I want more businesses to try this. I think the kneejerk “company town bad” misses a lot of the contextual differences between how and why they were needed in t

I want more businesses to try this. I think the kneejerk “company town bad” misses a lot of the contextual differences between how and why they were needed in the past, vs what employer-built/managed housing would look like today. For starters, company towns in the past (and these actually still exist) were usually for raw resource extraction in isolated areas. The workforce was a lot poorer than today and whereas now you could probably go on SSI or take a different job to not starve, people were desperate enough to take these jobs just to put food on the table. Once there, technology and infrastructure were such that connections to the outside world were difficult to make, and done by the company (who imported all the goods and provided all the services). So yeah, putting a lot of desperate people in complete control of a for-profit business led to a lot of abuse, de facto indentured servitude or what we now call debt bondage/ modern slavery, and other bad stuff. Employer housing in a place like the Bay Area would be entirely different. You’re completely connected to the rest of the world, you’d have plenty of money and options to switch jobs or engage in consumption outside the company development, you could just take your pay and use it for non-corporate housing (just like some people do with company food). There are for sure pitfalls we’d need to prevent, like lease or mortgage terms that make it too hard to switch jobs, or the employer being too nosy about what happens in its housing. But like, this model is a thing we’re all familiar with already in the form of university dorms, live-in resident managers, military housing, except it could be even more hands off. I actually think it would incentivize a lot of win-win outcomes. Employees get reasonably priced housing, employers offer a perk with nice balance sheet effects, employees get to live in presumably a safer area nearby (but not with) friends and acquaintances (ie a community), employees get a short commute, employers don’t have to pay out the nose for expensive third party corporate housing, employers get to capture positive externalities of job creation, it incentivizes development and would actually be able to make it happen because it’s a priority for a well funded and more importantly well-organized pro-housing entity… and if you thought it were creepy or better for young people than families you could just not use it. It’s a little dystopian at first glance, serfdom yadda yadda, but in the Bay Area we already have serfdom except our lords are random people who bought or inherited housing when it was cheap in the 70s-90s. And those people fight tooth and nail against development which keeps prices high and them in power. If we’re gonna have lords I’d rather have them be pro-development and giving me shares of their fiefdom.