At the Melbourne Apartments in Des Moines, a one-bedroom place rents for $565 per month.
Maybe Google should have its own Secretary of Housing & Urban Development. After all, somebody there seems very into giving shelter, not only to company employees but to other deserving folks as well.
Back in November, I wrote about Google’s expanding California real-estate holdings, which amounted to over 4 million square feet. The company had also just announced plans for a new corporate campus that would include housing for employees. Residences there could take up 10% of the new campus’s space, meaning perhaps 60 2,000-sq.-ft. dwellings, according to The Silicon Valley Mercury News. It seemed to represent the latest evolution of the company town.
Then today there appeared a report in The New York Times, telling how Google was investing in low-income housing in far-away Des Moines, Iowa.
This endeavor may simply represent a smart investment: The Times says the sale of federal low-income-housing tax credits allows investors to reduce their federal tax burden. “If you can buy $1 worth of tax credit for 59 cents, you are getting a [good] return on your investment,” the article notes. In addition to Google, other investors include Verizon and insurers Liberty Mutual and Allstate.
All the same, Google’s investments amount to $86 million poured into 480 apartments for low-income renters in the Midwest and California. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
Martin Luther King speaking at a Memphis rally prior to his assassination in 1968.
“I wish he wouldn’t come,” she said. The Tucson resident worried that President Barack Obama’s appearance at a memoriam for those recently killed in her city would somehow reinforce the idea that Tucson was an environment that fostered such violence.
Her worry is understandable. I remember when, in the days following Martin Luther King’s 1968 assassination, my hometown of Memphis was assailed by Time magazine as an place that was somehow responsible for the killing. It was, after all, a “rotting River city,” in the magazine’s words.
Earlier, Dallas—and its laughably inept, cowboy-hat-clad police force–had been the object of finger-pointing in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s murder. In more recent times, Oklahoma City has seemed to blame for the wacko reactionary attitudes of Federal Building bomber Timothy McVeigh.
There is some validity in the sentiment–after all, environments are responsible to a degree for inhabitants’ actions. Moreover, Tucson does seem a bit off-center. Jared Loughner was far from the only gun nut present at the Safeway on January 8; federal judge John M. Roll, who was killed, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head, and one of the doctors who attended Giffords were all known to sometimes pack heat and to frequent shooting ranges.
Moreover, as The New York Times reports today, there are two gun shows scheduled in the Tucson area during the next two weeks.
But there’s also something wrong here: The rest of America is looking for someone else to blame for the violence that is, after all, epidemic across the land. Yes, gun sales soared in Tucson after the shootings there–but they also rose across the country, including in such “blue” states as New York.
Sometimes, events in the United States just seem to drive you to despair.
I’ve written a short article for Publishers Weekly on the odd transition from being a book review editor to being a book author. One week, you’re the judge–and the next, the judged. Physician, heal thyself.
A line of 1930s jobless men waiting for food handouts.
An interesting observation from John Kenneth Galbraith:
“The organization man has been a subject of much sorrow. But all who weep should recall that he surrenders to organization because organization does more for him than he can do for himself….the mature corporation has the prestige which induces and encourages the individual to accept its goals in place of his own.”–The New Industrial State (1967)
So this is where the unemployed suffer hugely. Not only do they have no paychecks–after years of accepting organizational goals in place of their own, they have no goals and often, no way to create new ones. They look for work, but it is really a purpose in life that they miss most severely.
I appeared on Radio Boston, a program on the Boston University radio station, WBUR, this afternoon. The show was actually recorded some weeks back, but here it is via the miracle of recording: http://radioboston.wbur.org/2010/12/22/company-town
Workers at the Roebling steel works in New Jersey. Courtesy: Roebling Archives.
Hundreds of company towns were created in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. One of these was Roebling, New Jersey, created by the Roebling steel company.
The Roebling family, which built the Brooklyn Bridge, had a works in Trenton, N.J., but there was no space in that town to expand. Company executives found land 30 miles from Camden, N.J., where they purchased 250 acres. There, they would construct a line of open-hearth steel furnaces .
But back then, 30 miles was seen as an impossible commute. So, the company built a “model town” on the site with a general store, a variety of other merchandisers, a water system, utilities, a police force, and a public school. (But no churches!) They built houses that were rented to workers at “reasonable” rates. Within a short time, 750 such dwellings were built for 3,600 inhabitants–up to 200 other workers had to commute.
Like other steel towns, Roebling was not intended by its builders to be a “philanthropic” enterprise: “We are certainly not posing as idealists or reformers” said Charles G. Roebling. The houses were built of brick with gas and electric laid on. Unlike some company towns, workers experienced no requirement that they buy their necessities at the company store, but they got their wages in the form of cash or credit at the company store.
Like in the ill-fated, much larger development of Gary, Indiana, company executives expected Roebling, NJ to “pay its own way.” And unlike the Ford Motor Co. town of Dearborn, Mich. or even Hershey, Pa., there was no attempt by company management to oversee the lives of the workers. “They will be under no obligation to us nor we to them as far as life in the city is concerned,” announced the company.
Steel is no longer a going industry in the U.S., of course. But you can still visit Roebling. I will be speaking there at the formal opening of the town’s history museum in April, 2011.
The entrance to NASA's Research Park at Ames, California.
“I don’t want to say it’s the new company town,” reflects one real-estate executive of Google’s rapidly expanding domain, “but it’s not far from it.”
In an article penned by reporter Mike Swift, The Silicon Valley Mercury News describes how Google’s real-estate footprint has grown in the past four years to occupy more than 4 million square feet. And coming soon: a new Google corporate campus on Silicon Valley’s NASA base at Ames that will include employee housing. That new facility will add another 1.2 million square feet to the company’s real-estate holdings.
Swift also notes that Google is encouraging the city of Mountain View, California–the location of its much discussed Googleplex–to transform the area around its headquarters, adding more housing and retail establishments.
Just how many employees does Google foresee living and working at the NASA Ames Research Center? The company won’t say–nor will it even disclose the number of workers currently in Mountain View, although Swift estimates that there are 17,000. The complex at Ames is still in the planning stages, with construction scheduled to begin in 2013. Housing there could take up 10% of the new campus’s space, meaning perhaps 60 2,000-sq.-ft. dwellings.
Some people may be reluctant to use the term “company town,” with its negative connotations. But there is no other term–and history has shown that company towns need not be slums or Orwellian dystopias. In Mountain View, the company says it wants a “nurturing and regenerative” environment, complete with “vibrant community and work/life balance.” And maybe it has similar goals for the Ames campus.
In planning Hershey, Pennsylvania, Milton Hershey announced that he intended to build a community where there would be “no poverty, no nuisances, no evil.” Google, too, is down on evil–“Don’t be evil,” its informal motto instructs. So maybe, like Hershey, the Ames facility will be a home, sweet home. Here’s hoping.
Part of the Milton Hershey School in the town of Hershey, Pa.
CNN’s report from Hershey, Pa. dwells at length with the plight of workers displaced by the closing of Hershey Foods’ historic Chocolate Avenue plant. (I appear on camera, telling viewers that other townspeople are affected as well.)
The problem with reports such as these is that they leave us just where we are: in despair about deindustrialization, puzzled about where the next jolt of U.S. economic development will come from. Nevertheless, they seem to catch the temper of the times, when many Americans are frustrated and frightened.
Hershey Co.'s flagship plant is slated to be shuttered, with 500 jobs disappearing.
Can the Hershey company really close its flagship plant? The many-acre facility right on Hershey, Pa.’s main drag, a.k.a. Chocolate Avenue, has signaled to thousands of visitors that they are in Chocolate Town, U.S.A.–not least because the aroma of chocolate fills the very air.
But the factory is set to close, as the company announced this summer. Five hundred jobs will go, and six hundred other jobs will be transferred to a more modern $300 million facility on the edge of town.
“Lots of those workers were ready to retire anyway,” one local citizen told me during a recent visit. “Hershey will take care of them–it always has.”
Maybe. But more and more of the company’s production is going abroad, to Mexico and Asia.
The town of Hershey seems as prosperous and welcoming as ever, even with the vast Hershey Park amusement area largely closed for the season–its roller-coaster-like rides momentarily stilled.
A large patch of green near the plant’s gate is emblazoned with “Hershey’s Cocoa” spelled out in flowers. Up on a hill overlooking the village is the opulent, rambling Hotel Hershey, situated near Hershey Gardens and the imposing middle-school branch of the Milton Hershey School, endowed in 1915 with all of the founder’s company stock.
The endowment is managed from an imposing building tagged The Hershey Trust, also right on Chocolate Avenue. Milton Hershey’s old mansion provides further quarters for the wealthy school.
On a beautiful autumn day, the town hardly seems representative of a blighted, deindustrialized land. But that spectre haunts America in 2010, as I’ve learned during several recent radio-show appearances. Americans are worried that the recession hardly seems over–and as corporations continue to shift jobs abroad, the citizenry frets that no new economic development is on the horizon. One caller, a truck driver, told me that he used to pick up and deliver lots of steel produced in Gary, Indiana and elsewhere. Nowadays, much of his freight consists of used equipment being shipped abroad. Where will replacement jobs come from? No one in Washington or anywhere else seems to have an answer.
A rendering of Bell Labs' pathbreaking corporate campus near Summit, New Jersey. The Googleplex of its day, the Bell facility opened in 1944.
Everyone nowadays seems to have heard about Google’s spectacular California campus and headquarters, the Googleplex. News reports profiling the Google home base are everywhere, including a recent one on CNBC that showed its nap rooms, exotic free food, and numerous distractions (foosball, volleyball, croquet etc.), which the report said made the place seem “like a playground on steroids.” But the Googleplex is only the most celebrated of corporate campuses, which have been around since the 1930s and ’40s, as this excerpt from The Company Town describes:
In the 1930s, the Bell Labs division of American Telephone & Telegraph began planning for a new Manhattan headquarters. The high-rise would cover four acres of prime New York real estate and house 5,600 of the research-and-development division’s scientists and staffers. But by 1939, the plan had been discarded: Manhattan, it seems, was already plagued by “high living costs” and “urban noise and dirt.” Staffers were said to be repelled by the hassles and costs associated with commuting. So instead, in 1944, Bell Labs relocated to a park-like campus on 250 acres near Summit, New Jersey, 25 miles out from the city. Apparently, Bell Labs Chairman Dr. Frank B. Jewett had for years longed for more leafy surroundings.
Images of the New Jersey site show a complex of unthreatening, modern structures amid landscaped countryside. Indoors, a cafeteria, solarium, and employees’ lounge celebrate modernist aesthetics with “butternut woodwork,” recessed lighting, and unfussy, upholstered furniture. Modular construction allows reconfiguration of laboratory spaces according to the needs of the moment.
Bell Labs was in the vanguard of the industrial-park and office-park movement that would not truly pick up speed until the 1960s, by which point the U.S. economy had begun an inexorable shift away from manufacturing and toward services and knowledge work. Up until these years, the company town had been the primary venue for business civic experimentation. Some of these towns—including Lowell, Massachusetts; early Pullman, Illinois; Hershey, Pennsylvania; Kohler, Wisconsin; Vandergrift, Pennsylvania; and such timber towns as Scotia, California and Port Gamble, Washington—had been model, planned communities. Offering comfortable worker housing, handsome public buildings, landscaped vistas, parks, libraries, schools, hospitals, and other amenities, such places were capitalism’s utopias—showplaces for individual companies and evidence that the system was capable of generating urban areas where, in Milton Hershey’s words, there would be “no poverty, no nuisances, no evil.”
But by the 1930s, the automobile seemed to threaten the very existence of company towns. By contrast, office and industrial parks were utopias built for the automobile age.
The first such parks—around New York, Chicago, and Kansas City—dated back to the turn of the century, but by 1940 there were fewer than 35 such developments. By the early 1970s, however, there were over 300 such industrial/office parks in California alone, and a large number in Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Office-park path-breakers included IBM and PepsiCo. In 1957, the computer company commissioned Finnish-born Eero Saarinen—an architect on his way to developing a world-class reputation in part due to his many company campuses—to design a scientific research center in Yorktown Heights, New York. The three-story, 770,000-square-foot building there would house 1,500 scientists in a fieldstone-and-glass structure that set a new standard for suburban offices. IBM was so pleased with the Yorktown facility that it decided to move its corporate headquarters out of Manhattan to Armonk, New York. Architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill drew up plans for a 403,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete edifice there, complete with two sculpture-filled courtyards on 420 acres. At the same time, Skidmore, Owings’ created Connecticut campuses for Connecticut General Life and Emhart Manufacturing Co. Saarinen designed a further complex for Bell Labs, at Holmdel, N.J., which opened in 1962.
PepsiCo followed IBM’s lead, moving northward out of New York City. In 1958, the soft-drink giant purchased a former polo club in Purchase, New York, and hired architect Edward Durell Stone to plan a prestigious headquarters complex. That would consist of seven, seemingly overlapping, three-story buildings on 112 acres. Native and exotic trees and grasses were as carefully chosen as the fifty celebrated works of sculpture by the likes of Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi.
Outside of the New York area, the flight from urban centers was perhaps even more pronounced. In the 1960s, over 30 industrial parks representing 700 high-tech companies—Digital, General Electric, RCA, and Raytheon included—emerged along Route 128 near Boston. The Great Southwest Industrial Park, opened in 1967 on the outskirts of Atlanta, seems like a paradigm of the modern corporate campus. After passing through a 90-foot-high abstract entry arch, employees and visitors traveled along wide, divided boulevards bearing such collegiate names as Bucknell and Colgate. Trees and shrubbery shared quadrangle space with modernist sculpture. Buildings housed regional distribution centers for Coca-Cola, Goodyear, Philco-Ford, and Stanley Home Products. Not far away, the Atlanta Executive Park, which opened in 1964, housed administrative rather than industrial activity. There, a central plaza, the Pantry in the Park, supplied office workers with a snack bar, a copy service, and a gift shop.
Examining the emergence of corporate campuses and the exodus from New York City, urban sociologist William H. Whyte in 1988 noted that the new complexes had “little connection with their surroundings.” He went on,
They are elements of a car culture….Within the headquarters a range of services makes the outside unnecessary. These are particularly bountiful in outlying campuses. At Beneficial Management’s corporate village in Peapack, New Jersey, a pleasant grouping of low buildings is arranged around a courtyard and bell tower. There are outdoors dining areas, dining rooms within, shops, health facilities; the garage is laid out so that one drives to an underground space and takes an elevator to within a few feet of his office.
An unabashed fan of the urban experience, Whyte concluded that corporate campuses were employee-unfriendly developments—isolated, accessible only via increasingly congested roadways, often both Pharonic and sprawling, with little functional use of vast open space and too few pathways for those who might simply like to take a walk. Some were fortress-like as if intended to discourage visitors, he said. Most unforgivably, he found all of them inhospitable to the “unplanned, informal encounters” among people upon which both markets and spontaneous creativity depend. Ever hopeful, though, Whyte observed that the time-tested “idea of towns is gaining currency” as the campuses were found wanting. He seemed to forecast a return to sensible, small-community living and working.
Corporate campuses have continued to sprout, but company towns are hardly things of the past: Hershey, Scotia, Corning, New York, auto-production towns across Middle America, Midwestern meatpacking towns, and even the Atomic City of Oak Ridge are still in business. Moreover, rather than supplanting company towns, corporate campuses reproduce much of company-town life, albeit with a post-industrial, white-collar twist, in places ranging from Federal Express’ 500,000-square-foot Collierville, Tennessee, campus to the Mountain View, California site of the Googleplex. The FedEx facility is home to 1,500 employees and features jogging trails, a library, a wellness center, and coffee bars on each floor of the four office buildings. Google famously offers its cosseted workers free gourmet meals (Indian or Latin American, if you like), exercise facilities, and massages. Need to get your pants dry cleaned or your hair cut? There’s a service right there. There are even “sleep pods” where employees can take soporific-music-induced naps. All of this may sound idyllic, until you realize that workers need never go home—or stop working.
