Last week, Google’s global CEO Sundar Pichai said subsidised housing is something he would consider in Dublin.
It is at an early stage in the company’s thinking and it seems unlikely this would be anything like the company’s $1bn homes intervention in San Francisco.
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But the principle is similar to the US idea: contribute to the availability of homes in the area for those in the community who can’t afford the kind of rents €100,000 Google engineers can.
This invokes all sorts of reactions.
Should companies be relied on to house the general population?
Even if not, are tech firms, which have grown at breakneck speed and have more money than they know what to do with, exceptional cases?
And quite apart from how much money companies like Google or Facebook or Apple have, are we in Dublin admitting we need this kind of help for essential basics?
Or should we look at it more broad-mindedly, taking such initiatives from the biggest employers with grace and accepting that housing can be complicated with multiple approaches welcome?
All in all, are we entering a new era of Iveagh Trust patrician corporate patronage?
In San Francisco, Google has pledged $1bn to subsidise the general housing stock. This is through a mixture of land it will donate and money for different building initiatives. It is unmistakeably a community gesture rather than a short-term corporate plan for its own staff. It is aimed much more at workers who are being priced out of central areas than Googlers. In other words, it is being done to benefit teachers, nurses, retail and hospitality workers.
It is a response to the extraordinary rise in rents in cities which host the biggest, richest tech companies – a one-bedroomed apartment in San Francisco now costs close to $4,000 a month. And it is an acknowledgement that the reason those rents are soaring is because of the high-salaried tech workers.
So Google’s $1bn in San Francisco is to address the fear communities are falling apart, or becoming atrophied, without a genuine mix of workers being able to afford a home and raise a family.
Google isn’t alone in this way of thinking.
Microsoft is pledging $500m for a similar purpose in its home city of Seattle, while Amazon is starting to donate buildings for emergency accommodation.
Corporate largesse in a community isn’t a new idea either in the US or Europe.
Historically, there have always been examples of massive companies identifying with particular towns or cities and contributing substantial resources, even building large physical parts of them. This ranges from the American town of Endicott, in New York State, which was once utterly dominated by IBM (of the town’s 13,000 residents, 11,000 worked for the company) to Wolfsburg in Germany, where 70,000 people are directly employed by Volkswagen despite the city only having around 125,000 residents.
Dublin has had its own share of patronage. Guinness, owned by Diageo, still owns a chunk of Dublin 8, having housed scores of employees to work in its brewery there.
The initial impetus for that was a city which couldn’t provide adequate housing for workers, so Guinness stepped in circuitously through the Iveagh Trust.
But Dublin is hardly the poverty-stricken town of the Iveagh Trust era over a century ago.
A modern city in a rich country – which Ireland is, regardless of what we tell ourselves – should surely be able to provide housing for its own citizens, shouldn’t it? The problem, though, is how sharp the divide in incomes is becoming and how that is translating into housing affordability.
Dublin, like San Francisco or Seattle, albeit on a much smaller scale, has rarely seen this on such a systematic scale. During the height of the Celtic Tiger, a great many different kinds of job saw higher pay, more work or both. But even during the recession, when the rest of us were losing our shirts, the tech boom – and its high salaries – continued. The schism in affordability has developed since then.
Google’s thinking may be a sign cities, in particular, are entering a new phase where direct private sector subvention is on the agenda.
One could certainly make the case the situation became extreme in San Francisco, about an hour away from the search giant’s Mountain View Campus.
Each year, I notice the city becomes more and more an unavailable residential area for all but rich people.
Aside from the usual complaints about cultural diversity, this also means some of the most important core constituents of the community – groups such as teachers and nurses, police and retail workers – aren’t present any more in any numbers.
The result is a city that feels anaesthetised and dead after 9pm. Cookie-cutter restaurants and cafés serve much the same thing, populated by much the same kind of rich professional.
Groups such as artists can’t afford even a fraction of the rent you need to live in the city, so most of them have just gone.
Dublin is no San Francisco. The scale is completely different.
But the fundamental risk is the same: a city divided where the majority, or even a sizeable minority, feel very left behind. And an increasingly dull, bland set of mono-cultural city boroughs for those who can afford the rent.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for a San Francisco-scale Google intervention in Dublin. But the company does seem to be thinking about it.
“It’s something we would think about doing over time,” said Pichai.
“The [San Francisco] Bay Area is obviously the first place we started with housing. But it makes sense for us as a company to do it and it’s also the right thing to do. It’s important that there is value back to the community.
“There’s got to be support from the government too, in terms of development and planning matters. And so the whole thing goes together. But we are committed to Ireland.”
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