> The group only recently started interacting with local officials and residents, according to media reports, and had sued landowners who sold their land over what it deemed an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy”.
> “To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a conversation about the future of Solano county,” the group writes.
> The group pledges a decades-long conversation with residents and officials for “a chance for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space”.
> The group has already sent out opinion polls to local residents to gauge their feelings on an initiative that could appear before county voters, according to SF Gate.
> California Forever said in a statement that the group had met with the county’s congressional and state legislative delegation this week and would soon meet with county officials and mayors.
So they secretively bought up a bunch of land and sued some folks, but want to “engage with the local community” (via polling and through the interface of elected officials) and want to start a conversation about how the locals can work for them?
If you want to join a community, you can just, like, go join it. This seems more like an invasion of aliens from Planet Rich. Look out, soon enough they’ll work out how to fully emulate human behavior.
Nice renders though, look almost vaguely solarpunk inspired.
Building a city makes the land more valuable. If you tell people that you plan to invest a ton of money into the area they will include that information in their calculations when you are trying to buy their land. Some will then only sell their land for skyhigh prices, and some won’t sell at all in the hopes that they can sell it for even more once the city has been built around them. This can strangle the project in its infancy.
> If you want to join a community, you can just, like, go join it.
Yeah and that works perfectly well if you want to buy a single farm. You negotiate with the seller, you do the contract stuff, you pay, you move in. All good. But that is not what they plan.
It is almost as if you haven’t thought about why they do what they do at all.
I’m not sure that straightforward, the value of the land will only really increase if the project is somewhat successful and the landowners (not necessarily part of the “local community”) expect to be paid the already inflated price without having to take on any risk.
Both sides are just trying to maximize/minimize their gain/cost, introducing some moral angle just seems weird to me.
Especially when any attempt to significantly expand the housing supply (considering the current situation) should surely be viewed as a net positive for the society as a whole?
I get that part, I just don’t care about the financial details of how they are buying a community, they are just a boring little side detail. I was commenting on the fact that they are using the language of community engagement, but they are just blatantly buying a town, not engaging with it.
Yeah right we're a free society in the West are we, so you're free to buy my disused Santa Barbara property or the condo with view onto Central Park that I only saw once after buying it, or sleep under a bridge or whatever. Suit yourself this is a free country.
The renderings did not help me visualise the real possibility.
For perspective on how big 55,000 acres is, 640 per square mile, is 86 square miles, enough land to hold the city limits of Choose 2 of 3: Paris, Barcelona, and San Francisco.
Paris city limits, 2.1 million residents, 41 square miles
Barcelona city limits, 1.6 million residents, 39 square miles
San Francisco city, 800k residents, 47 square miles
Paris the city is the city, if you're building a new city you build the city and the unincorporated areas around you grow on their own.
If they're going to just build another The Woodlands (x2, they have twice this much land too) this isn't a very ambitious and transformative project, it's just a big fancy housing development with a Mayor and City Council instead of an HOA.
There is the old saying "for Europeans, 100 years is nothing; for Americans, 100 miles is nothing".
So I'm not sure you can compare areas with radically different density. If I got all the debates about US zoning and building sensibilities right, then it's very unlikely they'll try to build high-density apartment blocks there like in Barcelona or Paris.
Reading the comments here and elsewhere about this project is so vindicating for me.
In cities, NIMBYs will say "why should we build anything here, just move away and build your dream city somewhere else". I knew that there was no way that "somewhere else" would welcome construction of a new city, because there's people living out in the boonies everywhere. Those people moved to the middle of nowhere because they want to be far away from others - they're the last people who'd support new construction nearby.
So here's a new city proposal, paid for by private money, that won't take away anything from anyone, and even people who live far from the area seem to oppose it, just because it changes things.
Where are people supposed to live? There are not enough homes in cities, not enough homes in suburbs, and rural areas don't want new construction either. So where are the new homes for a growing population supposed to go? Or do y'all just want to keep increasing the homeless population indefinitely?
What I don't quite get is how government of this city is being planned. Right now, it's basically Disney world, a huge privately owned development project. Will this eventually become a municipality of its own or are they planning to build a completely privately-owned city?
(Not from the US though, so I might be missing some details on how local government works in California)
Also yes, social housing, walkable neighborhoods and all that sound nice, but promises (and renderings) are cheap. It's not clear if this has any resemblance to what will actually be built.
Honestly, if you want a truly progressive city government in California, you probably need it to be 100% private. If it's public, the regressive California constitution comes into effect, and now you can't make property taxes be high enough to pay for city services, you can't increase the property taxes on long-term landowners, and those low tax rates get inherited by the property owners' heirs. You have to pay for city services with income/sales taxes. It's basically feudalism.
With a 100% private development, you can have a land value tax - it's legal if you just call it rent, and you can increase it however much you want (at most it's capped to 5% + inflation, a lot higher than the 2% (not inflation adjusted) cap for property tax increases).
And no, this won't be social housing. NIMBYs will say they want social housing, but they won't vote in taxes to pay for it (in CA, every tax increase must pass in a ballot referendum), nor do they actually want it built anywhere, either. Because only private money is being used for this development, it will mostly be market-rate housing, and that's fine. Or most likely, it will be nothing, since rural NIMBYs will block it.
Ok, but wasn't the whole point of this that market-rare housing is becoming unaffordable, hence so many homeless? So how will this project then help reduce the homeless population?
Any increase in the number of homes reduces the homeless population. There are so many homeless people in CA mostly because there just aren't enough homes for everyone there. It won't completely solve homelessness - many people living on the streets now need social services and therapeutic help before they can afford any rent again, but there's plenty of homeless people in California with fulltime jobs paying like $30k/year (around the median salary in France). If you build enough homes, these people would be able to find housing, and social services would be less strained for the people who really do need help.
That sounds a bit like "the reason for this traffic jam is clearly that there are no enough lanes".
Evidently, there are enough buyers/renters around who can afford the higher prices and are able to price out the $30k/year group. So what would prevent rent or prices from rising to the same unaffordable levels in the new development, if there is still demand from this higher-paying group?
I feel if the market rate becomes unaffordable for middle-class fulltime employees, then you have an inequality problem, not a supply problem.
Well, the Georgists argue that a LVT plus developer friendly laws would prevent prices from rising too high. LVT taxes the value of the land, not the property, so if you have expensive land (somewhere people want to be), you're incentivized to build densely to earn profit from it.
It's not clear to me that's sufficient. You may also need something like a property profit tax to reduce speculation on housing.
The real challenge with this is keeping the type of people out who let SF devolve into the feverish nightmare politics it's currently running on.
Any progressive quality-focused community will, over time, be infiltrated by people who's only contribution is subvertering and sabotaging what has been built, usually in the name of egalitarianism or some other veil.
A 'gated community' on a much larger scale. Not open to the public. Few entrances/exits. Big walls/fences. Private security force. Residents booted out when they lose their big tech jobs.
This is fully what I expect it to be. Peaceable by keeping out unwanted people (poor people). I don't think we have it in us as Americans to truly build a proper egalitarian society. We don't really know what that looks like. As a substitute we use whitewashing and just shuffle around the unfortunates out of sight and pretend it's been fixed. If this "city" doesn't have low income housing and community social services you'll know it for what it is.
They can automate away an increasing number of low-wage jobs, but they'll still want people to clean their offices and serve overpriced coffee.
Maybe they'll have service entrances and hidden car parks where they let the low-wage workers in and out. Conceal the fact that eco-utopia still relies on a whole lot of road traffic bringing people and goods in and out. Really, it'll be an 'eco-utopia theme park'.
Until you're hit by the next wave of mass redundancies through no fault of your own, and are kicked out into the 'real world', to discover how much further it has fallen.
You have to ask yourself whether SF would have been 'let' to devolve if the type of people who support projects like this instead were active in the governance of their own city.
You might also ask yourself whether the devolution of SF is entirely organic; to me, some of the decisions being made there seem rather like deliberate sabotage.
I find the hubris of these people that just want to run off and do their own thing a bit disturbing; it's the 'you're standing on the shoulders of giants yet think you are seeing the answer with your own eyes alone' thing.
By and large I find the type of people that support these projects to be alarmingly lacking in any sort of empathy.
I don't think you can run a "utopian project" in the USA at all. You're subject to US laws, and that means you're easy prey for litigants (even sufficiently motivated pro se litigants) -- and the civil justice system is an ordeal where there's only one outcome: You lose.
In most cases, you lose lots of money in legal fees that you won't be able to claw back; in virtually all cases, you're slapped with injunctions and other roadblocks to development, which can be fatal and can take years to resolve; in all cases, you lose tremendous amounts of time, which could otherwise have been spent productively.
The utopian planners should have attempted their scheme somewhere on Nevis or a Bahaman island -- where the government would probably be cooperative rather than nakedly adversarial.
There aren't crackhead zombies shuffling through Dutch cities and the roads are immaculately paved. And that takes a ton of taxation. Utopia- or trying to get to it- takes money. And I question American elites willingness to pay for it or they would have voted for Sanders.
And yet even if successful it'll be more Disneyland than an actual real living European city. Sleeping Beauty's Castle instead of Schloss Neuschwanstein.
North American elites have always wanted the status and style of their former colonial superiors. Just with their own detached libertarian spin on it, without all the annoying social obligations and community and tiresome history and 'authenticity'.
Here you won't need a year of compulsory community service or high taxes to get access; just need a degree from Stanford and the ability to make some really compelling PowerPoint presentations.
Every time we'd go down to the Googleplex for work, my friend and I would make jokes about the movie Elyssium. But this is taking it to the next level.
Honestly the description of this place sounds like what I’ve found Sweden to be, since moving here from Palo Alto last month.
I am walking distance from everything I need, I am 10 minutes from a huge park with a large body of water, I walk to work, and if I need to detach I can take a boat to a summer house that’s off the grid.
The renders look like any Italian, French or Spanish small town. The concept as well.
Funny enough, there is a similar city in John Brunner‘s Sheep looking up, I believe. Established in the Bay Area as a utopian place after California became a postapocalyptic nightmare following a giant earthquake.
There are also walkable town in the US, visit college towns in New England for example. (To be clear, it is definitely a small subset, but it serves to show that it is at least possible for this sort of thing to grow organically here).
So far, stories about this are getting posted to HN on weekends, like news dumps. This time (for US people) it's posted in the wee hours of the morning at the start of a 3-day weekend.
I'm surprised at the investment in an area that's likely to undergo major environmental challenges but it will be fascinating to see how this turns out.
Superficially it looks like an American version of Neom.
Having worked on Neom, I can tell you that Neom is fractally insane. The approval process for headline projects at Neom is: have idea; produce cyberpunk-themed renders; show to Crown Prince; receive approval. (MBS loves cyberpunk.) There was one day where the target population for the city just doubled with no real feasibility analysis.
California Forever (awful name) seems to just be fairly normal planned city so far.
Neom is way more futuristic and pie in the sky than this project. If for no other reason the planed 170 kilometres long 200 meter wide linear city in Neom is straight up cyberpunk material while this one is… just a city? A liveable one, which makes it look special.
Superficially it looks like a California version of Lake Nona to me.
I personally think this project is awesome. Everyone visits Europe, and asks why can’t we have beautiful walkable cities here, and the reason we can’t is because of regressive, land-use laws, poor car-centric legislation, and many shyster developers. This place is going to be so desirable that it will likely be more expensive to live there than San Francisco. What would really impress me is if they can work with public officials to create a rail line connecting this place to San Francisco. They would almost have to to keep trucks out of the city.
> "To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a conversation about the future of Solano county,” the group writes.
Or, in other words, now that we already own the land and can have the conversation on the terms we dictate.
One has to wonder if this is a plan for these “investors” to find a better way to keep affordable housing people on the other side of town vs their backyard. ie the current NIMBY fighting going on in Atherton with the forced affordable housing projects residents are griping about.
Most of the investors in the article are the ones pushing back against the affordable housing project in Atherton. Atherton is roughly five square miles so affordable housing in the middle of that has residents “worried” about what affordable housing brings to their oasis.
With this new town they’re proposing I can envision investors on one side, state mandated affordable housing on the opposite side, and city services, retail, etc., separating the two residential zones.
It takes 200 years for a city to organically grow into an interesting and vibrant place. Can this process be sped up? Perhaps. But then the city itself would be in constant development. Construction everywhere, loud trucks hauling materials. Vacant buildings getting torn down without apology. This is what building a new city at speed looks like. Total chaos. Not bad, but chaos. It doesn't look anything like the concept art of idyllic European streets with cafes and kids biking by themselves.
I see this, NEOM/Palm Islands, Eko Atlantic, Sidewalk Toronto and compare it to large urban projects from decades ago, like Brasília... is it even possible to design a city from the grounds up? To just straight up select some plot of land and build infrastructure and create a community that otherwise needed hundreds of years of organic development with existing cities?
This is a risky plan that would either fail woefully or see unprecedented success.
I’m not American, so my opinion hardly matters here, but I wish to see a new successful city built from scratch…I’ve always pondered about the extreme difficulty of building and keeping cities in shape, and I’ll be amazed if someone actually pulls it off.
Agree, but why? It's an interesting theoretical question when you think about it. Is it because people who have the money and means have a skewed concept of the world making them incapable of constructing utopias/well functioning "synthetic societies", or is it more fundamentally impossible? And in the latter case, why then should we even try to improve society?
I don't even know if it's true, but if it is I'd guess the Typical Mind fallacy: most of us have blind spots where we don't think about how "good" people in a hurry would react, let alone the power-hungry actively trying to break it for their own gain.
Because every organically developing system has a great advantage that these projects lack: time. Cities evolve by gradual corrections/adjustments, you cannot anticipate every issue upfront.
> “To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a conversation about the future of Solano county,” the group writes.
> The group pledges a decades-long conversation with residents and officials for “a chance for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space”.
> The group has already sent out opinion polls to local residents to gauge their feelings on an initiative that could appear before county voters, according to SF Gate.
> California Forever said in a statement that the group had met with the county’s congressional and state legislative delegation this week and would soon meet with county officials and mayors.
So they secretively bought up a bunch of land and sued some folks, but want to “engage with the local community” (via polling and through the interface of elected officials) and want to start a conversation about how the locals can work for them?
If you want to join a community, you can just, like, go join it. This seems more like an invasion of aliens from Planet Rich. Look out, soon enough they’ll work out how to fully emulate human behavior.
Nice renders though, look almost vaguely solarpunk inspired.