Tech Campus Housing

The booming tech industry has created huge demand for housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, driving up housing costs and leading to long commutes.

Meanwhile, tech workers flock to San Francisco and Oakland, seeking the high-density urban environment that Silicon Valley lacks.

What might it look like if tech campuses replaced their parking lots and provided enough housing on-site to meet the demand?

Apple Campus 2

Cupertino, CA

13,000 employees / 13,000 apartments

More information

Updates

There have been many comments on why towers are used instead of 6-story blocks. The answers are:

- Some of the sites simply will not hold that many apartments without the use of towers.

- It leaves land open for future construction.

- Continuous urban-scale streets lined with townhouses and stores connect the towers, maintaining a walkable street.

- See the "Generic Cafe" for a module of what urban tech with smaller buildings and smaller businesses would look like.

Is this just a company town? Not necessarily.

These can be compared to mixed-use buildings with housing over offices/retail. There's no reason that everyone living here would need to work on site (though many probably would) - I simply matched the number of jobs to housing to show how much housing a certain amount of office space requires.

discuss it on

Facebook Campus

Menlo Park, CA

9,400 employees / 9,400 apartments

Facebook campus with housing - site plan

Electronic Arts HQ

Redwood City, CA

3,000 employees / 3,000 apartments

Generic Cafe / Startup / Coworking Space

a typical 1,000 square foot cafe or workspace.

12 employees / 12 apartments

San Francisco urban infill

Vertical Community Living

Balboa Reservoir - 6000 units

In 2014, to address the housing shortage, the City of San Francisco began Public Land for Housing, a program to open up unused City-owned land for housing development. The first site to be studied is the Balboa Reservoir, an empty reservoir (never used) / parking lot next to CCSF.

This design was prepared for SF Bay Area Renters' Federation, an organization advocating for the construction of large amounts of new housing to help bring down the cost of housing. Building types are similar to that in the Rincon Hill and Mid-Market areas, roughly 400 units per acre.

17 acres / 6,000 apartments.