Call it… Zuckerburgh.
Last week, Facebook announced plans to build a “village” next to its Menlo Park, California, headquarters that would include some 1,500 homes, along with a grocery store, a pharmacy, shops, offices, and public plazas. One goal is to provide an attractive place for some of Facebook's own employees to live and shop near its sprawling yet somewhat isolated campus.
The concept is reminiscent of the late 19th-century company town, in which major employers built self-contained communities for their own workers. As with many would-be utopias, some of these towns turned dystopian in a hurry.
But Facebook's proposal, which it's calling the Willow Campus, differs in important ways from company towns past. And it just might be a model for other big tech companies in Silicon Valley, where housing has become so expensive that even young software engineers struggle to make ends meet, to say nothing of local blue-collar and service workers.
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