San Francisco officials to tech workers: Buy your lunch
SAN FRANCISCO — The corporate campuses of the Bay Area’s technology companies have become independent fiefs with dry cleaning, gyms, doctors, shuttle buses and bountiful free meals, made by the best chefs poached from the region’s famous restaurants. Now, local officials are knocking at the gates.
And they are coming for the food.
Two San Francisco supervisors introduced an ordinance last week that would forbid employee cafeterias in new corporate construction. It is not clear whether the measure will pass, but it is a direct attack on one of the modern tech industry’s most entrenched traditions.
The ordinance, which seeks to force tech workers out of their subsidized cafeterias and into neighborhood restaurants, is the latest attempt by San Francisco leaders to make the tech companies that are migrating north from Silicon Valley adapt to life in the city.
The issue is an emotional one in San Francisco, where the flood of new workers and existing residents have struggled to mesh as the cost of living has spiraled. Income inequality in the city — often defined as “the haves who work for tech companies versus just about everyone else” — is among the highest in the country. Renting a one-bedroom apartment costs on average $3,258 a month. The median home price rose to $1.6 million earlier this year.
Although San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is not expected to consider the cafeteria ban until the fall, local reaction to it has fallen along the city’s typical, proand anti-tech fault lines.
“These tech companies have decided to leave their suburban campuses because their employees want to be in the city, and yet the irony is, they come to the city and are creating isolated, walledoff campuses,” said Aaron Peskin, a city supervisor who is co-sponsoring the bill with Ahsha Safaí. “This is not against these folks, it’s for them. It’s to integrate them into the community.”
Peskin’s ordinance is also aimed at getting more out of a tax deal given to tech companies that would agree to move into a troubled area called Mid-Market. In 2011, the companies were given tax breaks on payroll and stock options with the hope that they would bring jobs and investment to the neighborhood, just a short walk from San Francisco’s City Hall.
Within a few years, a number of companies like Twitter, Square and Uber moved into Mid-Market. But despite initial excitement over the opening of a number of restaurants and shops, the neighborhood has not flourished the way many had hoped.
Open drug use is still common on the streets around Twitter’s headquarters. Some of the big restaurants that moved in have already moved out because they were not drawing enough customers. A few stories up, in a forbidding art deco-style building, Twitter employees enjoy free meals in an expansive corporate cafeteria. Tight security on the ground floor keeps the problems of the street away.
“We gave huge tax breaks to revitalize neighborhoods,” Peskin said. “But instead, they’re all walled into their tech palaces.”
Existing tech kitchens would be grandfathered in under the proposed ordinance, so that anyone who has in-office meals now would keep them. But newcomers would have to learn to eat out or brown bag it.
“I’m not taking away anybody’s lunch,” Peskin said.
San Francisco is not alone in trying to crack the insularity of fast-growing tech employers. City officials in Mountain View barred Facebook from serving free meals at its new campus that opens this fall. Facebook is even planning on building residential housing for non-employees as it expands in nearby Menlo Park.
Tech companies have long offered perks like free meals, mainly to keep employees in the office and working longer hours. High-end cafeterias often made sense when companies were in suburban office parks, surrounded by parking lots and not a whole lot of food options. But the social and commercial functions they now provide to their employees are unprecedented, said Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University.
“There’s never been anything on the scale of what we’re seeing now,” said Berlin, who wrote a history of the industry called “Troublemakers.” “I’ve often wondered what’s lost in this trend to just constantly stay in your own ecosystem. What are the risks in these siloed monocultures?”
To some tech workers, targeting their free food feels more like scapegoating for the city’s problems than like sound policy. San Francisco had drug and homelessness issues long before Twitter came along.
Tech companies cannot be blamed for local policies that have helped to derail housing construction. And not every computer programmer, they note, is a millionaire.
“I’m not in favor of local government mandating where I can and cannot eat,” said James Manning, 43, the director of user experience at Dolby Laboratories, where in-office meals are heavily subsidized. “The idea the food doesn’t need to be subsidized, that tech workers make so much, is a fallacy. Tech workers, the vast majority, with the cost of living here, are not wealthy.”