A group of tech billionaires has quietly bought up 78 square miles of Solano County, California, halfway between San Francisco, where I grew up, and Sacramento, where I used to work. The funders are a who's who of the tech industry, including Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn; Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the Apple founder's widow. They want to build a new city of 400,000 people there, i.e., about the size of Oakland. It's called California Forever.
The group released their city plans to the public a couple weeks ago, and I had to write a review, because the level of ambition is off the charts. Nobody has ever tried to deliberately plan a new city this size in the United States.
Bottom-line, up front: The design is seductive. It has a lot of good ideas. But let's be real here: the California Forever people expect 400,000 people to live an hour's drive from where the jobs are. Who are we kidding here?
I. It's trying to be a traditionally planned city, with good bones.
California Forever gets the basics right. The first thing I noticed is, the street plan is a grid. Grids are good because they're versatile and scalable: grids work for cities of every size, whether it's Manhattan, Kansas or Manhattan, New York. There's a reason that cities have used them since ancient times. Hell, Piraeus, near Athens, is still using the street grid laid out in 450 BC.
In the 21st century, a grid is an unusual choice. Most new neighborhoods in the 21st century are designed with winding main roads and cul-de-sacs, a system that starts breaking down once a suburb tries to urbanize. Perimeter Center, Atlanta, and Tysons Corner outside DC both have this problem. Metro extensions to Tysons and Perimeter Center have somewhat alleviated the traffic snarl, but it's only really a half-measure because the bones of both places are so bad.
Likewise, the transport plan within California Forever is back to the future, relying on a city bus network and bike lanes. The streets are wider than necessary, but this is a relatively minor quibble compared to the basic soundness of the design.
2: The zoning plan is straight out of 1920, and I mean that in a good way.
The zoning plan is also another Back to the Future, and it's quite excellent. Suburban developments in California usually are around 8-9 net units per acre. This level of density is nowhere near enough to be sustainable in the long term. After about 50 years, the tax base can't support the physical infrastructure, which is why so much of the older suburbs in NorCal are visibly falling apart. Even rich ones like Davis have this problem.
California Forever wants to use rowhouses as the basic housing unit.
California Forever wants to average 30 units an acre, using the rowhouse as the basis of the city, just like Philadelphia and San Francisco. I'm a huge fan of rowhouse neighborhoods, because they're cheap to build and administer. This is because of two quirks of the law. Condos use the more expensive International Building Code standard, and there's a whole lot of bureaucracy required to administer a condo board. With rowhouses, the building code standards are looser, any general contractor can build them, and the buyer owns the land outright.
I am concerned that the density they're aiming for is actually too low. California Forever is aiming for a full-build population density of about 5,000 people per square mile, about the same as San Jose or Cleveland. This is double the density of what you see in most outer-ring suburbs, but it sure as hell ain't European. For comparison, in Vienna, an old airbase is being redeveloped as a neighborhood called Seestadt Aspern. The Viennese are aiming for a density of 25,000 people per square mile. (San Francisco has a population density of 19,000 per square mile, by comparison.)
Newly-built Viennese neighborhood Seestadt Aspern.
You might be wondering, "Jake, why are you skeptical? There's well-planned transit, biking, traditional neighborhoods, new housing... why is this a bad idea? You've gone on for 500 words so far, and you still haven't said one explicitly bad thing about this so far."
Yeah, about that.
III: Remind me again, how are these 400,000 residents supposed to get to work?
It comes down to three words: location, location, location. California Forever is in the middle of nowhere, six miles west of Suisun City. With no traffic, San Francisco and Sacramento are each an hour away, and San Jose is an hour and a half. It's nowhere near the jobs, and California Forever's plan includes no new mass transit infrastructure to get its 400,000 residents to those jobs. The plan basically handwaves the problem, saying that they're going to run express buses to the nearest Amtrak commuter train station six miles away. I looked at this, and I was like, "you've got to be shitting me." It's a huge oversight, and one that caused me to change my mind on the wisdom of this whole scheme.
Think about that comparison for a second. The California Forever people want to build a city the size of Oakland. Oakland has nine Bay Area Rapid Transit stations and two Amtrak stations. It has a proper downtown of its own. California Forever's plan is to put 400,000 people in the middle of nowhere, and expect a few express buses to do the job. Who are we kidding here?
The thing that drives me crazy is, it would be so straightforward to address this problem, because the Capitol Corridor commuter rail is within striking distance. If you upgraded the Capitol Corridor to the standard of the Spanish Madrid-Toledo line, with additional trackage to stop at California Forever, commuters would be a half-hour from Sacramento and Oakland, and 45 minutes from San Jose. And as a bonus, that would take tons of cars off the freeway. But that's not in the plans, and I don't think it ever was.
IV: California Forever is tech moguls who don't know what they're doing playing SimCity.
This fundamentally flawed plan to build a city in the middle of nowhere reflects the mentalities of the tech billionaires that funded it. In the tech business, old but functional systems that require a ton of effort to keep working, you junk old kit and replace it. The technical term is "legacy system". California Forever has the same kind of vibe. Your old city isn't working? Fine, just build a new one.
That style of thinking drives me crazy, because the core of Silicon Valley is an easy technical challenge to fix for an urbanist. The core of Silicon Valley isn't SF or Oakland, even though SF and Oakland get most of the press. Rather, Silicon Valley's true center is in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, 45 minutes south of SF.
The bulk of the big tech companies aren't in SF - they're down the Peninsula. Via siliconvalleymap.org.
The place that invented the future is an expansive, expensive sprawl of bland, copy-pasted office parks and tract homes. The 1990s-vintage light rail system is a ghost train. The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority's light rail system has 42 miles of track, and carries fewer riders than the 9-mile Tempo busway in Oakland. As of this writing, the median home in Silicon Valley sells for $1.6 million.
Karina Station, San Jose: all kinds of opportunities to build on top of the surface parking lots.
If you want to see what this looks like, here's the view from Karina Station, San Jose, outside PayPal's global HQ. There's tons of underused land available, and a light rail station used by only 110 people a day - i.e, less than one rush hour bus in Oakland. PayPal HQ alone has 25 acres of surface parking. Under SB79, the new zoning reform law, it's now legal to build 2900 homes there without touching a single square foot of office space. At an average household size of 2.8, that's 8,100 people who could live in one company's mostly-empty parking lots.
San Jose: tons of jobs - and plenty of surface parking ripe for redevelopment.
The billionaires could absolutely have thrown their weight around to fix Silicon Valley. They are no strangers to exercising power. But building apartments near underused train stations requires doing the hard work of fixing an existing place. It requires working with a legacy system, and California Forever's backers have shown little interest in doing that. The people funding California Forever don't want the existing Bay Area to build more housing - Andreessen even wrote a letter to his city council to that effect.
That's why I don't like California Forever. It's fundamentally wasteful to build a new city in the middle of nowhere, when there's just so much available land and infrastructure in the Bay Area that's ready for reuse. If the tech billionaires had put a fraction as much effort in to fixing the Bay Area as they did into playing SimCity (Solano County edition), we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.