LinkedIn and Google showed up Tuesday in front of Mountain View's city council with plans for a combined 4.1 million square feet of office space to accommodate their expanding workforce. But attached to their corporate blueprints came a stack of community benefits, and a key bargaining chip: housing.
Nestled in between two of the country's most expensive housing markets, the city of Mountain View, California has seen not only extraordinary growth, but also the strain of Google's "appetite" (as one city council member called it) for real estate and the effect of tech wages on the affordability of housing.
