Silicon Valley tech companies love to build super awesome campuses that their employees will never want to leave. Those college-like idylls are surefire crucibles for disruption. In-house catering, coffee shops, laundry services, nap rooms, and a slew of other perks have become industry standards. In downtown San Francisco, you can’t thrown an iPhone without hitting two dudes bragging about their startup’s nitro cold brew on tap.
But while those bougie office accoutrements keep workers caffeinated and at their desks, they’re also at least partially repsonsible for tech’s biggest sins: a lack of diversity and gentrification. To maximize productivity, insular tech campuses are insular—they intentionally isolate workers, their time, and their money, sequestering employment and economic opportunities away from the communities around the campus. And once you’ve got that bubble in place, it tends to self-perpetuate rather than burst.
It’s kind of like when a politician forgets the price of milk: The outside world becomes a distant abstraction. “The Google, Facebook, Apple culture where you don’t ever have to leave? When you create bubbles and then reinforce them like that, you get bias,” says Leslie Miley, engineering director and diversity champion at Slack (and veteran of Apple, Google, and Twitter). “The idea that you’re part of this elite makes it difficult for the companies to move their diversity numbers.”
If tech campuses are glamorous black boxes with a special (homogenous) caste of workers jumping from one to the other and back again, it starts to look like meritocracy has no room for diversity. And that in turn makes it even harder for people not plugged into the network to find an entry point. “When you have these insular campuses where people don’t interact with the area around them, it becomes this opaque world,” says Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder and executive director of recruitment firm ReadySet, and cofounder of Project Include. “White and Asian male talent has learned how to play that system, but people from under-resourced backgrounds assume that they cannot succeed in getting through the hiring process.”
Those candidates worry, certainly, about the companies’ lack of diversity. But they might even worry about being able to afford traveling down to the companies’ Mountain View or Menlo Park campus for a fourth, fifth, 12th interview. And because these people opt out rather than get rejected, it can look like homogeneity is a meritocratic accident. That’s the first layer of what Hutchinson calls “double displacement.”
The second layer, in Hutchinson’s construction, is economic—the cycle of gentrification leading to sky-high rents leading to more gentrification that happens around tech campuses. “If a tech company sets up shop in a economically depressed part of a city, the interactions between the white employees and the black and Latino people in the neighborhood might be hostile,” says Richard Ford, a civil rights and anti-discrimination lawyer at Stanford. “Those interactions could increase bias by ‘confirming’ stereotypes. And this problem is especially pronounced because employees do not leave the building.”
Even if the campuses don’t necessarily make techies more biased, the associated economic displacement does limit people’s chances to interact with the community positively. (As in, not on public transit. Nobody is at their best there.)
The campuses and surrounding housing stock turns into a mirror-universe version of an industrial-revolution era factory town. “If people don’t have to pay for transport, food, coffee, and laundry, they have more disposable income to spend on housing,” Miley says. So communities with tech campuses not only have an influx of people with disproportionately high wages—which could be a good thing—but also a tidal wave of workers whose every need is sated except for housing. Cue the rent spike.
But don’t cue benefits to local businesses. Tech campuses don’t bring many of the benefits that typically come with a big company setting up shop. “Imagine the effect on the incumbent,” says Christopher Palmer, an economist at UC Berkley’s Haas School of Business. “Across the street from an insular, self-sustaining suburban mall isn’t a very happy place to have a coffee shop or cleaning service. This is the same thing.”
Sure, the job opportunities for baristas might increase via the famous multiplier effect. But community wide? Not so much. “If those folks are not patronizing local establishments, you’re not getting the multiplier effect in the neighborhood,” says Karen Chapple, a city and regional planning professor at UC Berkeley. “It goes to some lucky contractor instead.” This isn’t necessarily a disaster around the more urban campuses—like Twitter’s in San Francisco’s mid-Market area—but in more suburban areas like Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and especially East Palo Alto, communities get screwed.
All of this isn’t to say that techies should never get coffee again. But they could be more programmatic about hiring qualified community members. Also, “If you’re going to have your amenities internal, at least do some local purchasing,” Chapple says. In other words: Go out for lunch sometime.
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