Tech companies are willing to make bolder and more innovative architectural moves as well. We've seen that with clients' large open floorplans designed by world renowned architects, as well as fully landscaped green roofs that provide social spaces for employees. Space planning is another important consideration, and our clients are constantly pushing the envelope in terms of finding ways to promote human interaction and collaboration at specific scales depending on the product team and end-users.

GlobeSt.com: How does California's unique regulatory environment shape the entitlement process for large campus projects?

Petrilli: The California Environmental Quality Act plays a huge role. CEQA's intent is to ensure that decision-makers understand the environmental impacts associated with projects and impose mitigations to lessen those impacts where feasible. And while that process often results in improvements to a project, the challenge is that the original intent–focusing on impacts to the physical environment like air quality, noise, sea level rise and so on–has increasingly been distorted over time.

What we're seeing is increasing pressure to use the environmental review process as a political tool to look at issues like displacement, gentrification and other socio-economic issues. That is not only outside the scope of the statute, but poses major technical problems since there are no reliable ways to meaningfully evaluate those phenomena on a project-by-project basis. And at a more basic level, it creates the risk of sowing confusion about what's really driving these big societal changes. The drivers are historical in scale and need to be understood in the context of how our economy, living patterns, personal and collective choices, policy decisions and a range of other factors have evolved over the course of the last century. As practitioners, we deal with these issues every day and try to find ways to inform public opinion, elevate the dialogue and be sensitive to the concerns of various stakeholders. It's not an easy task, especially in the context of an entitlement process.