Recently, The Mercury News announced an exciting update regarding Facebook’s current expansion in the Bay Area. According to the article, Facebook recently signed major leases with Sobrato Organization and Peery Arrillaga totaling 18 buildings in a part of Fremont near the east end of the Dumbarton Bridge.
Facebook had already expanded last November when the tech giant leased 190,000 square feet of space from Sobrato. Recently, though, the company leased an additional 100,000 square feet of space from Sobrato for further expansion. This is in addition to the ongoing construction taking place at Facebook’s main headquarters, where the plan is to create a mixed-use village.
These astounding transactions are part of a larger expansion in which Facebook has created three new job hubs in Fremont, Sunnyvale, and Menlo Park, each totaling more than one million square feet in size. The goal for these sites is to employ as many as 19,000 workers while the company continues to grow; the Menlo Park location alone has the potential to accommodate as many as 8,700 of these employees.
All of these expansions combined would create an area totaling 1.75 million square feet of offices, as well as parks, retail space, and homes. This concept is not unlike the ongoing Google expansion taking place in downtown San Jose, where the search giant plans to build new offices, shops, restaurants, housing, parks, and other amenities.
These ongoing expansions will not only create new job opportunities throughout the Bay Area, but may even help ease the commute time for Facebook employees as well. Director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto, Stephen Levy, discussed the latest Facebook developments, and is quoted in the article, saying, “The Fremont campus is a direct play to take advantage of the folks who live in the East Bay who might be able to find a better commute.”
Given the amount of traffic local residents battle on a daily basis, this new campus could indeed offer an attractive solution for thousands of workers in the Bay Area.
Levy also speculated, “Facebook probably won’t wait for the rail or bus bridge to expand in Fremont…. They could run shuttles to the BART stations nearby.” As for whether or not this is true, only time will tell.
