Corporations are bringing back the company town

The Future. Some of the biggest American corporations in tech and entertainment are having big city dreams — developing a new generation of “company towns” where people can live and play just a stone’s throw from where they work. The projects are focused on alleviating the sky-high prices and lack of inventory in the housing market… but may end up being the innovation playgrounds that these companies have dreamed of for years.

Incorporating the Inc.
Brands are coming for your backyard.

• Google is working on a community called North Bayshore in Mountain View, CA, that’ll have 7,000 housing units and another called Middlefield Park that’ll have 2,000 units.
• Meta is building Willow Village (dubbed “Zucktown”) in Menlo Park, CA, that’ll have 1,700 housing units, a hotel, and plenty of retail.
• Disney is developing 1,400 housing units across 80 acres in Kissimmee, FL, near Walt Disney World.
• NBCUniversal is working on 1,000 affordable apartments and 16,000 square feet of retail space right next door to its theme park in Orlando, FL.
• Elon Musk is building the city of Snailbrook outside of Austin, TX, for employees of his constellation of startups, including SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Co.

But the most ambitious of these projects is the “California Forever” project — which counts investors like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a16z’s Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs — that hopes to develop Silicon Valley 2.0 in the middle of lots of farmland. 

That one may bring an entirely new meaning to “startup accelerator.”