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.
I mean Caltrain exists. But the sane way would be to say “we’re building a new city out here, most people who live there will be economically dependent on the greater metro area, let’s connect them”. I’m not expecting the Shinkansen, but even something like Delhi’s RapidX would be a gigantic upgrade. Shit, Delhi is building a new airport and upgrading another one to accommodate international flights. The government has sensibly decided that both will be connected to the regional rail system, one to be the metro network AND to build a rail line connecting all 3. Meanwhile, it takes 2h+ to get from EWR to JFK and 3 transfers. Why can’t the USA just do it?
It’s because we have built processes designed to add friction, cost, and risk, rather than to build things. Our “state capacity” is all about stasis and paralysis by analysis, and re-analysis, and then some more re-analysis, until the proposed project dies an unnatural death.
This condition needs to be ultimately laid at the feet of the inaccurately-labeled “environmentalist” movement, whose true motivations for decades have been fundamentally anti-growth. In the real world, that translates into expensive and scarce housing, inadequate infrastructure, and huge hidden taxes that we all pay in the form of avoidable excess costs.
It would not be Caltrain, which is a name limited to the train running between San Francisco and San Jose. It would have to connect to the Amtrak Capitol Corridor, which runs between Sacramento and San Jose via the East Bay. It's the third busiest passenger rail corridor in the U.S., behind the Northeast (Boston to Washington D.C.,) and LOSSAN (a strong trunk between San Diego and Los Angeles, and a weaker full route north of L.A. to Santa Barbara or San Luis Obispo). It has stops in Davis and two stops on the north delta before crossing over the water to Martinez.
The corridor and service already exist, but the development is out of the way. It's at least 15 miles from either the Fairfield/Vacaville (near Travis AFB) or the Suisun/Fairfield stations to this city. Residents would either drive to these stations, or require Thruway-style motorcoaches that are timed to meet the trains.
Thruway is the name of Amtrak's bus network. The routes are contracted out to private charter bus companies. In California, the state buys the buses that the operators are responsible to staff and maintain.
I live in the midwest, where Amtrak is a complete waste of time and generally only runs once a day, often at 3am. Is this version of Amtrak actually a reasonable service, similar to Caltrain?
California has Amtrak California. The reason why California has more than one train a day is because the state purchases service from Amtrak.
The trains and their Thruway bus extensions are part of the national Amtrak network, and Amtrak staff run and maintain the trains and the stations. Metrolink, the Southern California commuter rail network, is operated by Amtrak though has its own fare structure and its own branding, whereas the state-supported trains are Amtrak-branded.
There are multiple trains per day on the three train lines, and California is home to the No. 2 (LOSSAN), No. 3 (Capitol Corridor) and No. 5 (San Joaquin) corridors in the U.S. The Capitol Corridor is basically the East Bay mirror of Caltrain, but is much less frequent because the tracks are shared with freight trains, and much of the San Jose to Sacramento corridor is industrial.
LOSSAN is a different beast altogether. It's a commuter train, and is duplicated by Metrolink and Coaster from Ventura to San Diego. It's also an intercity train, with Los Angeles and San Diego the most popular station pairs. It's world famous as a tourist train, as the tracks run along the beach from Ventura to Santa Barbara and from San Clemente to Del Mar. Ridership also swells because of Angels and Ducks games (both in Anaheim), college students enrolled at CSU Fullerton and UC Irvine, county fairs in Ventura and San Diego (especially during horse racing season at Del Mar), plus military ridership in Oceanside (Camp Pendleton) and San Diego.
LOSSAN also has a heavily trafficked industrial corridor between Los Angeles and Santa Ana. Passenger service reliability suffers due to "train congestion," especially during afternoon rush hour.
i've rode the wolverine before, which only has a few trips a day but is at normal times of day and pretty great, honestly, for getting to Chicago from SE Michigan
The trains from the Bay Area to Sacramento run very frequently - I want to say every 2 hours or so during the week, and slightly less than that on the weekend. It's a great service. But you'd need to connect to it - a dedicated busway would probably do the trick.
This proposed city would be compact, and there will not be 15 miles of continuous sprawl to meet the Capitol Corridor platforms. No fixed guideways are needed; Thruway coaches running on plain ol' highway lanes are sufficient.
Consider what an inter-city bus system in 2030 might look like. I'm imagining autonomous electric buses leaving every 8 minutes for downtown Oakland and SF.
BART is literally 1960s technology and with a change to the collective bargaining agreement can be made driverless. It is designed for a theoretical headway of 90 seconds.
A full-length BART train can move the same people as about two dozen buses. And again, BART was designed to be fully automated when it was conceived 60+ years ago.
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.
Ok I am going to post it to my facebook, thanks again for taking this up. You are the first person I have heard from who is supporting it (besides me). People see the investors, Laurene Jobs, Marc Andreeson, etc. and they turn off. They feel like billionaire outsiders are trying to take over their territory and don't know what they are doing.
People need to get past that and look at the project itself, which is wonderful, or at least has the potential to be wonderful.
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.
Noah did mention UC Davis. It's an ag school, but it can take the lead on this -- or some of the Bay Area CSUs or even Sacramento State. Why not UC Berkeley, for that matter? Like the colleges can form an REIT with the developer and share in the rents and land sales.
If you want to see where a community like this exists right now, spend some time near north San Diego and take a look around the outside of UC San Diego. It looks like Singapore.
You have very high density apartment complexes around two arterial roads about a half-mile apart, La Jolla Village Drive and Nobel Drive. On the northwest of La Jolla you have the UCSD campus, which in addition to the university also has two major medical centers. On the east, you have the University Towne Center mall. Surrounding the mall are office buildings. On the southwest, there is the Nobel Drive Trolley station, which sounds like a nondescript name for a stop that has two major shopping centers and a colossal parking garage in one of them built by the MTS. It's also a major transfer point for buses running to the university, La Jolla, the UTC and Oceanside.
The Trolley hooks through the university from Nobel Drive, stopping at the VA Hospital, "central campus" (the Gilman Transit Center is about a half-mile west of the stop), and the Voigt Drive stop serving the huge UCSD teaching and Scripps hospitals, Executive Drive (which serves offices) and UTC. The mall has one of the county's most important bus centers going in all directions. The trunk buses along Nobel and LJV form a loop that runs every 10 minutes, and it's crush loaded with students living between the campus and the mall.
This is possible by private-sector businesses, primarily biotechnology, medicine, engineering and some defense (Miramar MCAS is a few miles east) wanting to be near the university.
Some other examples of this are the U-District and Bellevue in Seattle, and Arlington and Alexandria in Virginia just across from Washington D.C.
La Jolla is the best part of San Diego, but even though it’s dense it isn’t very walkable. Near the university it’s hilly and mostly university building and residential, and in the UTC area the roads are wide, busy and not easy to cross, and has lots of high rise residential but most of the shops and restaurants are inside the malls (which are walkable themselves ). It would be nice if some of the dense shops, restaurants and nightlife places could move up there from downtown, but not the public defecators that ruin the downtown sidewalks.
Like I said, Singapore. It also has orderly, wide streets and towers not the scrum of pedestrians and wide sidewalks you'd see in Europe or older Asian cities.
Pretty much almost all of the retail activity in University City is inside UTC, lunch counters in the office buildings, or the two Nobel malls. There was a shopping center across from UTC, directly across from the bus hub, that is now closed and set to become high-rise residences.
I really hope the Nobel malls get a pedestrian makeover. The southern one that has the Trolley station is terrible for pedestrians. There's no dedicated pedestrian path to get to the stores. Also, to get to the bus stops on Nobel Drive requires crossing the road that has no stop signs for cross traffic.
MTS should also build an extension of the platform, or move it about 100 yards north, so passengers don't have to cross Nobel Drive to get to the northern mall. For one of the newest stations, Nobel Drive is also heavily patronized because of people going to shop or transferring to a bus.
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.
Elon Musk will hole himself up in a hotel room and collect his urine in mason jars. That, or his obituary will list the cause of death preceded by the word "autoerotic."
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.)
You should take a look at the cities around the LOSSAN corridor. Interesting historic fact: Those cities, Fullerton, Orange and Santa Ana, grew around the train line, which predated Interstate 5 by 60 years.
Fullerton itself has townhouses around the train station and has a nice, foresty walkable downtown. Orange retains its 19th century charm. Santa Ana has become a hot spot, and is building a streetcar to connect the train station and bus hub to the heart of downtown and to the edge of Garden Grove.
Tustin and Irvine are built far from residents, but San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente are walkable coastal communities around their stations (Amtrak serves the pier, but Metrolink serves the heart of the city).
Even small Solana beach has a nice downtown area around the Coaster station. I’m sure lots of that railway wouldn’t be built if they started today, it’s pretty scary crossing the tracks to walk down to Del Mar beach and I always see clueless people walking along the cliff side tracks who don’t realize how big and fast those Coaster trains fly through there.
The train platforms themselves are submerged in a pit in Solana Beach. This is one of two north San Diego County Amtrak stops, the other being Oceanside, which is also along the beachfront.
Mother Nature is becoming a NIMBY in the coastal Orange County part. Because of erosion, the track bed has shifted resulting in lengthy closures of the train line. San Clemente had a bluffside start to crumble, with a landmark building about to fall on the right of way.
California is going to have to spend billions relocating the right of way.
You can definitely go wrong if you build these neighborhoods in geographically hellish and insanely infuriating to actually get to the parts of the Bay Area one would want to spend time in. These guys don’t need to make this “city” eork, they just need to sell the vision and distribute to their LPs or whatever, taking their two and twenty for a while.
I used to commute to Apple from Vallejo in the 80s and it was pretty hellish, but rush traffic could be avoided by leaving at 4AM or 10AM. Probably worse now.
Milpitas would have a good connection to 237 and San Jose, in the 80s it was famous for being a smelly dump, but it’s probably built up by now, haven’t been there in years
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.
An urban area would use less water than agriculture. California estimates that agriculture accounts for about 40% of state water use, while urban areas are about 12%-15% despite having vastly more people.
It was smart of them to buy the almond orchard as way to bank the water for future residents, the agricultural lobby is skilled at holding onto water rights.
They specifically set up the industrial area instead of shopping/residential to be under the noise cone of Travis’ runways, but depending on the flight activity there may still be noise complaints. Not sure how regular the flights are and what aircraft. Back in the 80s when I lived in Mountain View the Navy still flew frequent P3 Orion sub-hunter flights frequently from Ames and was surprised at how noisy turbo-prop airplanes are when they fly low over your apartment every few hours. The national security issue is a joke (are the CCP sleepers waiting for a nice walkable neighborhood to conveniently spy from?) but the whole plan became public because politicians were worried that a shadowy group was buying up the land near the base.
Not true, though many towns do rely on surface water from Lake B, ground water aquifers (as opposed to surface water from lake and delta) are used for both ag and urban purposes. Vacaville itself uses water from a deep aquifer in addition to other sources.
In wet years surface water can be used to recharge the aquifer while in dry years wells from aquifers supplement surface water.
There are several aquifers, water basins and geological formations but when my relatives in Solano county (whose family settled in the region in the 1850s and have lived in the area continuously for 170+ years) talk now about “the” aquifer they are usually referring to the Tehama formation.
Here is more on the groundwater formations and wells.
One thing I didn’t realize is that the shallower groundwater basin underlaying the proposed planned city, the Suisun-Fairfield basin, apparently has poor quality water and somewhat limited supply (despite being so close to the bay/delta). This may be why the town of Suisun (just south of the development and right on the channel) relies almost entirely on water from Lake Berryessa.
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
This same project will fail the same way. These guys think they can just “will” (and spend) this city into existence, in the shittiest location in the friggin Bay Area (among the most beautiful areas in the U.S.) where nobody (essentially) has decided to live. Not going to happen.
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.
I think they can make money. The question is whether they'll ultimately create a 50,000-person bedroom community or a real new city with industry and a thriving community and 150,000+ people.
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
50 years from now, the Wikipedia page for thriving megalopolis San Vicente will credit Noah Smith for first conceiving of the name.
Los Angeles likes it so much it named *two* boulevards after him. (They are disconnected.)
Anything sounds good next to nearby Vacaville, which is Spanglish for cow town.
It could be worse. A neighboring city by Stockton is Spanish for lard.
Students of Cal State Stanislaus joke that the motto of its city, Turlock, is "The 'D' [between r and l] is silent."
It’s named after the local In-N-Out I believe.
Santa Noah has a better ring to it...
Are there any existing Californian cities that were founded after the Mexican-American War but still have Spanish names?
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.
All of California is missing that.
I mean Caltrain exists. But the sane way would be to say “we’re building a new city out here, most people who live there will be economically dependent on the greater metro area, let’s connect them”. I’m not expecting the Shinkansen, but even something like Delhi’s RapidX would be a gigantic upgrade. Shit, Delhi is building a new airport and upgrading another one to accommodate international flights. The government has sensibly decided that both will be connected to the regional rail system, one to be the metro network AND to build a rail line connecting all 3. Meanwhile, it takes 2h+ to get from EWR to JFK and 3 transfers. Why can’t the USA just do it?
NIMBYs and lack of state capacity, sadly!
It’s because we have built processes designed to add friction, cost, and risk, rather than to build things. Our “state capacity” is all about stasis and paralysis by analysis, and re-analysis, and then some more re-analysis, until the proposed project dies an unnatural death.
This condition needs to be ultimately laid at the feet of the inaccurately-labeled “environmentalist” movement, whose true motivations for decades have been fundamentally anti-growth. In the real world, that translates into expensive and scarce housing, inadequate infrastructure, and huge hidden taxes that we all pay in the form of avoidable excess costs.
It would not be Caltrain, which is a name limited to the train running between San Francisco and San Jose. It would have to connect to the Amtrak Capitol Corridor, which runs between Sacramento and San Jose via the East Bay. It's the third busiest passenger rail corridor in the U.S., behind the Northeast (Boston to Washington D.C.,) and LOSSAN (a strong trunk between San Diego and Los Angeles, and a weaker full route north of L.A. to Santa Barbara or San Luis Obispo). It has stops in Davis and two stops on the north delta before crossing over the water to Martinez.
Call it whatever, just get it connected.
The corridor and service already exist, but the development is out of the way. It's at least 15 miles from either the Fairfield/Vacaville (near Travis AFB) or the Suisun/Fairfield stations to this city. Residents would either drive to these stations, or require Thruway-style motorcoaches that are timed to meet the trains.
Thruway is the name of Amtrak's bus network. The routes are contracted out to private charter bus companies. In California, the state buys the buses that the operators are responsible to staff and maintain.
I live in the midwest, where Amtrak is a complete waste of time and generally only runs once a day, often at 3am. Is this version of Amtrak actually a reasonable service, similar to Caltrain?
California has Amtrak California. The reason why California has more than one train a day is because the state purchases service from Amtrak.
The trains and their Thruway bus extensions are part of the national Amtrak network, and Amtrak staff run and maintain the trains and the stations. Metrolink, the Southern California commuter rail network, is operated by Amtrak though has its own fare structure and its own branding, whereas the state-supported trains are Amtrak-branded.
There are multiple trains per day on the three train lines, and California is home to the No. 2 (LOSSAN), No. 3 (Capitol Corridor) and No. 5 (San Joaquin) corridors in the U.S. The Capitol Corridor is basically the East Bay mirror of Caltrain, but is much less frequent because the tracks are shared with freight trains, and much of the San Jose to Sacramento corridor is industrial.
LOSSAN is a different beast altogether. It's a commuter train, and is duplicated by Metrolink and Coaster from Ventura to San Diego. It's also an intercity train, with Los Angeles and San Diego the most popular station pairs. It's world famous as a tourist train, as the tracks run along the beach from Ventura to Santa Barbara and from San Clemente to Del Mar. Ridership also swells because of Angels and Ducks games (both in Anaheim), college students enrolled at CSU Fullerton and UC Irvine, county fairs in Ventura and San Diego (especially during horse racing season at Del Mar), plus military ridership in Oceanside (Camp Pendleton) and San Diego.
LOSSAN also has a heavily trafficked industrial corridor between Los Angeles and Santa Ana. Passenger service reliability suffers due to "train congestion," especially during afternoon rush hour.
i've rode the wolverine before, which only has a few trips a day but is at normal times of day and pretty great, honestly, for getting to Chicago from SE Michigan
The trains from the Bay Area to Sacramento run very frequently - I want to say every 2 hours or so during the week, and slightly less than that on the weekend. It's a great service. But you'd need to connect to it - a dedicated busway would probably do the trick.
This proposed city would be compact, and there will not be 15 miles of continuous sprawl to meet the Capitol Corridor platforms. No fixed guideways are needed; Thruway coaches running on plain ol' highway lanes are sufficient.
Consider what an inter-city bus system in 2030 might look like. I'm imagining autonomous electric buses leaving every 8 minutes for downtown Oakland and SF.
BART is literally 1960s technology and with a change to the collective bargaining agreement can be made driverless. It is designed for a theoretical headway of 90 seconds.
A full-length BART train can move the same people as about two dozen buses. And again, BART was designed to be fully automated when it was conceived 60+ years ago.
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.
Yes, the article is for free! The paywalled articles have a little lock symbol next to the title.
Glad you liked the post! :-)
Ok I am going to post it to my facebook, thanks again for taking this up. You are the first person I have heard from who is supporting it (besides me). People see the investors, Laurene Jobs, Marc Andreeson, etc. and they turn off. They feel like billionaire outsiders are trying to take over their territory and don't know what they are doing.
People need to get past that and look at the project itself, which is wonderful, or at least has the potential to be wonderful.
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.
Noah did mention UC Davis. It's an ag school, but it can take the lead on this -- or some of the Bay Area CSUs or even Sacramento State. Why not UC Berkeley, for that matter? Like the colleges can form an REIT with the developer and share in the rents and land sales.
If you want to see where a community like this exists right now, spend some time near north San Diego and take a look around the outside of UC San Diego. It looks like Singapore.
You have very high density apartment complexes around two arterial roads about a half-mile apart, La Jolla Village Drive and Nobel Drive. On the northwest of La Jolla you have the UCSD campus, which in addition to the university also has two major medical centers. On the east, you have the University Towne Center mall. Surrounding the mall are office buildings. On the southwest, there is the Nobel Drive Trolley station, which sounds like a nondescript name for a stop that has two major shopping centers and a colossal parking garage in one of them built by the MTS. It's also a major transfer point for buses running to the university, La Jolla, the UTC and Oceanside.
The Trolley hooks through the university from Nobel Drive, stopping at the VA Hospital, "central campus" (the Gilman Transit Center is about a half-mile west of the stop), and the Voigt Drive stop serving the huge UCSD teaching and Scripps hospitals, Executive Drive (which serves offices) and UTC. The mall has one of the county's most important bus centers going in all directions. The trunk buses along Nobel and LJV form a loop that runs every 10 minutes, and it's crush loaded with students living between the campus and the mall.
This is possible by private-sector businesses, primarily biotechnology, medicine, engineering and some defense (Miramar MCAS is a few miles east) wanting to be near the university.
Some other examples of this are the U-District and Bellevue in Seattle, and Arlington and Alexandria in Virginia just across from Washington D.C.
La Jolla is the best part of San Diego, but even though it’s dense it isn’t very walkable. Near the university it’s hilly and mostly university building and residential, and in the UTC area the roads are wide, busy and not easy to cross, and has lots of high rise residential but most of the shops and restaurants are inside the malls (which are walkable themselves ). It would be nice if some of the dense shops, restaurants and nightlife places could move up there from downtown, but not the public defecators that ruin the downtown sidewalks.
Like I said, Singapore. It also has orderly, wide streets and towers not the scrum of pedestrians and wide sidewalks you'd see in Europe or older Asian cities.
Pretty much almost all of the retail activity in University City is inside UTC, lunch counters in the office buildings, or the two Nobel malls. There was a shopping center across from UTC, directly across from the bus hub, that is now closed and set to become high-rise residences.
I really hope the Nobel malls get a pedestrian makeover. The southern one that has the Trolley station is terrible for pedestrians. There's no dedicated pedestrian path to get to the stores. Also, to get to the bus stops on Nobel Drive requires crossing the road that has no stop signs for cross traffic.
MTS should also build an extension of the platform, or move it about 100 yards north, so passengers don't have to cross Nobel Drive to get to the northern mall. For one of the newest stations, Nobel Drive is also heavily patronized because of people going to shop or transferring to a bus.
Other useful employers: medical center, offices of tech companies.
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.
Elon Musk will hole himself up in a hotel room and collect his urine in mason jars. That, or his obituary will list the cause of death preceded by the word "autoerotic."
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.
You should take a look at the cities around the LOSSAN corridor. Interesting historic fact: Those cities, Fullerton, Orange and Santa Ana, grew around the train line, which predated Interstate 5 by 60 years.
Fullerton itself has townhouses around the train station and has a nice, foresty walkable downtown. Orange retains its 19th century charm. Santa Ana has become a hot spot, and is building a streetcar to connect the train station and bus hub to the heart of downtown and to the edge of Garden Grove.
Tustin and Irvine are built far from residents, but San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente are walkable coastal communities around their stations (Amtrak serves the pier, but Metrolink serves the heart of the city).
Even small Solana beach has a nice downtown area around the Coaster station. I’m sure lots of that railway wouldn’t be built if they started today, it’s pretty scary crossing the tracks to walk down to Del Mar beach and I always see clueless people walking along the cliff side tracks who don’t realize how big and fast those Coaster trains fly through there.
The train platforms themselves are submerged in a pit in Solana Beach. This is one of two north San Diego County Amtrak stops, the other being Oceanside, which is also along the beachfront.
Mother Nature is becoming a NIMBY in the coastal Orange County part. Because of erosion, the track bed has shifted resulting in lengthy closures of the train line. San Clemente had a bluffside start to crumble, with a landmark building about to fall on the right of way.
California is going to have to spend billions relocating the right of way.
You can definitely go wrong if you build these neighborhoods in geographically hellish and insanely infuriating to actually get to the parts of the Bay Area one would want to spend time in. These guys don’t need to make this “city” eork, they just need to sell the vision and distribute to their LPs or whatever, taking their two and twenty for a while.
I used to commute to Apple from Vallejo in the 80s and it was pretty hellish, but rush traffic could be avoided by leaving at 4AM or 10AM. Probably worse now.
Would it be feasible to build a ferry slip in the South Bay?
Milpitas would have a good connection to 237 and San Jose, in the 80s it was famous for being a smelly dump, but it’s probably built up by now, haven’t been there in years
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.
An urban area would use less water than agriculture. California estimates that agriculture accounts for about 40% of state water use, while urban areas are about 12%-15% despite having vastly more people.
It was smart of them to buy the almond orchard as way to bank the water for future residents, the agricultural lobby is skilled at holding onto water rights.
They specifically set up the industrial area instead of shopping/residential to be under the noise cone of Travis’ runways, but depending on the flight activity there may still be noise complaints. Not sure how regular the flights are and what aircraft. Back in the 80s when I lived in Mountain View the Navy still flew frequent P3 Orion sub-hunter flights frequently from Ames and was surprised at how noisy turbo-prop airplanes are when they fly low over your apartment every few hours. The national security issue is a joke (are the CCP sleepers waiting for a nice walkable neighborhood to conveniently spy from?) but the whole plan became public because politicians were worried that a shadowy group was buying up the land near the base.
I live in Solano County. The aquifer is not used for domestic water supply; water comes from surface water sources.
Not true, though many towns do rely on surface water from Lake B, ground water aquifers (as opposed to surface water from lake and delta) are used for both ag and urban purposes. Vacaville itself uses water from a deep aquifer in addition to other sources.
In wet years surface water can be used to recharge the aquifer while in dry years wells from aquifers supplement surface water.
https://www.scwa2.com/groundwater/
There are several aquifers, water basins and geological formations but when my relatives in Solano county (whose family settled in the region in the 1850s and have lived in the area continuously for 170+ years) talk now about “the” aquifer they are usually referring to the Tehama formation.
Here is more on the groundwater formations and wells.
https://www.scwa2.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/CASGEM-FINAL-Monitoring-Plan-2014-ID-104202.pdf
One thing I didn’t realize is that the shallower groundwater basin underlaying the proposed planned city, the Suisun-Fairfield basin, apparently has poor quality water and somewhat limited supply (despite being so close to the bay/delta). This may be why the town of Suisun (just south of the development and right on the channel) relies almost entirely on water from Lake Berryessa.
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.
People don't mention often enough that a dense walkable neighborhood has to include a grocery store and a school.
Yes, groceries and pharmacy. Post office and bookstore.
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
Also by a Czech guy, even!
It's too bad that your linked story doesn't actually explain why it failed though.
This same project will fail the same way. These guys think they can just “will” (and spend) this city into existence, in the shittiest location in the friggin Bay Area (among the most beautiful areas in the U.S.) where nobody (essentially) has decided to live. Not going to happen.
I'm a new subscriber as I want to weigh in on California Forever. I'm surprised that Noah drank the Kool Aid on this one. His rabbits know better!
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.
I think they can make money. The question is whether they'll ultimately create a 50,000-person bedroom community or a real new city with industry and a thriving community and 150,000+ people.
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.
Ice Hockey? California would more likely have Pickleball or skate parks, but maybe they will steal the Sharks from San Jose.