Facebook is Building a Real Community in California To Test Whether People Love Tech Companies Enough To Live in Them (nytimes.com)

In Menlo Park, Calif., Facebook is building a real community and testing the proposition: Do people love tech companies so much they will live inside them? From a report: Willow Village will be wedged between the Menlo Park neighborhood of Belle Haven and the city of East Palo Alto, both heavily Hispanic communities that are among Silicon Valley's poorest. Facebook is planning 1,500 apartments, and has agreed with Menlo Park to offer 225 of them at below-market rates. The most likely tenants of the full-price units are Facebook employees, who already receive a five-figure bonus if they live near the office.

The community will have eight acres of parks, plazas and bike-pedestrian paths open to the public. Facebook wants to revitalize the railway running alongside the property and will finish next year a pedestrian bridge over the expressway. The bridge will provide access to the trail that rings San Francisco Bay, a boon for birders and bikers. Mr. Tenanes, Facebook's vice president for real estate, contemplates the audacity of building a city.

Comments

Re:Talk about bad timing...

[RightwingNutjob]

Which debacle? The one where it was revealed that the Trump campaign used Facebook's API, which is bad because Trump is a Republican, or the one where it was revealed that the Obama campaign did the exact same thing five years ago, which is bad because the peasants weren't supposed to find out?

Re:'Social Credit'

[cayenne8]

What's with the 225 or so low rent places offered on this type thing?

I mean, it seems hard enough to entice these high salary people to move to a community sandwiched in between what sounds like ghetto neighborhoods...why would you actively try to bring in likely criminal and low life tenets to live with your employees?

I know some think that it will lift up the poorer types, but from what I've seen over my years of watching it happen in my cities, it rarely is able to undo generations of living poorly, no value of education and an almost glorification of crime....not to mention, a community mindset of how "your community" should think, act and what values are priority.

You're just asking for trouble. You rarely see the good wear off on the bad elements, in fact, it seems the bad often brings the good down with it....