Work in a company ... and live in it?
plans to expand its Menlo Park headquarters include building a complex of 1500 homes, with shops, supermarkets, pharmacies, parks, hotels and all the elements and infrastructure of a small town for the everyday life of its workers, Baptized Willow Campus.
The plans, it construction would last until 2021, are intended as a way to alleviate one of the main problems that the workers of the company have when considering living in the San Francisco Bay area: housing costs have been Elevated to the point of becoming virtually irrational. A large number of technology companies that pay higher than average salaries and which, in many cases, include in their negotiations with the workers the payment of all or part of the cost of rent, have generated a situation of brutal gentrification: Some years ago were the worst areas of the city, today can not live any person with a reasonable salary.
The solution that Facebook seems to be designing is to offer housing to its workers in the proximity of their workplace: about 225 apartments, 15% of the total, would be offered for rent at prices lower than those on the market, presumably to people from the company. Others may be offered openly, although specific details are still unclear. The office space that would be created is not defined whether it would be for Facebook's exclusive use or if it would be offered to other companies. In addition, Facebook is investing tens of millions of dollars in improvements of the US101, which suffers from heavy traffic collapses that can lead to remarkably high travel times.
What Facebook is designing is, to all intents and purposes, a small city, as can be seen in the video presentation: more than 160,000 square meters of offices, 1,500 homes, almost 12,000 square meters of commercial area, a mall, a cultural center, A hotel and a visitor center ... a real "Facebookville", I do not know whether or not including a statue of its founder :-) An idea that goes far beyond what other big companies have designed for their corporate headquarters: at the time, we were talking about turning these venues into authentic cities where tens of thousands of employees worked. Now, in addition, many of those employees could directly live in them.
The idea of providing an employee with not only a job, but also a home in the vicinity of it seems, in principle, extremely practical: a city design carried out by a company like Facebook is evident that would not neglect in The necessary infrastructures for their workers, the bandwidth or the adequate transport systems. The experience of these workers could surely become very practical and functional, in a sort of "life in a bubble" that many would consider privileged, in which many of the interactions of their daily life would adapt to their circumstances. In the face of attracting and retaining talent, these companies would be able to offer an authentic immersive experience, an all-in-one solution that could surely be interesting for people who otherwise have to consider their professional movement as a whole Complex puzzle full of complications.
Where could a model of this type arrive? What problems, advantages or disadvantages could it generate? My experience leads me to think that the gains in efficiency and approach when building a city from scratch are potentially enormous. Is Facebook initiating a trend towards the development of "corporate cities" that offer their workers an experience that tries to improve the benefits of living in the cities we know? Would you see yourself living in a city in which the presence of the company for which you work is practically ubiquitous because it has been created and developed by the same company?