The building is adjacent to a lot of housing with a diverse crowd, it borders to north-Neukölln on "the kanal", what is compared to central Kreuzberg a classical working-man district that undergoes it's own challenges. The whole area has more of a homely vibe. I concur with the ~1km. Towards the Spree river its presence would've been easily tolerated (there are business parks), Mozilla has its office there too. Not to speak of anything Berlin central or indeed Adlershof. The Ab/Umspannwerk is a nice building of course, Berlin has a lot of these now obsolete electric facilities. A datacenter provider and other tech shops reside there for years, so did local grown startups. I wonder if the connectivity played any role, but there's lots of metro-fiber under the curbs in that part of town anyway. I still think there is opportunity for Google to pick the right location without community backlash not too far away.