North Bayshore, a neighbourhood in Mountain View, California, is fast becoming a one-company town. The area is home to Alphabet, parent company of Google, which employs 20,000 staff locally and which last month announced plans to spend up to $30m on building 300 modular homes. According to Ty Sheppard, communications manager at Google, the units will be “short-term housing for Googlers only”.
The plan is the latest effort by Google to expand its property footprint. One particular deal illustrates the company’s ambition in the area, a 500-acre sweep of coastland a 40-minute drive south of San Francisco. In 2015, Google competed with LinkedIn for rights over 2m sq ft of scarce North Bayshore land. Both made lavish assurances to win local authority approval: a new police station, environmental measures, even college scholarships. Ultimately, LinkedIn got the better of the deal, receiving 1.4m sq ft to Google’s 515,000.
On hearing the decision, David Radcliffe, Google’s vice-president of real estate, told local councillors: “It’s a significant blow. I’m not sure how I make any of this economically viable.” He never had to. A year later, a property swap with LinkedIn gave Google ownership over almost all of North Bayshore.