STOREY COUNTY, Nev. — You can’t ride the wild mustangs at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in Nevada, but you’re nearly guaranteed to see bands of them loping over sagebrush in a scene that feels straight out of the 1800s.
At least until the dust clears and Tesla’s 5.3-million-square-foot “Gigafactory” comes into focus.
Welcome to the Silver State, where Elon Musk, a cryptocurrency tycoon and a brothel owner are using a symbol of Americana as a social media recruiting tool.
The water cooler used to be the spot in the office to talk shop. Then came on-site cafes, fitness and yoga studios, rooftop gardens, fire pits and rock-climbing walls. “The overarching trend of the last five years has been the hotelification of the office,” said Lenny Beaudoin, an executive managing director at CBRE.
For employers, the newest amenities to wow workers are ideological, with environmental commitments topping the list, said Jason H. Somers, the president of Crest Real Estate, a Southern California real estate consultancy.
progress by corporate giants, but most efforts remain so opaque that it’s tough to spot greenwashing, the use of sustainability efforts to appear more attractive.
Embracing high environmental standards can be challenging and expensive. Some companies pay others to reduce emissions. Others plant trees, which can take years to grow and rely heavily on water and care.
Tesla used a $1.3 billion state tax break to build its $5 billion factory, tapping into a local work force still reeling from the Great Recession and ushering in a wave of Silicon Valley heavies. Switch, a technology infrastructure company, set up three data centers, then Google gobbled up 1,200 acres. Blockchains bought 67,000 acres for $170 million in 2018, becoming the park’s biggest tenant.
hoped to transform the expanse into an experimental city run by his encrypted digital systems. He pledged to build 15,000 homes, turning it into a huge innovation zone, with his company overseeing everything from schools to courts, law and water.
“I want this to become the greatest social experiment in the history of the world,” he said. “It’s going to be a cross between Disneyland and the chocolate factory from Willy Wonka.”
He’ll have to rethink the scope: In March, the county voted against the secession plan.
Mr. Berns says he plans to develop around 25,000 of his 67,000 acres, but for now, it will remain an outpost for wild horses.
Nevada is home to more than half of the country’s 95,000 wild horses and burros, descendants of animals brought to the continent by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. Managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management to the tune of about $100 million annually, wild horses live on protected and private land crisscrossed by freeways.
Wild Horse Connection, an advocacy group. “Horses in traffic, on the wrong side of fencing, vehicular, train accidents, sick or ill horses.”
Rescues triple once mares start foaling, said Ms. Vance, whose annual budget is about $100,000, including small donations from the office park and tenants. She says further expansion depletes open spaces and decreases grazing areas.
“Horses have migration patterns, and when a development comes in, it cuts that off and there’s more interactions with people,” she said.
One solution is humane horse fertility so the animals, which can spend up to 16 hours a day eating, don’t overpopulate and overgraze.
American Wild Horse Campaign, has worked with the office park since 2012, spending more than $200,000 on fertility control, water and feeding in the last three years.
“Development displaces wildlife,” she said. Water stations help, she said, as does an underground crossing built by Switch.
But the horses will not offset the park’s overall carbon footprint, said Simon Fischweicher, the North American head of corporations and supply chains at CDP. Tenants like Tesla, whose lithium-ion batteries are costly to mine and nearly impossible to recycle, require a lot of energy.
Switch is installing its own solar panels, and there are two green fuel plants on site, but distribution and data centers use large amounts of water for heating and cooling, and “supply chain emissions are on average 11.4 times higher than operational emissions,” Mr. Fischweicher said.
Others question the need to use the horses as a lure. Mr. Thompson says most of the roughly 25,000 workers at the office park are blue-collar Nevadans living within an hour commute. They’re here for jobs, not because of horses.
Growth for the industrial park means luring workers from out of state, expanding limited housing nearby and developing more land — all of which jeopardize the wildlife incentive.
“Quality of food, retail choices and housing are going to shape those decisions more than having wild horses nearby,” Mr. Beaudoin of CBRE said. “I would never bet against someone like Elon Musk, but there are other factors to attract workers.”
Fifteen months ago I traveled to Portland, Ore., to visit the childhood haunts and homes of Beverly Cleary, the beloved and award-winning author of more than 40 books for children and young adults. I was accompanied by my husband and our daughter, all three of us aficionados of Ramona Quimby, us parents having read all the books as children, before rereading them aloud to our kid.
With an overseas move on the horizon, we had decided to visit the city that plays its own subtle but essential role in the author’s most popular novels: Portland, with its moody rain and splashy puddles, its streets named after regional Native American tribes, its welcoming libraries and worm-filled parks. The Oregon of Ms. Cleary’s childhood clearly inspired her imagination — among her books, close to half of them are set in Portland.
So in the last days of December 2019, we took a trip to the City of Roses, visiting the northeastern Grant Park and Hollywood neighborhoods of Ms. Cleary’s childhood. I didn’t know then that it would be our last family vacation before the coronavirus pandemic — and I couldn’t have imagined how often I would return to those memories during the months of our confinement.
Beverly Cleary circa 1955.Credit…Alamy
When Ms. Cleary died on March 25 at the age of 104, my sorrow at the loss of an adored author who was declared a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress in 2000 was coupled with memories of our journey. Scrolling through the photos of our trip, the simple scenes of Craftsman homes, verdant parks, and crowded children’s libraries evoked a lost innocence.
As a child, I loved Ms. Cleary’s books because they didn’t condescend. Her characters are ordinary kids succumbing to ordinary temptations, such as squeezing an entire tube of toothpaste into the sink, or taking the first, juicy bite out of every apple in the crate.
As an adult, rereading the books aloud to my daughter, I was struck by their sense of timelessness — sisters struggling with sibling rivalry, parents grappling with financial worries and job loss. The author’s own father lost his Yamhill farm when she was 6, moving the family of three about 40 miles northeast to Portland — the “city of regular paychecks, concrete sidewalks instead of boardwalks, parks with lawns and flower beds, streetcars instead of a hack from the livery stable, a library with a children’s room that seemed as big as a Masonic hall,” she wrote in her 1988 memoir, “A Girl From Yamhill.”
I thought of that when I saw one of Ms. Cleary’s cherished childhood homes, a modest,bungalow near Grant Park, on a block lined with closely set houses. She romped with a gang of “children the right age to play with,” and their escapades made her yearn for stories about the neighborhood kids. “I longed for books about the children of Hancock Street,” she wrote in “A Girl from Yamhill.” In her stories, she changed Hancock Street to Klickitat Street “because I had always liked the sound of the name when I had lived nearby.”
We found the Klickitat Street of the books nearby, along with Tillamook Street, both named after Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest. As my 6-year-old daughter raced along, searching for vintage hitching rings, I pictured Ramona — or even a young Beverly — on these same sidewalks, stumping on stilts made from two-pound coffee cans and twine, or perching on the curb to watch the Rose Festival parade.
Over the next few days, we found the author’s former elementary school, a brick building now named the Beverly Cleary School, Fernwood Campus. We stopped by the Multnomah County Central Library, a stately brick structure downtown where she did summer “practice work” as a student librarian (and where the children’s section also bears her name). We ate doughnuts and pizza. We visited Grant Park, where the local artist Lee Hunt created a trio of bronze sculptures depicting three of Ms. Cleary’s cherished characters: Henry Huggins, his dog, Ribsy, and Ramona, posed, as if in motion.
The writer’s daughter, then 6, beamed as she held the hand of the statue depicting the famous character, Ramona Quimby, in the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden. Credit…Ann Mah
Though it was a typical Portland winter day — wet — nothing could dampen my daughter’s joy when she saw her favorite characters rendered slightly larger than life. She ran to hold Ramona’s hand, beaming, and the picture I snapped will be forever burned on my heart.
For my daughter, the best part of the trip was our visit to the Willamette Valley town of Yamhill, where we glimpsed the turreted Victorian house in which Ms. Cleary spent the first six years of her life. We spent the night in a vintage trailer park nearby, sleeping in a 1963 Airstream Overlander, as I imagined the author might have done with her own young family. For dinner, we roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, a meal that my daughter still describes as one of the best of her life.
These are the memories I’ve turned to over the past year as the pandemic has stolen away life’s simple pleasures. A wet afternoon at the park. Warming up at the library story hour. A cup of hot chocolate sipped at a crowded cafe. The rain beating on the metal roof of our camper van, reminding me of the creative inspiration that Ms. Cleary described in “A Girl From Yamhill”: “Whenever it rains, I feel the urge to write. Most of my books are written in winter.”
Before our trip, I had wondered if my daughter was too young for a literary pilgrimage — and perhaps she was, for there were moments when searching for yet another filament of the author’s girlhood tried her patience. And yet, though it was only a few days, our trip has captured her memory. She speaks of it now with crystalline precision, reminiscing of the last days before the strangest year of our lives began.
Our last morning in Portland found us a weary group of travelers as we waited to board our pre-dawn flight. We queued at the airport coffee counter for muffins and hot drinks — but when I tried to pay, the cashier told me that an anonymous stranger had bought us breakfast.
“Mama! It’s just like in the book!” exclaimed my daughter. It took me a few minutes to realize she was talking about a scene from “Ramona Quimby, Age 8,” when the Quimby family — worn down by financial worries, family squabbles and dreary weather — try to cheer themselves up with a hamburger dinner they can barely afford, only to have a kindly gentleman anonymously pick up their check.
That moment seems like a dream now, disconnected as we are from one another, all of us existing in our bubbles. But one day soon we will meet again and touch each other’s lives, not just as friends and family, but also as strangers. In the meantime, we have Beverly Cleary’s books to remind us.
Ann Mah, the author of the novel, The Lost Vintage, lives in Hanoi, Vietnam.
The New York Times found. Some corporations are reopening offices in the spring, and many are saying they will remain flexible, staging returns over several months and planning to allow some workers to continue to work from home. As nerve-racking as it was last year to be abruptly torn from their desks, many people find the prospect of returning distressing.
Here is what some of the country’s biggest companies are telling their workers.
IBM
IBM, which employs about 346,000 people, hasn’t set a strict timeline for when its U.S. workers will return to the office. It expects about 80 percent of its employees to work with some combination of remote and office schedules, depending largely on role.
JPMorgan Chase
The bank, which has more than 20,000 office employees in New York City, has told employees that the five-day office workweek is a relic. The bank is considering a rotational work model, meaning employees would rotate between working remotely and in the office.
PricewaterhouseCoopers
The consulting firm, which has about 284,000 employees, is set to open one office in each of its major cities in May, and all of its offices in September. Even when the offices are formally reopened, PwC will allow some workers, depending on their job, to work remotely at least part time.
Walmart
Most of Walmart’s 1.5 million employees work at the retail giant’s stores, and a vast number have continued to go in to their workplace throughout the pandemic. It said on March 12 that it would start bringing workers back at its Bentonville, Ark., office campus no earlier than July. Its global technology employees will continue to work virtually “for the long term.”
Wells Fargo
At Wells Fargo, 60,000 employees have worked at bank branches and other facilities during the pandemic, but 200,000 more have worked remotely. The company told its staff in a memo last month that it had set a Sept. 6 return-to-office target and was “optimistic” that conditions surrounding Covid-19 vaccinations and case levels would allow it to keep it.
GameStop said it would sell additional stock, up to 3.5 million shares, to finance its move online retailing and to support its finances.Credit…Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Wall Street is poised to begin the week on an upswing, with futures pointing to a 0.3 percent rise in the S&P 500. Asian markets also gained in the wake of Friday’s U.S. jobs report, which marked a bigger-than-expected surge in hiring last month.
The Nikkei index in Japan rose 0.8 percent, to its highest level since mid March, and the Kospi index in South Korea gained 0.3 percent.
Stock markets were closed for holidays in China, Hong Kong and much of Europe.
Digesting the jobs report
The Labor Department on Friday reported U.S. employers added 916,000 jobs in March, the biggest jump since August, and the unemployment rate fell to 6 percent. The news exceeded expectations, and the gains were broad based, with hiring in the hospitality, retailing and transportation sectors all rising.
Adding some uncertainty to the bullish numbers is a rise in coronavirus cases in the United States after weeks of decline. But as Ben Casselman reported in The New York Times: “Few economists expect a repeat of the winter, when a spike in Covid-19 cases pushed the recovery into reverse. More than a quarter of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and more than two million people a day are being inoculated.”
Bonds and oil
Yields on 10-year Treasury notes, which have been on an upward trajectory since October, have stabilized over the last few days. On Monday the yield was down slightly to 1.71 percent.
Oil prices fell. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 1.9 percent to $63.40 a barrel, and West Texas Intermediate slipped 1.8 percent. Traders have been adjusting their positions since last Thursday’s decision by OPEC and its allies to slowly relax curbs on output. Those controls were put in place in response to the sharp decline in oil demand during the pandemic.
Companies
GameStop said Monday that it would sell up to 3.5 million additional shares to “further accelerate its transformation” and to strengthen its balance sheet. The struggling bricks-and-mortar retailer, which found itself at the center of a trading frenzy in January, is aiming to become more of an online operation. Additional shares would dilute the ownership of its existing investors — and GameStop’s shares fell more than 10 percent in premarket trading.
Air France on Monday is expected to announce it has accepted a government-backed refinance package. Aid for the struggling carrier has been the subject of talks between French government and European Union officials, and on Sunday Bruno LeMaire, the French finance minister, said the basic terms of a deal had been reached, Reuters reported.
Shaundell Newsome of Small Business for America’s Future said changes were needed throughout the banking industry to improve outcomes for Black owners.Credit…Bridget Bennett for The New York Times
The government’s central small business relief effort, the Paycheck Protection Program, has made $734 billion in forgivable loans to nearly seven million businesses. But minority-owned businesses were disproportionately underserved by the program, a New York Times analysis found.
“The focus at the outset was on speed, and it came at the expense of equity,” said Ashley Harrington, the federal advocacy director at the Center for Responsible Lending.
The aid program’s rules were mostly written on the fly, and reaching harder-to-serve businesses was an afterthought. Structural barriers and complicated, shifting requirements contributed to a skewed outcome, The New York Times’s Stacy Cowley reports.
In the program’s final weeks — it is scheduled to stop taking applications on May 31 — President Biden’s administration has tried to alter its trajectory with rule changes intended to funnel more money toward businesses led by women and minorities. But those revisions have run into their own obstacles, including the speed with which they were rushed through. Lenders, caught off guard, have struggled to carry them out.
“Historically, access to capital has been the leading concern of women- and minority-owned businesses to survive, and during this pandemic it has been no different,” Jenell Ross, who owns an auto dealership, told a House committee.
The United States is particularly important to the world economy because it has long spent more than it sells.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
The United States and its record-setting stimulus spending could help haul a weakened Europe and struggling developing countries out of their own economic morass.
American buyers are spurring demand for German cars, Australian wine, Mexican auto parts and French fashions. And many Americans have spent their stimulus checks on video game consoles, exercise bicycles or other products made in China.
The United States’ comparatively fast recovery involved a little bit of luck — new variants of the virus have just begun to push domestic infections higher — and a large policy response, including more than $5 trillion in debt-fueled pandemic relief, The New York Times’s Jeanna Smialek and Jack Ewing report.
“When the U.S. economy is strong, that strength tends to support global activity as well,” said Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve.
But some hazards lurk. The slow pace of the European Union’s vaccination campaign will probably hurt its economy. Poorer and smaller countries, facing severely limited vaccine supplies and fewer resources to support government spending, are likely to struggle to stage an economic turnaround even if the U.S. recovery increases demand for their exports.
Chocolate is Britain’s second-largest food and drink export, after whiskey.Credit…Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
Small British chocolate makers emphasizing ethically sourced ingredients and bespoke batches became big sellers in Europe in recent years but have been nearly impossible to find there since January, David Segal reports for The New York Times.
“We have customers complain to us all the time, ‘Why can’t I buy my favorite British chocolate?’” said Hishem Ferjani, the founder of Choco Dealer in Bonn, Germany, which supplies grocery stores and sells through its own website. “We have store owners with empty shelves.”
“We have to explain, it’s not our fault, it’s not the fault of the producer. It’s Brexit,” he said.
Chocolate is Britain’s No. 2 food and drink export, after whiskey, according to the Food and Drink Federation. Chocolate exports to all countries hit $1.1 billion last year, and Europe accounts for about 70 percent of those sales. In January, exports of British chocolate to Europe fell 68 percent compared with the same period the year before.
The trade deal struck late last year with the European Union has not saved British companies from a maddening, unpredictable array of time-consuming, morale-sapping procedures and from stacks of paperwork that have turned exporting to the E.U. into a sort of black-box mystery. Goods go in and there is no telling when they will come out.
Small British chocolate makers emphasizing ethically sourced ingredients and bespoke batches became big sellers in Europe in recent years but have been nearly impossible to find there since January, David Segal reports for The New York Times.
“We have customers complain to us all the time, ‘Why can’t I buy my favorite British chocolate?’” said Hishem Ferjani, the founder of Choco Dealer in Bonn, Germany, which supplies grocery stores and sells through its own website. “We have store owners with empty shelves.”
“We have to explain, it’s not our fault, it’s not the fault of the producer. It’s Brexit,” he said.
Chocolate is Britain’s No. 2 food and drink export, after whiskey, according to the Food and Drink Federation. Chocolate exports to all countries hit $1.1 billion last year, and Europe accounts for about 70 percent of those sales. In January, exports of British chocolate to Europe fell 68 percent compared with the same period the year before.
The trade deal struck late last year with the European Union has not saved British companies from a maddening, unpredictable array of time-consuming, morale-sapping procedures and from stacks of paperwork that have turned exporting to the E.U. into a sort of black-box mystery. Goods go in and there is no telling when they will come out.
“We’d been told the product would arrive in France, so we put Calais as the point of entry. It went to Rotterdam, where it sat for six weeks,” he said. “Chocolate. Sitting in a warehouse. For six weeks.”
Through a shipping agent, he managed to get the import duty dropped. He learned a lesson about filling out forms, but that expertise won’t help him much.
“It’s impossible to find shippers that will deliver to Europe,” he said, “because there’s a backlog of goods in the pipeline.”
At Coco Caravan, a chocolate maker in the Cotswolds, the stasis has meant that Europe has gone from 15 percent of the company’s revenue to zero. That has caused Jacques Cop, the owner, to disappoint old customers and put off new ones. In recent months, prospective buyers in the Netherlands, France and Germany have expressed interest.
“They say, ‘We found you online and love everything you do in terms of being ethically sourced and vegan, but how are you going to combat the import-export problem we will have with the European Union?’” said Mr. Cop. “We can’t give them a clear answer, other than, ‘Yes, there will be additional costs involved.’”
Mr. Cop is also confronting a challenge common among small chocolate makers in Britain: importing raw ingredients from Europe. He stockpiled cacao in 2020 from his source of choice in Amsterdam. Now that it is time to buy more, obstacles have emerged. Transportation costs have doubled, which is bad enough. But Mr. Cop says his shipper refuses to take new orders because of worries that a shipment will somehow get blocked between Amsterdam and Britain.
“It’s to the point where I’m thinking of borrowing a Renault van and just driving to the Netherlands myself,” Mr. Cop said. “It’s a 10-hour drive each way. But I’m not sure I have another choice.”
