The big thing this project is missing is reliable rapid transit to SF/SV. Knowing CA, it will take 50 years before Caltrain thinks of building out to there.
Love this, totally agree, is this article for free? I would love to show this to some of my friends. I happen to know a lot of local officials in this area, city council people, county supervisors, etc, and would love to share this with them. If I posted this on my facebook page a lot of them would see it. I don't want to name names here directly.
I have been arguing with them about it, my first reaction was positive to this project, California desperately needs this. The problem is the wealthy people funding it, not the actual plan itself, locals react negatively to that and they don't even give it a chance. They also think it is too bold before they even give it a chance. Both Dems and Repubs.
The biggest thing is whether you can get half a dozen big employers (usually factories, universities etc.) to move into the city. The focus on residential amenities doesn't matter unless you have jobs. The residential amenities may become paramount if your plan is to make it a haven for vacation homes or retirement villages, which personally isn't particularly interesting.
On a side note, I don't put much value on the artisanal stuff. It's mostly fueled by pastoralist nostalgia.
The self-proclaimed YIMBY who reacts to new building proposals by saying "No" is hilarious. How many California YIMBYs are just urbanite virtue signallers who have been assuming that they could safely advocate for things they don't want because they're a minority?
The mockups are nice, but Americans beware - the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I live in a part of the world that is the polar opposite of CA in every way when it comes to urban planning. It eschews single family homes to the extent that virtually everyone here lives in apartment blocks, or large shared buildings with 4-8 apartments in them. Public transport is utterly dominant, and many people (most?) don't have a car at all. You can indeed meet people you know on the street. This structure is basically a consequence of local planning laws.
And these things are .... OK. But, just OK. Like everything, this kind of living comes with a lot of downsides.
I'm in the process of buying my first place. It is, of course, an apartment. To own an actual _house_, of my own, with a garden and all the space that comes with it, would require moving fully out to the countryside (a small village, not suburbs). My wife isn't currently down for that, so, apartment it is, even though it costs more than houses do in the place where I grew up.
The same planning rules that yield what would be called "high density" in California severely restrict supply (via height rules) to the extent that demand vastly outstrips it. Rents are high, COL is high, ownership costs are really high. Yet, the damn country will not freaking build. The only building that takes place is demolishing old apartment buildings to replace them with new ones, usually squeezing in one or two more apartments at the cost of reducing the size of them all. As a result, living space is utterly anemic here. When I visit California, I visit friends who are no particularly special people (they work in tech though), and they live in big nice houses in nice suburban communities. Here, people working in senior roles for rich tech firms on top salaries live in tiny shoeboxes practically on top of each other. Many people don't have enough space to have kids (like us, which is one reason I'm moving us). Neighbourly relations are famously strained in this place because although the modern buildings are relatively well soundproofed, it only takes one bad neighbour to screw up an entire building for the other residents.
Our current place has a little balcony. It overlooks one of the busiest railway lines in the world. 24/7 there are trains screeching along the tracks. It's unbelievably noisy, so our doors and windows remain closed most of the time. And I like trains!
Speaking of which - getting around. Yeah. Public transport is fine as long as you don't have any luggage with you, or children, or like listening to music together with your partner, or want to go to a place and return home late, and as long as the railway unions in your place aren't militant, or any one of a million things that car drivers don't even think about because take them for granted. And oh yes, you'd better get used to being hammered with overtly left wing propaganda every time you travel, because the sort of people who are attracted to running public transport are SUPER woke and they control the advertising billboards. You can of course also walk, as long as you don't care to leave your local area. And "walkable cities" sounds great until you remember that you HAVE to walk, including in the snow and rain, because there's virtually no public parking and your apartment didn't come with a private parking space anyway.
Having spent time in both California and obviously here, I can't work up the strength of feeling about this stuff that some Americans do. The sort of project represented by California Forever will appeal to some people (mostly young people), and strongly repel others (mostly those who grew out of it), and in the end it won't make a huge difference one way or another. It certainly isn't some sort of utopian model of how things should be everywhere. Houses are nice. Gardens are nice. Cars are nice. People want these things, because they are nice. A more interesting and futuristic city design would work out how to let people have cake+eat it. Huge underground parking lots and tunnels, perhaps? I feel like Elon Musk is going to be the guy to make real progress here.
Noah, this is the first serious critique of CF I have read, and a good one.
I have been to a couple of CF's community meetings and they were . . . educational . . . and dispiriting. More heat than light. This week they held a press conference in Rio Vista (press only, no hecklers) and in one news clip Mr. Sramek said something to the effect that he does hope that (if approved by the Solano County voters) this could break California out of its decades-long funk and show that we can in fact still do big things, and take that Texas. To put it another way, this could be a Yes We Can! moment for California.
San Vicente is a good name, and I have another candidate. The site overlooks the Sacramento River delta and is within sight of Rio Vista, so maybe not Rio Vista Vista or Hasta La Vista, but Delta Vista—or rather ∆elta Vista, as this city would be a symbol of change.
Interesting article. I would encourage you to look at Florida for a great deal of experimentation in community building. As someone originally from Massachusetts, I have been pleasantly surprised by the level of experimentation done at city/community scale. Specific communities of interest are Seaside (where the Truman show was filmed) or Babcock Ranch.
You can't go wrong building well-designed walkable neighborhoods and these look nice. Would be even nicer if this was allowed in existing cities but we aren't there yet, plus there are significant costs and delays for conversions even if they're legal. The analogy to Irvine is interesting because after a long start as an obnoxious single-family home preserve Irvine has morphed into the best city in OC by far for building new housing, including lots of multifamily. If the rest of Orange County would build like Irvine does I'd have a lot more friends (because they wouldn't have been forced from the state by housing prices.)
The Travis issue is not a deal killer- Vacaville has spread south toward the base and Fairfield is close as well.
A bigger issue is that Hwy 80 can already be a parking quite often between Fairfield and Sacramento already . The smaller highways you mention just feed to 80.
There is a good aquifer in the area (which is why there is farmland) and plunking 20 or 50,000 people down isn’t much different than what has already happened in neighboring Vacaville (which added 60,000 people from 1980 to 2020).
Personally I would have chosen the Winters area rather than Travis as a spot for a planned city, but the Travis area is more accessible to the east bay.
This is a great model for other parts of the world where entrenched interests prevent the sort of development that the future needs. I'd love to see something on this scale here in Ireland where rapid economic and population growth meets nimbyism, ensuring we end up with ribbon development, long commute times and a grim and socially destructive housing shortage. We've plenty of empty space btw.
I can't remember the origin, but a perceptive urban planner said something like: "If you want to build a successful city, design it so that the young mother want to live there."
If you think about it that makes a lot of sense. Young mothers mean young families, meaning working people at the beginning of their careers who want a safe place to raise a family. That means you need affordable housing, good jobs, good schools, great parks, safe walk-able neighborhoods and urban spaces, places to meet your friends, good living for grandparents and elders .... Design for the young mother encapsulates everything a successful city needs without excluding others.
Kind of surprised Noah didn't mention California City and talk about what might be different with California Forever, given it was almost exactly the same idea in the 1960s and completely failed
Real estate developer here, and I think you're understating the likelihood of success--at least from an investment perspective--if they win the ballot initiative to become a municipality. That will give them access to tax exempt bonds, control over TIF, etc, which will greatly derisk the initial land development and reduce capital costs for the private components. Any plan review would be your colleagues rather than a motley crew of busy bodies. As you point out, this new city won't necessarily be a fount of culture (it may end up just being a new urbanist Scottsdale), but I think weirdly feasible as a development project given its ambition.
Very interesting. This idea was originated by Paul Romer in his famous Charter Cities idea which didn't materialize so far, but hopefully this time it could work.
I am also Czech, like Sramek, and those renderings have a very familiar feel to them - they look like the city I where live (in summer - you would have to make them a lot grayer in winter). And it's the second largest city in the country. Imagining that someone would build that from scratch feels overwhelming. I know that everything in America has a different scale but still, 400,000 people - that's a lot of schools, hospitals, theaters, a few ice hockey arenas, and at least one big football stadium and university campus... each of those would be a pretty big project on itself. I admire that someone has the balls to try something so ambitious.
San Vicente is a great name
The big thing this project is missing is reliable rapid transit to SF/SV. Knowing CA, it will take 50 years before Caltrain thinks of building out to there.
Love this, totally agree, is this article for free? I would love to show this to some of my friends. I happen to know a lot of local officials in this area, city council people, county supervisors, etc, and would love to share this with them. If I posted this on my facebook page a lot of them would see it. I don't want to name names here directly.
I have been arguing with them about it, my first reaction was positive to this project, California desperately needs this. The problem is the wealthy people funding it, not the actual plan itself, locals react negatively to that and they don't even give it a chance. They also think it is too bold before they even give it a chance. Both Dems and Repubs.
So glad you picked up on this project.
The biggest thing is whether you can get half a dozen big employers (usually factories, universities etc.) to move into the city. The focus on residential amenities doesn't matter unless you have jobs. The residential amenities may become paramount if your plan is to make it a haven for vacation homes or retirement villages, which personally isn't particularly interesting.
On a side note, I don't put much value on the artisanal stuff. It's mostly fueled by pastoralist nostalgia.
Love the name!
The self-proclaimed YIMBY who reacts to new building proposals by saying "No" is hilarious. How many California YIMBYs are just urbanite virtue signallers who have been assuming that they could safely advocate for things they don't want because they're a minority?
The mockups are nice, but Americans beware - the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I live in a part of the world that is the polar opposite of CA in every way when it comes to urban planning. It eschews single family homes to the extent that virtually everyone here lives in apartment blocks, or large shared buildings with 4-8 apartments in them. Public transport is utterly dominant, and many people (most?) don't have a car at all. You can indeed meet people you know on the street. This structure is basically a consequence of local planning laws.
And these things are .... OK. But, just OK. Like everything, this kind of living comes with a lot of downsides.
I'm in the process of buying my first place. It is, of course, an apartment. To own an actual _house_, of my own, with a garden and all the space that comes with it, would require moving fully out to the countryside (a small village, not suburbs). My wife isn't currently down for that, so, apartment it is, even though it costs more than houses do in the place where I grew up.
The same planning rules that yield what would be called "high density" in California severely restrict supply (via height rules) to the extent that demand vastly outstrips it. Rents are high, COL is high, ownership costs are really high. Yet, the damn country will not freaking build. The only building that takes place is demolishing old apartment buildings to replace them with new ones, usually squeezing in one or two more apartments at the cost of reducing the size of them all. As a result, living space is utterly anemic here. When I visit California, I visit friends who are no particularly special people (they work in tech though), and they live in big nice houses in nice suburban communities. Here, people working in senior roles for rich tech firms on top salaries live in tiny shoeboxes practically on top of each other. Many people don't have enough space to have kids (like us, which is one reason I'm moving us). Neighbourly relations are famously strained in this place because although the modern buildings are relatively well soundproofed, it only takes one bad neighbour to screw up an entire building for the other residents.
Our current place has a little balcony. It overlooks one of the busiest railway lines in the world. 24/7 there are trains screeching along the tracks. It's unbelievably noisy, so our doors and windows remain closed most of the time. And I like trains!
Speaking of which - getting around. Yeah. Public transport is fine as long as you don't have any luggage with you, or children, or like listening to music together with your partner, or want to go to a place and return home late, and as long as the railway unions in your place aren't militant, or any one of a million things that car drivers don't even think about because take them for granted. And oh yes, you'd better get used to being hammered with overtly left wing propaganda every time you travel, because the sort of people who are attracted to running public transport are SUPER woke and they control the advertising billboards. You can of course also walk, as long as you don't care to leave your local area. And "walkable cities" sounds great until you remember that you HAVE to walk, including in the snow and rain, because there's virtually no public parking and your apartment didn't come with a private parking space anyway.
Having spent time in both California and obviously here, I can't work up the strength of feeling about this stuff that some Americans do. The sort of project represented by California Forever will appeal to some people (mostly young people), and strongly repel others (mostly those who grew out of it), and in the end it won't make a huge difference one way or another. It certainly isn't some sort of utopian model of how things should be everywhere. Houses are nice. Gardens are nice. Cars are nice. People want these things, because they are nice. A more interesting and futuristic city design would work out how to let people have cake+eat it. Huge underground parking lots and tunnels, perhaps? I feel like Elon Musk is going to be the guy to make real progress here.
Noah, this is the first serious critique of CF I have read, and a good one.
I have been to a couple of CF's community meetings and they were . . . educational . . . and dispiriting. More heat than light. This week they held a press conference in Rio Vista (press only, no hecklers) and in one news clip Mr. Sramek said something to the effect that he does hope that (if approved by the Solano County voters) this could break California out of its decades-long funk and show that we can in fact still do big things, and take that Texas. To put it another way, this could be a Yes We Can! moment for California.
San Vicente is a good name, and I have another candidate. The site overlooks the Sacramento River delta and is within sight of Rio Vista, so maybe not Rio Vista Vista or Hasta La Vista, but Delta Vista—or rather ∆elta Vista, as this city would be a symbol of change.
Interesting article. I would encourage you to look at Florida for a great deal of experimentation in community building. As someone originally from Massachusetts, I have been pleasantly surprised by the level of experimentation done at city/community scale. Specific communities of interest are Seaside (where the Truman show was filmed) or Babcock Ranch.
You can't go wrong building well-designed walkable neighborhoods and these look nice. Would be even nicer if this was allowed in existing cities but we aren't there yet, plus there are significant costs and delays for conversions even if they're legal. The analogy to Irvine is interesting because after a long start as an obnoxious single-family home preserve Irvine has morphed into the best city in OC by far for building new housing, including lots of multifamily. If the rest of Orange County would build like Irvine does I'd have a lot more friends (because they wouldn't have been forced from the state by housing prices.)
Also, nice touch with San Vicente.
Agreed- think it is a good idea.
The Travis issue is not a deal killer- Vacaville has spread south toward the base and Fairfield is close as well.
A bigger issue is that Hwy 80 can already be a parking quite often between Fairfield and Sacramento already . The smaller highways you mention just feed to 80.
There is a good aquifer in the area (which is why there is farmland) and plunking 20 or 50,000 people down isn’t much different than what has already happened in neighboring Vacaville (which added 60,000 people from 1980 to 2020).
Personally I would have chosen the Winters area rather than Travis as a spot for a planned city, but the Travis area is more accessible to the east bay.
Let us know when the residential apartments go on sale!
This is a great model for other parts of the world where entrenched interests prevent the sort of development that the future needs. I'd love to see something on this scale here in Ireland where rapid economic and population growth meets nimbyism, ensuring we end up with ribbon development, long commute times and a grim and socially destructive housing shortage. We've plenty of empty space btw.
I can't remember the origin, but a perceptive urban planner said something like: "If you want to build a successful city, design it so that the young mother want to live there."
If you think about it that makes a lot of sense. Young mothers mean young families, meaning working people at the beginning of their careers who want a safe place to raise a family. That means you need affordable housing, good jobs, good schools, great parks, safe walk-able neighborhoods and urban spaces, places to meet your friends, good living for grandparents and elders .... Design for the young mother encapsulates everything a successful city needs without excluding others.
Kind of surprised Noah didn't mention California City and talk about what might be different with California Forever, given it was almost exactly the same idea in the 1960s and completely failed
https://archive.curbed.com/2019/5/31/18639098/california-city-failed-utopia-ghost-town
Real estate developer here, and I think you're understating the likelihood of success--at least from an investment perspective--if they win the ballot initiative to become a municipality. That will give them access to tax exempt bonds, control over TIF, etc, which will greatly derisk the initial land development and reduce capital costs for the private components. Any plan review would be your colleagues rather than a motley crew of busy bodies. As you point out, this new city won't necessarily be a fount of culture (it may end up just being a new urbanist Scottsdale), but I think weirdly feasible as a development project given its ambition.
Very interesting. This idea was originated by Paul Romer in his famous Charter Cities idea which didn't materialize so far, but hopefully this time it could work.
I am also Czech, like Sramek, and those renderings have a very familiar feel to them - they look like the city I where live (in summer - you would have to make them a lot grayer in winter). And it's the second largest city in the country. Imagining that someone would build that from scratch feels overwhelming. I know that everything in America has a different scale but still, 400,000 people - that's a lot of schools, hospitals, theaters, a few ice hockey arenas, and at least one big football stadium and university campus... each of those would be a pretty big project on itself. I admire that someone has the balls to try something so ambitious.