At the end of the interview, Gabriel says, "If we're able to do this, I hope one thing it does is prove the market, prove that there's an unmet demand for walkable urbanism." Given the price of housing in basically every walkable urban city in America, it seems the question of demand is already settled!
The real question is whether the people of California want affordable housing, walkable neighborhoods and livable cities enough to set aside their ideological hatred of progress, growth, and capitalism.
I think you're right that the demand is there and that it's entrenched NIMBYism that is the biggest obstacle to this project. Still, assuming they can overcome that obstacle, it would be nice to have an example of a new city explicitly built on these principles as a success story for inspiring better suburbs.
This is great, I'm following this project with great interest. One thing that I haven't seen in the drafts or on the embedded map is a plan to connect to and/or enhance the rail transit infrastructure back to the central Bay Area and/or to Sacramento. The development will be in range of both the Capitol Corridor, which is the subject of various plans for upgrade along the lines recently accomplished with Caltrain, and even BART in Pittsburgh/Antioch. Maybe 50k people doesn't quite warrant too much of an overall regional infrastructure upgrade, but 400k might, so why not start planning?
Thanks, Malcolm! CF discusses their short-range and long-term goals for linking up to regional transportation here: https://californiaforever.com/transportation/. They're planning for the city to be "rail ready" eventually, if/when the population numbers justify it.
Good takes. CF isn’t so novel from a planning perspective. Here in Montgomery County MD our growth was planned out through greenfields in a series of “corridor cities.” They have been built. Germantown and Clarksburg are the newest additions.
Great interview, thank you. Frederick Jackson Turner said our frontier had closed in 1890 but the ensuing 130 years have seen a continuation of the American frontier through the spread of suburbs, and now people are saying the suburban frontier has closed because we have run out of cheap land by big cities and building has become so expensive and suburban car dependent living has so many downsides. But continuing to do greenfield development like this but at a much denser scale than a single family suburb and with mixed use throughout seems like the solution for how we can continue to responsibly do greenfield development. In a way we are returning to elements of the railroad suburbs from 130 years ago with this. If this is successful not only could it stimulate other new cities like this but also stimulate conversion of suburban neighborhoods into something like this.
Thanks, Mike! I agree, and I think the big opportunity here is to prove the concept and inspire followers-on. Texan suburbs, for example, have grown rapidly in recent years, but few developers are thinking about building economically vibrant, sustainable places like this. It's all glorified car+people storage.
Interesting, I imagine there is strong resistance in Texas to forcing people to give up their cars? Our suburbs have always been about trying to have the best of both worlds - city and countryside. But so often we fail at both and have neither city nor countryside. See Howard Kunstler. With new cities like this though, we should be able to have the best of both worlds- dynamic city immediately next to countryside (hopefully this city doesn’t become surrounded by low density suburbia sprawl) and walkability for most of our daily needs plus access to our cars for the less occasional trips to more specialized or distant places.
I'm not sure that it's active resistance more than cultural inertia. Sometimes people need to be shown what's possible before they can realize that possibility for themselves.
I lived in a newly built, but infill, walkable neighborhood in Dallas from 2000-2007 (townhouses replacing 1960s-era small homes and apartments, I think). Other than people walking dogs, the only pedestrians were my husband and me--because it was 109 degrees!
Here in my walkable Austin neighborhood, during our six months of summer, we locals are like the monsters in "Aliens": we mostly come out at night, mostly!
As a former sceptic and current cheerleader for this development, my biggest personal concern :
I live near the freeway of 880 and are overly burdened by air quality issues currently. An entire new town driving in and out of the bay on this freeway will make it worse for my community.
Is that a valid concern ? How can this commute be more low-carbon for the residents of Solano ?
I think there are two ways the CF folks are trying to mitigate this. One is by getting commitments from businesses to open facilities in the new city, so that residents are only commuting locally (here's a list of interested companies: https://californiaforever.com/new-employers/).
The other is by offering a rapid shuttle service to job centers elsewhere, obviating the need for individual car trips. And the shuttles themselves could use lower-emission technologies. They discuss all that here: https://californiaforever.com/transportation/
i'm going to be a hater here and say that the economics of this make so little sense unless they're expecting to suck billions of dollars of public subsidies to build the infrastructure to support something like this. lets face it, those public funds are much better spent in solano co current cities rather than this. then there's the reality that people move out to greenfield developments in order to live the suburban greenfield life. people who want to live in a city will choose to live in a city. transit is already criminally underfunded in CA, making it a deeply inferior good to the personal automobile - especially in suburbia, now these folks are telling us that they'll not only run the city on transit but that people will choose it connect to major cities hours away? the amount of magical thinking involved here is astounding
Some of my former Sidewalk Labs colleagues are now working on this project. I am following it with interest... thanks for doing this interview!
At the end of the interview, Gabriel says, "If we're able to do this, I hope one thing it does is prove the market, prove that there's an unmet demand for walkable urbanism." Given the price of housing in basically every walkable urban city in America, it seems the question of demand is already settled!
The real question is whether the people of California want affordable housing, walkable neighborhoods and livable cities enough to set aside their ideological hatred of progress, growth, and capitalism.
I think you're right that the demand is there and that it's entrenched NIMBYism that is the biggest obstacle to this project. Still, assuming they can overcome that obstacle, it would be nice to have an example of a new city explicitly built on these principles as a success story for inspiring better suburbs.
This is great, I'm following this project with great interest. One thing that I haven't seen in the drafts or on the embedded map is a plan to connect to and/or enhance the rail transit infrastructure back to the central Bay Area and/or to Sacramento. The development will be in range of both the Capitol Corridor, which is the subject of various plans for upgrade along the lines recently accomplished with Caltrain, and even BART in Pittsburgh/Antioch. Maybe 50k people doesn't quite warrant too much of an overall regional infrastructure upgrade, but 400k might, so why not start planning?
Thanks, Malcolm! CF discusses their short-range and long-term goals for linking up to regional transportation here: https://californiaforever.com/transportation/. They're planning for the city to be "rail ready" eventually, if/when the population numbers justify it.
Good takes. CF isn’t so novel from a planning perspective. Here in Montgomery County MD our growth was planned out through greenfields in a series of “corridor cities.” They have been built. Germantown and Clarksburg are the newest additions.
Great interview, thank you. Frederick Jackson Turner said our frontier had closed in 1890 but the ensuing 130 years have seen a continuation of the American frontier through the spread of suburbs, and now people are saying the suburban frontier has closed because we have run out of cheap land by big cities and building has become so expensive and suburban car dependent living has so many downsides. But continuing to do greenfield development like this but at a much denser scale than a single family suburb and with mixed use throughout seems like the solution for how we can continue to responsibly do greenfield development. In a way we are returning to elements of the railroad suburbs from 130 years ago with this. If this is successful not only could it stimulate other new cities like this but also stimulate conversion of suburban neighborhoods into something like this.
Thanks, Mike! I agree, and I think the big opportunity here is to prove the concept and inspire followers-on. Texan suburbs, for example, have grown rapidly in recent years, but few developers are thinking about building economically vibrant, sustainable places like this. It's all glorified car+people storage.
Interesting, I imagine there is strong resistance in Texas to forcing people to give up their cars? Our suburbs have always been about trying to have the best of both worlds - city and countryside. But so often we fail at both and have neither city nor countryside. See Howard Kunstler. With new cities like this though, we should be able to have the best of both worlds- dynamic city immediately next to countryside (hopefully this city doesn’t become surrounded by low density suburbia sprawl) and walkability for most of our daily needs plus access to our cars for the less occasional trips to more specialized or distant places.
I'm not sure that it's active resistance more than cultural inertia. Sometimes people need to be shown what's possible before they can realize that possibility for themselves.
I lived in a newly built, but infill, walkable neighborhood in Dallas from 2000-2007 (townhouses replacing 1960s-era small homes and apartments, I think). Other than people walking dogs, the only pedestrians were my husband and me--because it was 109 degrees!
Here in my walkable Austin neighborhood, during our six months of summer, we locals are like the monsters in "Aliens": we mostly come out at night, mostly!
As a former sceptic and current cheerleader for this development, my biggest personal concern :
I live near the freeway of 880 and are overly burdened by air quality issues currently. An entire new town driving in and out of the bay on this freeway will make it worse for my community.
Is that a valid concern ? How can this commute be more low-carbon for the residents of Solano ?
I think there are two ways the CF folks are trying to mitigate this. One is by getting commitments from businesses to open facilities in the new city, so that residents are only commuting locally (here's a list of interested companies: https://californiaforever.com/new-employers/).
The other is by offering a rapid shuttle service to job centers elsewhere, obviating the need for individual car trips. And the shuttles themselves could use lower-emission technologies. They discuss all that here: https://californiaforever.com/transportation/
i'm going to be a hater here and say that the economics of this make so little sense unless they're expecting to suck billions of dollars of public subsidies to build the infrastructure to support something like this. lets face it, those public funds are much better spent in solano co current cities rather than this. then there's the reality that people move out to greenfield developments in order to live the suburban greenfield life. people who want to live in a city will choose to live in a city. transit is already criminally underfunded in CA, making it a deeply inferior good to the personal automobile - especially in suburbia, now these folks are telling us that they'll not only run the city on transit but that people will choose it connect to major cities hours away? the amount of magical thinking involved here is astounding