The bridge will provide access to the trail that rings San Francisco Bay, a boon for birders and bikers. Facebook wants to revitalize the railway running alongside the property and will finish next year a pedestrian bridge over the expressway. The community will have eight acres of parks, plazas and bike-pedestrian paths open to the public. The most likely tenants of the full-price units are Facebook employees, who already receive a five-figure bonus if they live near the office. Facebook is planning 1,500 apartments, and has agreed with Menlo Park to offer 225 of them at below-market rates. Willow Village will be wedged between the Menlo Park neighborhood of Belle Haven and the city of East Palo Alto, both heavily Hispanic communities that are among Silicon Valley’s poorest. Tenanes says, has a dual mission: “We want to balance our growth with the community’s needs.” It is a project with many precedents in American history, quite a few of them cautionary tales about what happens when a powerful corporation takes control of civic life.įacebook, Mr. Now the social network is building a real community, the kind you can walk around. In just a few years, Facebook built a virtual community that linked more than two billion people, an achievement with few precedents.

That round building in the corner? Maybe a cultural center.” “There will be a retail street along here, with a grocery store and a drugstore. “There will be housing there,” he points.

He leans over a scale model of the 59-acre site, which is named Willow Village. It will have offices for thousands of programmers to extend Facebook’s fearsome reach. John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president for real estate, is showing off the company’s plans for expansion.

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