
Facebook is planning to build a real community with parks, stores and apartments - DyslexicAtheist
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/facebook-zucktown-willow-village.html
======
DenisM
Microsoft ended up, organically, surrounded by Microsoft employee residences.
All you ever see in your life are Microsoft buildings on campus, fellow
Microsoft employees driving on all nearby roads (you can tell from parking
permits), living next door, sitting next table in the bar, standing the queue
at the store, riding the company shuttle, being your friends.

What it did is create an awful monoculture. You don't get to have a beer with
a buddy works at a competing or related company and realize how utterly,
unbelievably stupid and immature your position is on this or another issue.
Ideological inbreeding is what it is. My biggest regrets lie where I wasted
time on something that I could have been talked out of by someone with a
different perspective.

I think cross-pollination of ideas is the major advantage of Silicon Valley.
Seattle is also getting better recently, with big companies opening more jobs.

~~~
burger_moon
>I think cross-pollination of ideas is the major advantage of Silicon Valley.
Seattle is also getting better recently, with big companies opening more jobs.

Tech workers hanging out with other tech workers is still a huge circle jerk
of ideas. If all you've known is graduate university with a CS degree and
working at tech companies and living in upper middle class and wealthy
livelihoods you are still part of the same monoculture. Not much changes
between Google and MS in the larger picture.

~~~
khalilravanna
Right SF is better than what the parent comment describes but it very
oftentimes is still devoid of true diversity. I worked at a company based in
SF and made the conscious decision not to live there. It felt like every time
I would go out to a bar or coffee shop all I would hear is tech workers and
business investors having the same types of conversations everywhere. More
than being crummy for expanding one's perspective on a whole host of issues,
it was just plain depressing to be around.

------
bitumen
_Depends how it goes. Facebook is testing the proposition: Do people love tech
companies so much they will live inside of them?_

People are increasingly afraid of tech companies, not in love with them. We’re
all pretty dependent on them, but that also breeds fear and loathing. It
doesn’t help that so many companies are full of the same, weird, Stepford Wife
tone of “We love you, we want what’s best for you, and that just so happens to
align with our own perverse incentives. We’re changing the world.”

I get the sense that the older guard of the media is also taking this
opportunity to stoke fear and resentment of their newer competitors. They’ve
been good at that kind of thing for a couple of hundred years longer than tech
as a concept existed. I’m concerned that things like encryption and secure
messaging, self-driving tech and more will be cynically attacked too.

~~~
drdeadringer
A teacher I had in High School explained a particular portion of history to us
about like this: "I can rule via Love or via Fear. People can fall out of
Love; People don't fall out of Fear." So this monarch dictated government via
Fear, and it worked until he died [which is the point much of the time].

Now, the monarchs may not die. "Facebook Forever" as reality? A 'Black Mirror'
episode isn't a far stretch, and to be fair so is the opposite -- both of
which we can see in reality today.

Being skeptical of tech companies is great. Behaving appropriately is also
great. Going "all or nothing" can be debated. I'm interested in hearing about
something in the middle, should such exist.

~~~
fny
You can also rule by utility and dependence. People don't just love FAANG,
they _need_ FAANG because they provide indispensable tools which yield vast
utility.

You can also use addiction as a strategy to create dependence, but this is a
strategy: users will inevitably realize there's more harm than good being
done. It also means you're at risk of become a fad. I actually think
Facebook's pivot from user engagement maximizer to social fabric platform
reflects some internal awareness of the vulnerabilities of an addiction-
focused business strategy over the long term.

~~~
samsonradu
Besides Google’s search I can’t think of any FAANG service/product that would
be indispensable for the average Joe, being the only service that has no real
competition. For all the others, people would replace them relatively easy.
Could you provide some examples?

People _need_ Microsoft Windows to operate their businesses and do their jobs,
Apple phones and Netflix subscriptions are much easier to replace.

~~~
bitumen
I want to agree with you, but realistically I think a lot of people have come
to view Amazon at least, as pretty indispensable. Between their retail
offerings, and AWS, they’re into a lot!

~~~
samsonradu
Maybe I’m biased because I’m living in a country where Amazon has little to no
presence and there are just other retailers to fill the gap, other delivery
companies etc. so life goes on. I never heard anyone cry for Amazon to come to
our rescue.

------
40acres
Lot's of negative sentiminents in these comments towards Facebook which is
understood but the way I look at it this is a symptom and not the root cause.

We are having a really bad housing crisis in coastal cities, and obviously the
Bay Area is leading the pack. NIMBY voters and short sighted government
officials are stagnating developers from building more units. Just a few weeks
ago the city council in Portland rejected two housing projects that would've
generated thousands of units and hundreds of affordable housing units.

When the public sector cannot solve the housing problem it is no surprise that
the private sector will step in and play a bigger role. It's not surprising to
see tech companies leading the way because their HQs are in the Bay Area. If
potential employees don't wont to work for you because the area that the
office is in has an astronomical COL that is an existential threat to your
company.

~~~
ihsw2
That's an altruistic lens applied over a more likely scenario -- 20-40% of
salaries are lost to rentier cadres. Throughout history they have been a
blight upon humanity and they have always been formidable, and furthermore
Facebook actuaries likely calculated that rental costs are only going to keep
going up unabated. There will be a point where Facebook will have to move
headquarters and that will come with a multibillion dollar pricetag.

In this hypothetical scenario, they will have to take steps to ensure this
doesn't happen again, which comes with a hefty pricetag in itself, so provided
this data there is only one question -- where to relocate the HQ?

There is no better place than the SF Bay Area, so logically it stands to
reason that they take the same steps to progressively expand their current HQ
rather than relocate.

Not only that but this new FB community can be a testbed for applying the same
pernicious digital surveillance mentality to the physical world. Truly, it
will be the place to measure how much privacy people will give up for real-
life benefits (eg: rent).

~~~
yellow_postit
With the housing challenges in SF I think you will see more and more companies
questioning the “there’s no better place than SF” mindset.

------
nabla9
People speculate wildly but what is this really 1) utopian attempt or 2) new
form of paternalism, or 3) just practical way to solve housing crisis for
employers.

1) Walt Disney tried utopian with Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow
(EPCOT)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_\(concept\))
The property became the Walt Disney World Resort but some of the architecture
is from the EPCOT concept. Later Michael Eisner tried something similar with
Celebration, Florida
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida)

2) Traditional paternialism was social engineering attempt where employers
wanted to control their workers force middle-class ideals to working-class. It
was seen as moral and religious responsibility for owners to do this. Company
Towns were build to achieve this goal. Modern version might push certain
lifestyle and values.

3) Zucktown and Alphabet City may be just a realization that it's cheaper and
easier for everyone if employers turns into property developer and builds
housing than just increase wages.

------
pjc50
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)

    
    
        You get sixteen likes, whattaya get?
        Another day older and deeper in debt
        St. Peter don'cha call me, 'cause I can't go
        I owe my soul to the company store
    

(Parody of "Sixteen Tons" [https://genius.com/Tennessee-ernie-ford-sixteen-
tons-lyrics](https://genius.com/Tennessee-ernie-ford-sixteen-tons-lyrics) )

~~~
verylittlemeat
I wonder if anyone has tried to do a 1:1 mapping of early 20th century robber-
barrons and the current 21st century tech gods.

Seems like there would be a lot of aspirational lifestyle overlap.

~~~
agency
I live a couple of blocks from the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital,
which isn't too far from the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. It's funny to
compare to all of the buildings on the east coast named after Rockefellers and
Carnegies. New industrialists indeed...

------
Yetanfou
There once was a time when satire was just that, satire. When dystopian
fiction was understood to be that, dystopian, portraying a potential future.
When books like 'Brave New World', 'Fahrenheit 451' and '1984' were written.
Where cyberpunk was a literary genre where corporations were more powerful
than nation states.

Now, things are different. Facebook is building the set for a real life Truman
show [1], Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which book paper catches fire,
and burns..) has found stiff competition in the rise of censorship on the
'net, 1984 is treated as a user manual by those who prefer to see the world in
terms of 'good' and 'bad', Brave New World is just another story - nothing to
see there, move along. Where institutions like the EU are trying to dissolve
national borders and national identities without offering a believable
identity in return, leaving the population grasping for a handhold and ready
for recruitment by any strong identity group which catches their favour.

There is supposed to be a Chinese proverb saying 'may you live in interesting
times' , to be directed at those one considers to be their opponents. While
the proverb seems to be made up, times _are_ interesting in many ways.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show)

~~~
bsenftner
Great post, I agree with you 100%. If you don't mind, I thought the correct
Chinese proverb was "May you live in _uninteresting_ times" \- as the proverb
is an acknowledgement of the disruption of lives that occur during
_interesting times_.

~~~
soundwave106
"May you live in interesting times" is a phrase widely thought of in the
English world to be a "Chinese _curse_ ", though the "Chinese" element of this
per the Wiki is possibly dubious.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times))

------
justaguyhere
_In the textile town of Lowell, Mass., in 1846, the mill clock slowed down to
lengthen shifts and then sped up at night when the workers were off_

Holy shit!

------
duck
By definition a company can't "build a real community", only the residents can
do that. I love the timing of this piece though.

~~~
andys627
Developers build cities. Developers maximize profit. In the USA, the gov't
defines where incentives are. That is why we have urban sprawl everywhere
(including the bay area).

I always thought this project, S. Lake Union (Amazon), Toronto Waterfront
(Google), Diridon Station San Jose (Google) was these large companies'
response to no private developer or gov't entity building a city they thought
was needed... in other words it's just a normal city built by a large company.
It's not too different than one of these crappy master planned communities
where I live like [http://stonegatereno.com/](http://stonegatereno.com/) or
[http://damonteranch.com/](http://damonteranch.com/) .

------
chiph
Getting laid-off if you were a FB employee and a resident would become super-
unpleasant. "Got laid off. Now I have to find a new place to live by the end
of the week. And explain to them how I am able to pay the higher rent on the
new place"

~~~
skybrian
I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. Despite being located next to Google
or Facebook, these will likely be apartments being rented out like anywhere
else with no particular employment requirements.

Though, they're likely to be attractive to employees who want to live within
walking distance.

~~~
Hydraulix989
If that were the case, what would be the incentive for FB to do this then?

~~~
stellar678
Everywhere in the Bay Area has a severe housing shortage. Even with $150k+
salaries, there are very limited housing options available on the peninsula.

The Bay Area's land-use policies are directly responsible for the absurdly
high housing costs and terrible road congestion. Too many jobs are in office
parks, too many houses are in far-flung and low-density areas.

If Facebook can build 1000 apartment homes that would allow their employees to
walk to work, they stand to benefit in huge ways. If that development can help
subsidize 200 apartment homes for people who have been displaced by the skewed
housing market, all the better.

At least that's how I read their motivations.

------
pdelbarba
Having been in a situation where my work, housing, friends and entire life
were all wrapped up in one, each subject to the failure of one of the others,
this freaks me out a bit. The anxiety it can cause is unreal since there's no
compartmentalization in your life. You can't go home and not worry about work,
or go to work and not worry about home.

The situation I was in was quite a bit more complicated than this, involving
national level athletic training and working for a company that was both
associated personally with the team as well as the sport in general. I was
living in team dorms and having problems with the team so suddenly everything
was in jeopardy. I do not recommend it...

------
908087
This has me picturing a community of people wearing identical "male"/"female"
plastic hairpieces and massive fake smiles, under constant surveillance.
Communicating is done solely via Facebook, so the fake smiles become
permanently burned into the residents' faces.

Facebook as a physical community is a truly terrifying place to imagine. I'm
not sure a Black Mirror episode could even properly capture it.

Zuckerberg: "If I can't be president of the US, I can at least be president of
the HOA"

------
skybrian
Folks, this will let employees walk to work, resulting in less traffic, and
putting somewhat less pressure on housing prices in nearby communities. Mixed-
use development is what a lot of housing advocates have been asking for.

This "company store" stuff is unwarranted negative sentiment. They're just
apartments. Along with new housing you do want to have parks and stores.

~~~
vorpalhex
This is not a new idea. At no point previously in history has this worked out
well. Companies like Facebook (and they aren't alone in this) love the idea of
employees living around the company both literally and figuratively - spend 12
hours a day at the office and in return we'll give you free food and a gym and
games. This is not a great future.

~~~
skybrian
I think people are expecting innovation in real estate just because it's
Facebook. But this isn't their area of expertise. Do they need to do anything
different from any other large real estate developer in Silicon Valley to
succeed at building housing?

They've likely hired professional real estate developers who will follow all
the same laws, with more money.

The free food and games and gyms are already there (at work).

So I'm not seeing how this will be different in practical terms from other
large apartment complexes?

~~~
vorpalhex
A company whose main business model is giving things out for free, to gather
your data, which they then make billions of dollars selling to other
businesses?

And you think they're suddenly taking on the very complex and muddied problem
of real estate because they have passionate feelings about the housing crises?

------
Dangeranger
Planned utopian communities have a track record of devolving into anything but
their original goals. This feels like a cross between the movie "The Circle"
and the Toyota company city in Japan.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Depends on the scale. Lots of cities and towns have areas planned by
developers. They work well enough, though they don't have as much character as
more organically grown neighborhoods.

------
bad_alloc
This gives me DDR (East Germany) vibes: The rethoric, the symbolism and the
motivation are all similar to how the DDR presented itself.

------
DenisM
I’m not buying the “cheaper employee housing” idea. If they build it, they
will have on their hands real estate that’s rented out below market, a
potential revenue source that’s utilized to subsidize employees. Only not all
employees because there won’t be enough to go around. So you will have to
ration it. Will there be a waitlist? Why not rent to anyone and give the
surplus to employees instead? That way all employees participate, not just the
few chosen ones. And no tax complications.

Then you spin off the real estate arm into a subsidiary and use dividends to
pay the employees. Same thing, right? Then you realize you can just sell the
subsidiary and invest the cash into something with a better risk / reward
profile.

And then you ask yourself why did a software company spent several years
managing a real estate project.

I think it’s just boys playing toys. Big, expensive toys. Heck, I would do
that too if I had the money.

------
chicob
When someone needs to mention the 'real' character of this 'real community',
that means there is nothing real about it. It's a red flag for phony.

Henry Ford tried to force the American way of life in Fordlândia. He failed.
George Pullman wanted Pullman, Chicago, to be a sin-free town. He also failed.

Modern company towns live under the specter of many past failed projects.

Maybe "Zuckerburg" isn't supposed to be any kind of utopia. But why should
Facebook succeed in building a town, specially when it's supervised by a
corporation that profits on knowing everything it can about people?

I know I'd never want to live there. It would always feel like online trackers
covered in stucco.

------
dna_polymerase
They more and more sound and behave like a cult. Silicon Valley these days
feels like a very very awkward dystopia.

------
pleasecalllater
... and monitoring of all things people do... and then using it against
them... and people will be grateful for that

------
davidw
Bay Area massively undersupplies housing for decades, problems arise. News at
11.

People are working to fix it, though:
[https://yimbyaction.org/join/](https://yimbyaction.org/join/)

------
Slansitartop
I'd be great for retention of they could make the leases conditional on
continued employment at Facebook. /s

> Google will build 5,000 homes on its property under an agreement brokered
> with Mountain View in December. Call it Alphabet City as a nod to Alphabet,
> Google’s corporate parent. The company said it was still figuring out its
> future as a landlord, and declined further comment.

There's no question that the Alphabet/Google company town should be called
Alphaville.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_\(film\))

------
pchristensen
This is so different than old company towns. Those were built around remote
factories where no housing or stores or services of any kind surrounding them
- they were more like Disneyland, in the sense that everything comes from
there. Facebook's "community" is using all the generic terms for every decent
sized development in America right now. It's 60 acres - you could walk outside
of it in a couple minutes, and you can drive to all of Silicon Valley. There's
no "company store" \- you can live and shop wherever you want.

------
twoquestions
We tried company towns already, it did Not Go Well.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)

~~~
s73v3r_
Isn't that the destiny of all tech companies? To rediscover concepts that
previously did Not Go Well and act like they're new, only to rediscover why
certain regulations were put into place to begin with.

------
rjkennedy98
This honestly sounds like an Onion article title.

~~~
astrodust
Meets a _Black Mirror_ episode.

------
bnastic
What a nice, paid advertisement to get the attention away from the current
troubles. For shame, NYT

------
calewis
How about they just pay there taxes, then the governments can build the parks?

------
djanogo
Did Mr Z piss off somebody who's behind major media outlets?, surprised to see
liberal media going after a company that is mostly left wing.

~~~
slig
They're mad that FB changed the timeline algorithm. Now they're showing less
shared links to 3rd party sites and more personal updates, such as new photos
and status updates.

~~~
paulie_a
When did that happen? If anything it seems like they have ramped up
"suggested" garbage posts to the point it is 1 in 3 on my timeline

~~~
slig
In January [https://www.vox.com/2018/1/12/16882536/facebook-news-feed-
ch...](https://www.vox.com/2018/1/12/16882536/facebook-news-feed-changes)

------
ng-user
> employees are offered a 5 figure bonus if they live close to their work

Is this a unique bonus mainly offered in the Valley versus the rest of the
world?

------
simonebrunozzi
I have done a lot of extensive read and thinking on the subject for my startup
(we're now doing digital real estate transactions leveraging the Blockchain,
but months ago we were exploring the idea of a platform to create/fund
communities). [0]

The pioneer in this field has certainly been Adriano Olivetti in the
1940/1950s, back when Olivetti was an amazingly successful company. They were
market leaders in typewriters, so much that they bought the US-based
Underwood, and they were pioneering computers in the 1960s.

Olivetti built a "quasi-socialist" company campus in Ivrea (outside Turin,
Italy), which was really innovative for its time. Kindergarden, schools,
services, etc, all available to Olivetti workers and their families. Think of
it as a combination of a Google or Facebook campus, with an Italian,
pragmatic, honest twist.

Now, let's get back to Facebook's proposed "campus" or "community".

I see a few problems here:

1) providing rent to FB employees is a form of employee retention - you have a
strong incentive not to leave Facebook, or you will lose a rent likely more
affordable than outside the campus, and your neighborhood friendships.

2) Most of these campuses are done to project an image of an amazing, cool
company. Therefore, expensive architects plan expensive buildings in a way
that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere. When building costs are
"subsidized" by the need of "grandeur" of a company, it's the wrong incentive
at play. Look, for a counter example, at the Nightingale project [1].

3) Many architects and thinkers have written about the subject. In particular,
Christoper Alexander and Leon Krier, among others. The short summary of their
conclusions is that "top down" almost never works; "bottom up" does. In
essence, you have to plant the seed, provide initial resources, and get out of
the way, letting people and communities figure out how they want to organize
their life. A good counter example? The planned city of Brazilia. I studied
it, and visited it, and it's an urban design nightmare. [2] - so much so that,
to cite just one metric, Brazilia has 4 to 5 times the number of pedestrian
accident (in proportion of the population) of other Brazilian cities.

I could go on and on, but let me just conclude with this: most of these
company-driven initiatives are dead from the start, and they are set to
produce only aberrations. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope to see something
different emerge over time.

[0]: [https://www.fabrica.city/](https://www.fabrica.city/)

[1]: [http://nightingalehousing.org/nightingale-
village](http://nightingalehousing.org/nightingale-village)

[2]:
[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20632277](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20632277)

------
narrator
How are they going to keep the riff-raff from East Palo Alto out?

------
auchenberg
... with cameras everywhere, so they can train their AI.

------
dwighttk
>Facebook is planning 1,500 apartments

>About 12,000 of its 25,000 employees work in Menlo Park. In a decade, it will
have space for 35,000

so they are planning to build 15 of these Zucktowns in Menlo Park in the next
10 years?

------
fluxic
just an excuse to beta test their new army of mailmen who give better CPA-
tracking to their ads team.

------
Simulacra
Sounds like a factory town

------
decebalus1
Seriously folks, that the fuck is going on? Every day I read the news it's
like I'm in a dystopian novel. Yesterday there was the parole-as-a-service
startup announcement, today 'The Circle' leaks into reality. Lots of startups
are issuing basically 'Kongbucks' and a self-driving car killed its first
victim. Looking forward for the first corporation to want to become sovereign.

~~~
deft
Agreed. This place seems to love most of those events however. Google execs
have been very open about their desire to start a Google Island where they can
conduct limitless experiments (on customers / 'citizens' I assume) away from
regulation.

~~~
tempodox
That sounds very much like the city of Rapture in _Bioshock_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock))
the only difference being that Art Déco is the more tasteful styling.

------
joelrunyon
This would be so creepy.

~~~
GunlogAlm
Even the name... Zucktown.

------
cratermoon
parks, stores and apartments ... and ubiquitous surveillance?

------
45h34jh53k4j
What a hellhole. Pray the CA authorities put a stop to this madness!

------
mikeash
I assume they’ll start paying their employees in Facebucks that can only be
spent at the company store?

