Mountain View required Facebook to give up the free meals benefit to lease a building. Google jumped through tons of hoops to develop housing in Mountain View.

Palo Alto has blocked new housing for the last decade. They enforce strict zoning that has curtailed commercial development too.

> Mountain View required Facebook to give up the free meals benefit to lease a building

Not quite. The rule is that for offices in the Village at San Antonio Center project meals within an office cannot be subsidized more than 50% on a regular basis. Meals that are in restaurants that are open to the public can be subsidized as often and as much as the office wants to.

That development includes several restaurants. I expect Facebook will make arrangements to use them to provide Facebook's free meal benefit at that development.

The point is that local governments are making companies jump through hoops to get space.

not true either, it is the opposite, in fact. see more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bl19RoR7lc

Well, sure. If you're going to bluff the car salesman, you have to be willing to walk out of the dealership (otherwise it really is just a bluff).

...and then you haven't actually influenced the local government, you've just found a new one.

One would hope that a local government that lost its town Facebook or Google would be influenced by that loss, but maybe things are actually so bad that they wouldn't be.

Many of the people who are long time residents and home owners in Mountain View wouldn't shed a tear if Google packed up and left. The general local attitude toward those large tech companies is ambivalent at best.

Yes, I know. They aren't going to change that position voluntarily. I strongly suspect that state intervention is inevitable.