After years of facing a housing shortage, companies like Google, Meta, and Disney are taking matters into their own hands. The digital renderings of North Bayshore, a proposed massive development project in Mountain View, California, are bustling with sparkling buildings and animated enthusiastic pedestrians. There’s much to boast about, including 7,000 new homes, three distinct neighborhoods, and nearly 300,000 square feet of commercial and community space. However, the glittering images carry no hints of the company behind this entire effort: Google.
Modern Corporate Towns
Companies across the country are leveraging their clout and substantial resources to build modern corporate towns – small cities that will feature all the trappings of traditional civic life, including housing, retail shops, and public spaces. These new developments won’t carry the companies’ logos on every building, and many of the units will be available to the general public, not just employees. However, in the broad realm of real estate, they stand out: after years of facing housing shortages in their areas, companies like Google, Meta, and Disney – which are not exactly known for building new homes – are taking matters into their own hands. Their creations have dull names like Middlefield Park and Willow Village, but could also be called Zooktown or Google City USA. While these projects promise thousands of new homes, the plans also implicitly acknowledge the bleak state of the American housing market and the roles these companies have played in driving up home prices near their massive headquarters.
Modern Corporate Towns
After years of planning, excitement, and dealing with local council meetings, the latest iterations of corporate towns are starting to flourish. In June, the Mountain View City Council approved Google’s master plan for the North Bayshore project, a partnership between the tech giant and Australian real estate company Lendlease. The new community will replace a suburban office park with a sprawling new neighborhood in the heart of Silicon Valley. The plans involve building up to 7,000 new homes across a “mix of income levels,” along with parks, restaurants, retail shops, and more than 3 million square feet of office space on 153 acres. About 15% of those units will be priced below market rate, although the city has not yet specified the exact income limits that will determine who can apply for the units. Mountain View also approved the master plan for Middlefield Park, another Google project proposing to demolish existing office and industrial buildings and build roughly 2,000 new residential units, along with more office and retail space.
Other Companies
Other companies are trying to use a different tactic. Remember Amazon’s search for its second headquarters? The nationwide search had cities like Hartford, Connecticut, and Toledo, Ohio, competing to offer the most generous economic incentives while the e-commerce giant looked for its second home and a place to put about 25,000 workers. Ultimately, the project landed in Arlington, Virginia, and the first phase of HQ2 opened in May, featuring two office buildings consisting of 22 floors and a new public park. Amazon isn’t directly building housing like Google and Facebook, but the $2 billion Amazon Housing Equity Fund is committed to supporting other housing developments in the Washington, D.C. area, Nashville, and Seattle, extending the company’s direct impact into housing markets that will feel its expansion for years to come.
Concerning History
Corporate towns in the 19th and 20th centuries had some of that utopian character, at least in theory. In many cases, corporate towns were a pragmatic response to the need for housing near factories or lumber mills, which were often located in barren areas with few amenities to keep workers happy, such as churches or libraries. Hershey, Pennsylvania’s corporate town, established around 1909, prioritized these community assets, alongside providing affordable homes that workers could rent or buy. At one time, 3% of the U.S. population lived in corporate towns, according to The Economist magazine.
But
The idea of a place dominated by a single company – where your boss owns not just your home but also runs your church, schools for your children, and sells you everything you need in the company store – has always been a proposition fraught with risk. In many corporate towns, companies used the setup to maintain their social control, threatening disgruntled workers with eviction from company housing if they went on strike. When your company is your entire world, the stakes are infinitely higher.
This time is different
Given the history of housing built by corporations, it’s fair to wonder which side the new versions will lean toward: the ideal version of affordable housing and desired amenities, or a more dystopian outcome that makes us more dependent on corporations that have already infiltrated every aspect of our lives.
The graveyard of abandoned projects may offer some hints about what’s to come. In May 2020, Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of parent company Google, withdrew from plans to build a new advanced technology neighborhood on 12 acres along Toronto’s waterfront. The company officially stated that its partnership with the city ended due to the pandemic, but it turned out that the company was quietly planning to acquire 800 acres of land adjacent to the entire Google City and a testing ground for some of its wildest technologies. When those plans were revealed, public opinion shifted, and local elected officials rallied against the idea, ultimately derailing and killing the entire project.
Google’s plans in Mountain View, by comparison, are more subdued. All that talk of a city of the future has been replaced by language encouraging affordable housing, traditional spaces for local businesses, and public parks. The project is still massive, certainly, but Google had once spoken about playing “a larger role in public life” than what is outlined in the current plans, according to Josh O’Kane, a journalist who closely follows Google’s plans for the Globe and Mail in Toronto and later wrote a book about the whole story.
Perhaps Google and other big companies have learned a lesson from that debacle in Toronto. They certainly seem to be trying a different tactic now: proposing more conventional projects filled with key planning terms like “mixed-use” and “walkable,” instead of offering fantastical villages where robots take out your trash and your Facebook profile is your ID.
For this reason, the question of which side these new corporate cities will land on – a technologically advanced utopia or a system of strongman rule – is likely not relevant. The real outcome is more likely to be somewhere in the unimpressive middle ground, according to Crawford from the University of California, Berkeley. However, it’s worth noting that these aren’t your ordinary real estate developers.
“I think my motto is that they are complicated,” Crawford told me. “It’s easy to say that either the company is nice or threatening. But reality lies somewhere in between.”
James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on the discussions team at Insider.
Source: https://www.aol.com/meet-americas-newest-mega-landlords-102801079.html
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