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  
     Electronic Arts HQ Redwood City, CA 3,000 employees / 3,000 apartments   | Facebook Campus
Mountain View, CAMenlo Park, CA 9,400 employees / 9,400 apartments   Googleplex 10,000 employees / 10,000 apartments  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 all content is Creative Commons - Attribution feel free to repost and share on your website | San Francisco urban infill Vertical Community Living  Balboa Reservoir 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.   San Francisco Freeway Housing Apartments built over freeway deck 150 blocks / 140,000 apartments   Generic Cafe / Startup / Coworking Space a typical 1,000 square foot cafe or workspace. 12 employees / 12 apartments  See also an interactive short story on housing It's a Co-op research on the architecture of cooperative housing California Rail Map map of current rail service and connecting buses in California Northeast Rail Map map of current commuter and regional rail service in the Northeast Corridor |
