All these comments comparing this to company scrip are profoundly ignorant, and are downright insulting to the victims of robber barons and capitalism in Appalachia. Google pays salaries in USD. They don’t pay a worker 10 GoogleBucks per ton. Google doesn’t force their workers to live at Google tenements or stay at Google hotels. Hell, they don’t even force you to go into a Google office. All they’ll do is make a note on your “permanent record” at performance review time if you were in the office less than 60% of the time. In coal country, if you showed up at a picket line instead of the mine, they’d send in Pinkerton goons to murder you, and the mayor too.
Call me a bootlicker, I don’t care, but I actually think this is brilliant on Google’s part. Median rent in Mountain View for a 1br is $3600/mo. They’re renting rooms to their high-paid employees for ~15% less than market rent, right on campus, avoiding them from pricing out another local family if all they need is a place to sleep. Sillycon Valley is a terrible place to live. It’s a place to go for a couple years, make a bunch of money, live worse than a broke student, and GTFO as soon as possible. It’s like working on an offshore oil rig, with the gender ratio to match…
Unlike the coal towns’ usurious pricing to a captive market (another day older and deeper in debt), Google is almost certainly losing money on this hotel. They don’t care. They shell out twice as much for a temporary apartment with every corporate relocation package they give to new hires.
Google would like to build more market rate housing to meet demand. Unfortunately, building any new housing is illegal because the real estate cartel runs City Council, so Google takes over an existing hotel and prices it like an apartment. It’s the reverse Airbnb. You love to see it. It’s not a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets when the cartel cornered the local housing market 15 years ago, but every little bit to undermine their stranglehold on power helps. FDR and Stalin were natural enemies, and yet they both recognized in that moment, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Same goes here. Critical support for Google.
A kinder version of a company town is still a company town, in the same way high-paying wage labor is still wage labor.
This is not Google being charitable and caring about housing prices in the surrounding area. These are the people most able to work remotely; Google is bringing them back to their expensive office to justify its existence and saying “this time I’ll be your landlord, too.”
$99 a night for company rooms? Around here we can get a shitty room, AND a hooker for that price. Not to mention drugs being readily available in the parking lot.