Facebook campus expansion includes offices, retail, grocery store, housing
The proposed village includes offices, home, a grocery store, and parks and plazas
MENLO PARK — Aiming to address long-neglected community needs and to accommodate its burgeoning workforce, Facebook has proposed a vast expansion of its Menlo Park campus.
The new campus would include several office buildings, hundreds of homes, retail, a grocery store, and parks and plazas, all part of what the social network giant envisions as a new center for the neighborhood.
“This will be a village,” said Ryan Patterson, a real estate manager with Facebook. “The community benefits will be open and accessible to everyone.”
Menlo Park-based Facebook intends to develop 1.75 million square feet of offices, 1,500 units of housing, 125,000 square feet of retail space including a pharmacy, as well as a cultural and visitor center.
“Working with the community, our goal for the Willow Campus is to create an integrated, mixed-use village that will provide much needed services, housing, and transit solutions as well as office space,” said John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president of global facilities and real estate.
Facebook submitted its plans on Thursday to Menlo Park officials. If the city review proceeds as anticipated, Facebook hopes to launch construction sometime in 2019, with the first buildings ready for occupancy about two years after that.
As of March 31, Facebook had 18,770 global workers, an increase of 38 percent year-over-year. The company didn’t disclose the number of employees in Menlo Park or the number projected to work at the expanded campus. However, using commonly accepted ratios of 1 employee for every 200 square feet of Class A office space, as many as 8,700 Facebook employees could work at the future Willow Campus.
Facebook hopes that one big community benefit will be the addition of a market in what is something of a grocery desert in that part of Menlo Park. The closest Safeway store in Menlo Park is about 4 miles away from the proposed campus, a trip that can be a 20-to 30-minute drive across town in commute traffic.
“Part of our vision is to create a neighborhood center that provides long-needed community services,” Tenanes said.
OMA New York, an architectural firm, is designing the campus. Facebook declined to give an estimate of the overall project cost.
“We envisage construction will follow in phases, with the first to include the grocery, retail, housing and office completed in early 2021,” Tenanes said. “Subsequent phases will take two years each to complete.”
One local community group embraced the concept of the new Facebook village.
“We feel that Facebook genuinely wants to be a good neighbor,” said Diane Bailey, executive director with Menlo Spark, a community environmental group. “They appear to have heard the requests of the community, and they want to meet those requests.”
Menlo Spark in particular likes the order in which Facebook intends to develop the various elements of the campus.
“We are very pleased about the way this is happening, about the phasing of the project,” Bailey said, “It’s great that the grocery store and the retail will be first, and that housing will be first. The area has not had a grocery store or a pharmacy for a long time.”
Facebook intends to set aside at below-market rental rates 15 percent, or approximately 225, of the residential units, the company said.
“It’s really the big tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple that are still doing most of the expanding in the Bay Area,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “Big tech companies are becoming major players in adding housing. It’s a positive sign that housing will be a big part of this campus.”
The social media giant also hopes to spur a revival of transit and transportation upgrades, including greater use of the Dumbarton transit corridor, potentially running shuttle buses across the bay that could connect to BART.
“The region’s failure to continue to invest in our transportation infrastructure alongside growth has led to congestion and delay,” Tenanes said. “Willow Campus will be an opportunity to catalyze regional transit investment by providing planned density sufficient to support new east-west connections and a future transit center. We’re investing tens of millions of dollars to improve U.S. 101.”
Patterson said the project has been in the making with the Menlo Park community for a number of years.
“We are excited to continue that process over the next few years and make this a reality,” Patterson said.
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