Will Facebook's $120 Million Company Town Enshrine Tech's Insularity?

Facebook recently announced plans to build a campus to house employees looking to live closer to work. As Bay Area real estate prices reach ever more intimidating heights, the social media giant hopes that this housing investment will ameliorate the lives of those employees seeking to eliminate their daily commute.

The project, a collaboration between Facebook and local developer St. Anton Partners, will be called Anton Menlo. It will offer almost 400 multifamily housing units, fifteen of which will be set aside for low-income housing. According to a press release circulating on SBWire, inhabitants of the new living arrangement can look forward to a sports bar, pet spa, pool with cabana area, bike shop, and a “rooftop entertainment deck.”

When all everything is finished, the total investment in these units will be $120 million.  Considering that houses can easily go for $2 million in Menlo Park and surrounding areas, this appears quite reasonable.

However, employees aching to live closer to work will have to wait a little longer for Anton Menlo to become reality. The first steps towards construction will take place in October and the companies estimate time to completion will be two years.

While this will definitely be a boon for the Facebook employees who get to live closer to campus, it’s symptomatic of the larger insularity of tech. With chartered buses and company housing, and even tech-company amateur sports leagues, tech employees of the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area in general are often set apart from the larger community.

This has created an undercurrent of resentment in the region, a feeling that tech runs everything and those not involved are mere plebeians. It would be misleading to say the majority of the Bay feels this way, but it certainly is a constant murmur in the backdrop.

In a piece in The Guardian back in May, Rory Caroll described this growing feeling of animus towards tech. “[San Francisco] knows better than anyone that technology companies like having things their way, whether it be taxes, transport, or lifestyle,” Caroll wrote. “This dominance, critics say, has produced a cossetted caste which lords it over everyone else, a pattern established during the dotcom explosion a decade ago and now repeated amid a roaring boom.”

However, it’s possible that instead of exacerbating the growing gulf between tech and others, Facebook’s housing solution might actually make it better. A major complaint of those not in tech living in San Francisco and other places where commuters make their homes is that, sure, the commuters might live there but they don’t actually live there. They have no roots in the cities where they make their homes because every morning, they are shuttled out of them and every evening, they are shuttled back in just in time for bed.

If the commute ceases to exist, then so do the commuters. The chartered buses gradually disappear as does the resentment. Insularity goes both ways: tech companies get their way and non-tech people can reclaim their cities and towns.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Facebook’s campus will only be able to hold approximately ten percent of its Menlo Park employees. This may make very little, if any, difference in overall tech slash non-tech relations. And who knows? Maybe, as The Wall Street Journal notes, this “company town” will backfire as it becomes overbearing to live and work in the same place. Hey, not even tech people can stand tech 100 percent of the time.

@heyiamlex