Building H #90: Billionaires Want to Build a City
Is this the city of the future?
Two weeks back, the New York Times had a stunning scoop: a bunch of Silicon Valley billionaires had bought 50,000 acres midway between San Francisco and Sacramento with the ambition of turning farmland and scrub into a dynamic new city of 100,000 or more. The story was light on details, but hinted that the new city could include “tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over 10,000 acres of new parks and open space.”
To some, this sounded amazing - the sort of bold thinking and robust housing development that the state and Bay Area region needs.
To many others, it sounded creepy.
The project rang many bells. Here they go again, those Silicon Valley billionaires thinking that the world is their plaything - and in particular that the communities and residents of Solano County, where the new city is envisioned, are mere clay to be smushed and squashed into their idea of the future.
But as Steven Johnson observed, this project sounds “more Jane Jacobs than Ayn Rand.” We were curious what, exactly, the critics were criticizing. It's easy to bash on billionaires, after all, and their spaceships and superyachts and, now it seems, supercities. But what are the true concerns of the community? What is the grist of the grievance? So we at Building H took a deeper look into the materials available.
The crux of the complaint, it seems, is that the company (Flannery Associates, a name so bland it seems out of a corporate dystopia) went on a buying spree without saying much about why they were buying - especially why they were willing to pay upwards of 10 times going rate. And when some landowners decided to hold out and demand even more, well then Flannery Associates filed a lawsuit claiming collusion among local landowners, which just pissed people off even more. The lawsuit was seen by many as an injustice - Flannery wanted the land, no questions asked, but they weren’t willing to pay the owners what they wanted. And all that seemed insulting and suspect, especially given the secrecy behind the company.
Indeed, many locals have spun this as a basic class issue. As the mayor of Fairfield, a nearby city of 120,000 and the county seat of Solano County, said, “It frankly is the same old story about an upper class, if you will, coming after people who are hardworking, middle class people and farmers.” And the small communities that are nearby the proposed city are indeed poor and forgotten spots in the Bay Area.
We think this will be basically Main Street of the new city in Solano County. It’s presently an unincorporated town with 20 houses.
Arrogance is indeed a grave sin in local politics, and it seems undeniable that Flannery Associates - or California Forever, as they have now announced themselves - was both heavy-handed and tight-lipped when a little more grace and transparency might have helped. But if individual property owners decided to cash in at 10 times - or more! - the going rate for their properties, well that was entirely their choice. It’s hard to say that paying so much was exploitative. For its part, California Forever says they didn’t come forward with their grand plan sooner because they wanted to keep land prices from soaring even higher, if folks knew there were billionaires behind the whole thing.
Indeed, a great deal of the hostility towards the project seems rooted in a distinct distaste for those billionaire investors - Marc Andreessen, Mark Moritz, Lauren Powell Jobs, John Doerr and others among them - and their reputation for arrogant empire building, back then in a business context and now, it seems, in literally building an empire out of farms. There’s also plenty of conviction that this Silicon Valley crew, which made their bucks in digital technology, knows less than spit about zoning, planning, infrastructure, or the customs of local politics. This, to us, seems a pretty glib argument, and maybe/probably knowingly obtuse, given that 1) the website says they are investors but not involved in operations, and 2) they surely do know something about hiring good people and building teams to get the jobs done.
And so we spent some time on Google and discovered that, sure enough, a look under the hood at California Forever reveals people who know something about building cities. The planning team is reportedly helmed by Gabriel Metcalf, a well-respected urban planner who spent 20 years leading SPUR - the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association - a nonprofit that has consistently advocated for healthier, more sustainable, more equitable urban development in San Francisco, all the while encouraging less red tape in building housing in a city that desperately needs more of it. Anyone reading this would find his 2015 book, Democratic by Design, a compelling vision of better designed urban communities and an honest blueprint for how to build healthier, equitable, and better communities (his LinkedIn profile now says simply: “Working on something great”).
Also on the team, according to the website, is B.H. Bronson Johnson, a veteran infrastructure expert who worked for several major developers on massive projects in the Bay Area. We would also note that he most recently served as director of infrastructure for Sidewalk Labs, the Google spinoff that launched an super-ambitious but ill-fated project to reimagine Toronto; one suspects there were lessons learned about how to navigate local sentiment and issues.
There’s also landscape architecture firm CMG, which is the master landscape architect behind the crazy ambitious (though not as ambitious as this!) redevelopment of Treasure Island in San Francisco, which is turning a derelict naval base into, basically, a new small island city. Also worth noting: Sitelab Urban Studio, a San Francisco urban design firm with a track record of imaginative, thoughtful reimaginations of how cities work for the benefit of their communities. The description of their work on their website, at least, sounds tailor made for this project: “Our work envisions the next generation of the city, designs districts of innovation and intersection, develops urban regeneration plans in sensitive areas or recycles brownfields.”
Whatever you think of the investors, this team is made up of serious people; these are individuals and organizations who think big, plan big, and have previously built big. Granted, California Forever is on another scale altogether. But if you gave me a billion dollars or two and told me to hire a team to build a new city out of nothing, this is pretty much a dream team.
To be sure, there’s little substance behind the plan so far - or at least, California Forever has revealed very little of its plan. The website is full of dreamy Cezanne-esque illustrations that look more like Mallorca than Modesto. There’s a lot of blank space still on the canvas here.
Just another day in Mallorca — oh, sorry, the Sacramento delta.
But our imagination was piqued by the project’s Design Principles, especially the first three:
Create good paying local jobs, and paths to get those jobs, for Solano’s residents.
Build walkable neighborhoods and new paths to homeownership.
Help solve regional infrastructure needs, including energy, transportation, water, and wildfire protection.
These all seem grounded in the same principles we believe in and advocate for at Building H: equitable, healthy, sustainable communities for all people. We know, we know - this is just a marketing website! And feel free to shout told-you-so's down the road. But it’s very easy, these days, to be cynical and jaded and suspicious when somebody comes along and proposes something so big and so surprising that it shakes up the status quo. These sorts of ideas - Build a new city from scratch to provide housing for thousands! - are so unfamiliar to our experience that we forget that, historically, this used to happen all the time. Especially in California, new cities would emerge out of apparent desert or meadow all at once. This indeed is how California happened, except that those cities just wouldn’t be designed and planned so thoughtfully.
In fact, it's worth looking about 150 miles away from Solano County, in Fresno, where another huge development proposal was recently announced just a few days ago. Like California Forever, this one proposes to house more than 150,000 people, with “compact, walkable neighborhoods where individuals and families, households can live, work and play all in the same neighborhood,” according to Jennifer Clark, the city of Fresno’s planning director. But unlike California Forever, this proposal is part of an existing city, and reflects Fresno’s official plan to incorporate new housing. It's not a bunch of billionaires swooping in, it's just a city trying to get ahead of its housing problem and plan for a decade or two of housing ahead of time. Yes, this project (proposed as it is on the edges of the existing city of Fresno) will probably end up adding to the sprawl of Fresno, and yes, it has already sparked a NIMBY backlash. In the main it’s a well intentioned step forward that at least intends to not be built around cars. But is it the city of the future - the one we need to build that makes everyday life yield health and happiness? Probably not. And maybe that's where California Forever is decidedly something different.
We at Building H have talked a lot - a LOT! - about how we need to think bigger, to build healthier communities from the ground up. So it would be hypocritical of us to criticize California Forever as the wrong sort of development, especially since so little has been proposed, let alone built. In fact, we expect this wave of bad press will wane as the project starts to come into relief and the team engages with local officials and citizens. At least at this point, as an idea, it’s the sort of big thinking we encourage and endorse.
Build it - let's see what comes.
Got thoughts? A different opinion, or context we missed? Comments are open.
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