For quite some time, there\u2019s been talk about Google wanting to build high-rise housing for employees on the back side of the Plex near 101 past San Antonio. Or maybe in proximity to Moffett Field. Or something else. And it goes back and forth, because while Google\u2019s commute patterns have disrupted Mountain View\u2019s transit and traffic, the notion of locally housing enough employees to give Google a decisive voting bloc in local elections unnerves people. And now comes word that Facebook is eager to do the same thing in Menlo Park, an even smaller-by-population town than Mountain View.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This comes to mind for two reasons. \u00a0One is that I realized this weekend that I enjoy going to Sunnyvale or San Jose for \u00a0my pub nights rather than Mountain View; the one place I really like in MV is a dive that\u2019s very suited for somebody knocking back straight Fernet while it\u2019s still light out. The other is that I saw the new office building at the corner of Castro and Central\u2026and it\u2019s going to be occupied by 23 and Me, a company famously associated with Google. Here\u2019s some of that new construction in town, a 2-story motel replaced with a 4- or 5-story office block\u2026and it\u2019s going to another arm, tenuously, of the Beast of Mountain View.<\/p>\n
How do you go about getting development without becoming a company town? Mountain View has had famous tenants before, like Adobe or Silicon Graphics or Netscape, but they never accumulated the kind of scale Google has. \u00a0Other companies like IBM or Intel or Sun were strewn all over the Valley – you can\u2019t throw a rock without hitting a former HP building, and Apple\u2019s \u201cCampus 2\u201d is going on top of the former HP Cupertino campus – but none of them became the dominant power in their town. Now, Apple\u2019s got Cupertino, Google has Mountain View, Stanford has basically always had Palo Alto, and Facebook is making their play for Menlo Park. And this article sort of nails it:<\/a> how is it that tech companies, the ones who brought us telepresence and work from home, all have to have these self-contained hamster runs now?<\/p>\n As a native son of the South, I know plenty about company towns. They tend to be good for the company and less good for the town. Mountain View needs housing, all right, but it doesn\u2019t need a Google dorm and it doesn\u2019t need another stack of luxury condos. \u00a0What it needs is a safe replacement for all those pre-1989 apartments that sit over carports and will pancake down in the next big quake. But the only way you get a return on your investment is to posh it up, because there\u2019s another name for large-scale dense affordable housing: the projects. \u00a0And it\u2019s something no one is eager to bring to town, no matter how badly people who aren\u2019t getting options and restricted stock units need a roof over their heads. \u00a0Mountain View has five dozen firefighters, and two (2) of them live in Mountain View. \u00a0You\u2019re not surprised at this for some place like Hillsdale or Atherton, but when it trickles down the Peninsula to Menlo and Paly and Mountain View, it\u2019s worth stopping and thinking about what kind of community we\u2019re creating.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a tough choice, really. You don\u2019t have to put new housing in town when everyone wants to live in San Francisco, but then you\u2019ve got problems associated with Google buses on suburban side streets and a train station overwhelmed by shuttles and the density of what used to be a reverse commute and the fact that instead of paying property taxes and sales taxes in town, Google\u2019s drones are being ferried back up to San Francisco on nights and weekends and eating their free lunch on campus in the meanwhile. \u00a0When the choice is between occupation and colonization, it\u2019s time to start thinking about how you diversify your town and make sure you\u2019re not in thrall to that one big company who\u2019s going to leave you sneezing if they get a sniffle. \u00a0And when your company has 20,000 people working in a town of 75,000, that\u2019s bad arithmetic. UAB is the largest employer in Birmingham (and in Alabama) and still only represents 1 job in 10. \u00a0If even half of Google\u2019s Mountain View employees live there, that\u2019s a nontrivial impact on the town – in terms of voting, in terms of public resources, and in terms of what happens to Mountain View when Google decides to go Galt and move to Birmingham for the tax breaks.<\/p>\n And make no mistake, once that company is big enough and once that town is dependent enough, you\u2019re going to be a wholly operated subsidiary. \u00a0Nice little city you got there. \u00a0Shame if anything happened to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For quite some time, there\u2019s been talk about Google wanting to build high-rise housing for employees on the back side of the Plex near 101 past San Antonio. Or maybe in proximity to Moffett Field. Or something else. And it goes back and forth, because while Google\u2019s commute patterns have disrupted Mountain View\u2019s transit and … <\/p>\n