Bay Area cities are cracking down on free food at tech companies
Lotta hate for Mountain View in the comments here, which is ironic because with this ordnance Mountain View is trying to fix a problem that tech companies get a lot of hate on HN for.  I&#x27;ve got mixed feelings about this, so I&#x27;ll try and explain both sides:<p>The problem MV&#x27;s fixing is the perception that highly-paid tech workers have become a class of their own, isolated from the larger communities in which they live and insulated from negative social consequences in the communities around them.  When you get paid a high salary, eat at work, only socialize with coworkers, have all your logistic needs taken care of by your rich employer, and only go home to sleep, it&#x27;s really easy to feel like your city&#x27;s problems are other peoples&#x27; problems.  In other threads on HN, you will see plenty of mudslinging about tech workers who step over homeless people on their way to work or kick neighborhood teams off a public basketball court so they can play a company game.<p>The Village at San Antonio is supposed to be exactly the type of mixed-use, mixed-income development that urban planners salivate over today.  It&#x27;s got a mix of luxury apartments and affordable housing over street-level retail, connected by pedestrian thoroughfares to the office space that Facebook is about to rent.  There are over a dozen restaurants within walking distance, ranging from Chili&#x27;s, Veggie Grill, and Sajj to The Counter burgers to upscale sit-down places, along with a Walmart, a Safeway, and a Whole Foods.  The whole point is to fix all the problems with tech insularity and wealth polarization that everyone complains about here.<p>OTOH, the cynic in me says that it won&#x27;t actually do a damn thing about this, and that tech workers will stand around talking to each other and ignoring the locals in line for Veggie Grill while the service workers around them eat at the Walmart cafeteria.  And the only effect will be to reduce efficiency for people who could otherwise just grab free food, take it back to their desk, and get back to work.  A lot of the point of the free cafes at Google was to cut out the friction of deciding where to eat, walking there, and paying, and instead just focus on the job we had to do.<p>There&#x27;s no free lunch.  Sometimes it turns out our desires are contradictory, and the flip side of intangibles like community engagement are reduced efficiency and heavy-handed regulation.