House Hunters: Corporate Campus Edition

The primarily physical symbols of the tech boom are: huge sprawling campuses that you can only really get a sense of from the air; weird anonymous towers overwhelming an iconic city skyline; conference centers viewed from the inside. I would add to the list “anonymous three-bedroom ranch houses built in the 50s that cost two or more million dollars and are located in one of the following California towns.”

These are the most expensive real estate markets in the United States, according to Coldwell Banker, excluding New York City. The ones in Northern California are unremarkable in housing terms except for their proximity to large tech companies — they are strange physically contingent resource-driven boom towns built around data instead of oil, and Chinese manufacturing contracts instead of natural gas.

Anyway, here is probably the most surreal and affirming page on Zillow.