New Cities Offer a Chance To Rethink How Local Government Works
The average age of an owner-occupied house in California is 45 years, which is a reminder that your home was probably built relatively recently. I was an adult when my “historic” midcentury ranch was first sold (for around $50,000 including the lot). It was part of a futuristic neighborhood of 200-plus properties plopped in a farm field. Everything around me—including our city’s Gold Rush-era downtown—was once a fallow field.
Sorry for being Captain Obvious, but many people seem to have forgotten that our cities, suburbs and small towns were the product of ingenuity, investment, creativity and construction. It’s not a coincidence the American Dream of homeownership has slipped away—with home prices in California now topping $900,000—after years of no-growth rules, urban-growth boundaries and other limitations on development.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office nine years ago pointed to a problem that’s only gotten worse: chronic underbuilding, especially in coastal communities. Developers could easily meet the demand. But government meddling—from voter-backed slow-growth restrictions to state environmental rules—makes it inordinately costly and difficult for them to do so.
In recent years, the housing crisis has gotten so troubling that even California’s progressive lawmakers have tried to address it by allowing streamlined “by right” development approvals. They’ve got the right idea, but they’re steeped in an urbanist ideology that despises car-centered suburbia. As a result, they’ve only loosened rules for the high-density projects that few people prefer.
The state is at a crossroads, but fortunately some of its wealthiest and most-innovative residents are crafting plans to do what previous Americans have always done: build new cities. It’s uncertain whether they can break through the Byzantine slow-growth regulatory process the state has developed in the last 50 years, but at least someone is trying to shake up the development process.
The highest-profile new-city proposal is known as California Forever. Its East Solano Plan would create a 50,000-plus population city on ranch land between the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento. The project, spearheaded by Bay Area tech moguls, envisions a new downtown with traditional walkable neighborhoods. The proposal became national news after The New York Times reported the group was quietly buying acreage.
After tepid public support, the project’s backers pulled the November ballot measure. They haven’t given up, but instead have agreed to delay the project and work with the county to secure rezoning through the normal, life-sucking county entitlement process.
But two other new-city projects have gained recent attention. As The Sacramento Bee reported, Sutter County supervisors gave the go-ahead on the next phase of groundwork for a portion of Sutter Pointe—a proposal that would build around 17,500 new homes north of Sacramento in what the newspaper refers to as “effectively a new city.” It’s not as gee-whiz as the East Solano Plan, but it’s also more likely to move ahead quickly.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reports on a new project in north Sonoma Co
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