FREE lunch — heck, free breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus all the MMs and Red Bull you can stand — is a delicious perk of working in Silicon Valley.
Free or even subsidized food in corporate cafeterias makes eminent sense in such a suburban setting. Corporate campuses, built where fruit and nut trees once stood, are cut off by busy thoroughfares. To go out for lunch, you have to drive a mile or so, park, eat and then high-tail it back to work.
Nothing much, food-wise, has sprouted around those campuses. There is not a bite to eat within a half-mile of Hewlett-Packard’s midcentury modern lab building in Palo Alto, the model of tech campuses in the valley.
So when this cafeteria culture hits the big city, does the collision somehow stultify economic activity? Cities, after all, need people out on the sidewalks.
That was an important lesson learned in the 1960s and ’70s, after urban renewal advocates like Robert Moses in New York bulldozed neighborhoods in hopes of starting afresh. Buildings with no space for shops rose on the scraped earth, and it took years for people to return to the sidewalks.
All of this comes to mind because San Francisco is offering tax breaks to tech companies that relocate their offices to the city’s blighted neighborhoods. Twitter will be the first recipient of this largess when it moves into new offices in the Furniture Mart on a particularly desolate section of Market Street next year.
Twitter, which is competing for talent with Google and Facebook, gives its employees free food. The question is whether those urban employees will leave the building often enough to dramatically improve the neighborhood.
Gabriel Metcalf, the executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, an urban policy research group, says the impact of corporate cafeterias in an urban setting has not been rigorously studied. But, Mr. Metcalf says, “You certainly get more life on the street if everyone is going out to lunch.”
Twitter may be a good test case. Market Street, a wide avenue that bisects downtown San Francisco, begins at the Ferry Building. Smart designers transformed that structure from a seedy and little-used transportation hub; it now teems with shops and restaurants that attract tourists and office workers alike. During the twice-a-week farmers’ market, people stand in line for a half-hour to buy ramen, exotic sausages or rotisserie pork sandwiches from food carts.
But a mile and a half up Market, in the shadow of the golden dome of City Hall, it’s a different picture. Boarded-up buildings. Empty, littered lots. Even in boom times, the area never improved.
This is where the city has encouraged Twitter to set up shop. To transform the area, though, people will have to get out on the street. When the people come, shops open. When the shops open, more people come. A virtuous cycle begins.
But what happens when people don’t leave the buildings — when the culture of the suburban campus drops into an urban center? Two places in the city offer laboratories of sorts for a possible answer.
In a former industrial neighborhood called Mission Bay, the University of California, San Francisco, built its medical center. The university stashed its cafeterias up off street level. As a result, the area has remained sterile and empty. Employees and students drive in, then drive out. The public stays away.
That is expected to change when Salesforce.com, a company that has thrived providing Web services to corporate sales representatives, finishes building a new headquarters nearby. It will consist of eight buildings over 14 acres — a suburban campus in the city. The architects, Legorreta Legorreta, of Mexico City, have incorporated street-level retail space into the project that is open to the sidewalk. They say they want to invite the public in. Salesforce has never had a corporate cafeteria.
Then there is a no-name neighborhood, south of San Francisco’s financial district, that is home to a satellite office of Google. While the fare in that office’s corporate cafeteria isn’t as extensive as it is in the company’s home office in Mountain View, 40 miles to the south, it is still copious and free for employees.
The results are not surprising. In the time that Google has been in San Francisco, few establishments that draw people to the sidewalk have opened in its neighborhood. There is a new expense-account-set restaurant across the street, and a taco truck popular with the employees at the nearby Gap headquarters, which also has a corporate cafeteria, though meals there are unsubsidized.
EVEN a city like San Francisco, which in some ways likes to tell people how to live their lives — trying to ban McDonald’s Happy Meals, second-hand smoke outdoors and plastic shopping bags — is unlikely to start telling companies how to feed their employees.
“It’s not the kind of thing you can micromanage,” says Mr. Metcalf of SPUR. “It’s nice to have something that they leave alone.”
But he hopes that the executives who move into blighted city neighborhoods see a reason to encourage employees to get out.
“The city benefits,” he says, “when a company decides to integrate more with the public life of the street.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/technology/03ping.html?partner=rss&emc=rss