Apple's New Headquarters: Sprawling and Sprawl-Inducing

Apple anticipates only about 10 percent of the employees that will work in its new headquarters will live in Cupertino, the city where Apple's headquarters was built. This is an old fashioned approach to building an office campus. "By moving out of downtown skyscrapers and building in the suburbs, corporations were reflecting 1950s ideas about cities—they were dirty, crowded, and unpleasantly diverse," Adam Rogers argues in Wired.

The location and purpose-built nature of the building make it unsuited to evolve. "If Apple ever goes out of business, what would happen to the building? The same thing that happened to Union Carbide’s. That’s why nobody builds these things anymore," writes Rogers. To ease the concerns of the city's mayor, Apple will contribute hundreds of thousand of dollars to Cupertino and neighboring cities in parking restitution, but urbanists had hoped they would have invested in other transit. "The company could have chipped in to double the frequency of CalTrain’s commuter rail. It could have built a transit center in Cupertino, which, unlike Mountain View and Palo Alto, has none."