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> It is absolutely insane that there is so much wealth being generated by these companies, yet they seemingly have no political will to influence the very localities they are based in

Wealth != municipal revenue. Menlo Park was particularly upset that Sun Microsystems (selling hardware and generating sales tax) was replaced by Facebook (no sales tax revenues). A pizza parlor would generate more revenue for the city, seems like, than an Internet company.

The only other venue is for company employees to buy up residential real estate, start paying property taxes and show up for city council meetings, as the city is likely deriving significant revenue from that. But if that is not happening, we can assume that company employees chose to deploy their residential spending elsewhere, and if so, why should the city care?

Does Menlo Park not have property tax for corporate headquarters?

Yeah, I think every city does, but like anything in property tax land, it's the value of land and additions. So a bunch of office buildings plus cheap land by the Bay.

I tried to find an exact answer, but San Mateo county doesn't publish a list of largest property taxpayers (some do http://ttc.ocgov.com/proptax/toptaxpayers so I believe it's public records), and a search for variants of Hacker Way on their site doesn't yield much.

Those places look like they ought to be valued really highly, but I suppose it's probably not a huge amount compared to tens of thousands of houses.

This article seems to imply it was assessed at $355 mil http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_16037583 With new building Facebook erected it will likely get re-assessed at higher value, but still, there are probably residential blocks in Menlo Park valued higher.

Business property taxes and many other services tend to be considerably cheaper than residential rates.

And furthermore - if employees do buy up residential real estate, they now have an incentive against rezoning to allow higher density (and increasing supply -> potentially lowing the value of the very expensive assets they just purchased)

At that time, wasn't it commonplace for manufacturers (ie. Sun) to only pay municipal sales tax on items sold within the city and not for "remote" orders?

It must have been all California sales. They were top sales tax producer for the city http://www.almanacnews.com/news/2009/05/27/menlo-park-a-top-...

> It is high time for all of the tech companies of Silicon Valley and San Francisco to come together and lobby the hell out of municipal and county governments to push for more housing and better transit.

The problem is fractal. The reason why the companies locate in SF rather than, say, Gilroy is the same reason why the companies locate in Silicon Valley rather than Tulsa, OK, for example.

The first problem here is that the executives in these companies want to live in those rich communities, so they don't locate the headquarters somewhere sensible. And lack of telecommuting is driven by the fact that executives can't telecommute as everybody now realizes that they actually don't do anything.

Second, there is a recruiting advantage when your company office is in the "cool" area. If you put the Facebook HQ in Gilroy, for example, a bunch of the younger folks would choose to work for a company that is located in SF proper.

That explains why the companies are located in these places. It doesn't explain why the companies don't use their clout to improve them, or even apparently make the attempt.

Because there is no clout in local politics unless you're bringing tax dollars to the table, which tech companies don't.

Don't they pay a ton of property tax on those fancy headquarters?

Possibly? What's the ratio of what they pay compared to the rest of the residential property in the city limits?

I guess I didn't make my point clear:

The executives don't live where the problems are. And, in fact, the executives are quite happy with NIMBY keeping the rabble out of Atherton and Palo Alto, thank you very much.

The HQ location is a balance between where the executives live and where employees can be recruited. With more tilt toward the executives (there was a study somewhere that showed that HQ relocations almost always moved closer to the CEO's residence--funny that...)

I see what you mean. Still, you'd think the difficulty with recruiting, or the increased pay required to attract workers, would at some point give them an incentive to improve things somewhere in the area.

Since when is there anything cool in Silicon Valley but the tech industry? There's nothing to do there, it's just low-density sprawl for miles upon miles. It's a testament to the strength of the industry that so many people are willing to put up with the tedium of an essentially suburban life in order to work there.

It's often less that there's no political will and more that the people in the cities have more votes to block that political will.

Why stop being a NIMBY when it's great for you?