Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> “To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a conversation about the future of Solano county,” the group writes.
> The group pledges a decades-long conversation with residents and officials for “a chance for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space”.
> The group has already sent out opinion polls to local residents to gauge their feelings on an initiative that could appear before county voters, according to SF Gate.
> California Forever said in a statement that the group had met with the county’s congressional and state legislative delegation this week and would soon meet with county officials and mayors.
So they secretively bought up a bunch of land and sued some folks, but want to “engage with the local community” (via polling and through the interface of elected officials) and want to start a conversation about how the locals can work for them?
If you want to join a community, you can just, like, go join it. This seems more like an invasion of aliens from Planet Rich. Look out, soon enough they’ll work out how to fully emulate human behavior.
Nice renders though, look almost vaguely solarpunk inspired.
> If you want to join a community, you can just, like, go join it.
Yeah and that works perfectly well if you want to buy a single farm. You negotiate with the seller, you do the contract stuff, you pay, you move in. All good. But that is not what they plan.
It is almost as if you haven’t thought about why they do what they do at all.
Both sides are just trying to maximize/minimize their gain/cost, introducing some moral angle just seems weird to me.
Especially when any attempt to significantly expand the housing supply (considering the current situation) should surely be viewed as a net positive for the society as a whole?
For perspective on how big 55,000 acres is, 640 per square mile, is 86 square miles, enough land to hold the city limits of Choose 2 of 3: Paris, Barcelona, and San Francisco.
Paris city limits, 2.1 million residents, 41 square miles
Barcelona city limits, 1.6 million residents, 39 square miles
San Francisco city, 800k residents, 47 square miles
I’m not sure about Barcelona but San Francisco is pretty much like Paris in that way (just way leas dense).
It’s really not a fair comparison.
If they're going to just build another The Woodlands (x2, they have twice this much land too) this isn't a very ambitious and transformative project, it's just a big fancy housing development with a Mayor and City Council instead of an HOA.
So I'm not sure you can compare areas with radically different density. If I got all the debates about US zoning and building sensibilities right, then it's very unlikely they'll try to build high-density apartment blocks there like in Barcelona or Paris.
In cities, NIMBYs will say "why should we build anything here, just move away and build your dream city somewhere else". I knew that there was no way that "somewhere else" would welcome construction of a new city, because there's people living out in the boonies everywhere. Those people moved to the middle of nowhere because they want to be far away from others - they're the last people who'd support new construction nearby.
So here's a new city proposal, paid for by private money, that won't take away anything from anyone, and even people who live far from the area seem to oppose it, just because it changes things.
Where are people supposed to live? There are not enough homes in cities, not enough homes in suburbs, and rural areas don't want new construction either. So where are the new homes for a growing population supposed to go? Or do y'all just want to keep increasing the homeless population indefinitely?
(Not from the US though, so I might be missing some details on how local government works in California)
Also yes, social housing, walkable neighborhoods and all that sound nice, but promises (and renderings) are cheap. It's not clear if this has any resemblance to what will actually be built.
With a 100% private development, you can have a land value tax - it's legal if you just call it rent, and you can increase it however much you want (at most it's capped to 5% + inflation, a lot higher than the 2% (not inflation adjusted) cap for property tax increases).
And no, this won't be social housing. NIMBYs will say they want social housing, but they won't vote in taxes to pay for it (in CA, every tax increase must pass in a ballot referendum), nor do they actually want it built anywhere, either. Because only private money is being used for this development, it will mostly be market-rate housing, and that's fine. Or most likely, it will be nothing, since rural NIMBYs will block it.
Evidently, there are enough buyers/renters around who can afford the higher prices and are able to price out the $30k/year group. So what would prevent rent or prices from rising to the same unaffordable levels in the new development, if there is still demand from this higher-paying group?
I feel if the market rate becomes unaffordable for middle-class fulltime employees, then you have an inequality problem, not a supply problem.
It's not clear to me that's sufficient. You may also need something like a property profit tax to reduce speculation on housing.
Any progressive quality-focused community will, over time, be infiltrated by people who's only contribution is subvertering and sabotaging what has been built, usually in the name of egalitarianism or some other veil.
In most cases, you lose lots of money in legal fees that you won't be able to claw back; in virtually all cases, you're slapped with injunctions and other roadblocks to development, which can be fatal and can take years to resolve; in all cases, you lose tremendous amounts of time, which could otherwise have been spent productively.
The utopian planners should have attempted their scheme somewhere on Nevis or a Bahaman island -- where the government would probably be cooperative rather than nakedly adversarial.
You have to ask yourself whether SF would have been 'let' to devolve if the type of people who support projects like this instead were active in the governance of their own city.
You might also ask yourself whether the devolution of SF is entirely organic; to me, some of the decisions being made there seem rather like deliberate sabotage.
I find the hubris of these people that just want to run off and do their own thing a bit disturbing; it's the 'you're standing on the shoulders of giants yet think you are seeing the answer with your own eyes alone' thing.
By and large I find the type of people that support these projects to be alarmingly lacking in any sort of empathy.
Suddenly the utopian vision looks pretty bleak.
Maybe they'll have service entrances and hidden car parks where they let the low-wage workers in and out. Conceal the fact that eco-utopia still relies on a whole lot of road traffic bringing people and goods in and out. Really, it'll be an 'eco-utopia theme park'.
Could be a good tagline: Europe, the utopia of Silicon Valley elites
EDIT: look it up on Twitter
There aren't crackhead zombies shuffling through Dutch cities and the roads are immaculately paved. And that takes a ton of taxation. Utopia- or trying to get to it- takes money. And I question American elites willingness to pay for it or they would have voted for Sanders.
North American elites have always wanted the status and style of their former colonial superiors. Just with their own detached libertarian spin on it, without all the annoying social obligations and community and tiresome history and 'authenticity'.
Here you won't need a year of compulsory community service or high taxes to get access; just need a degree from Stanford and the ability to make some really compelling PowerPoint presentations.
Every time we'd go down to the Googleplex for work, my friend and I would make jokes about the movie Elyssium. But this is taking it to the next level.
I am walking distance from everything I need, I am 10 minutes from a huge park with a large body of water, I walk to work, and if I need to detach I can take a boat to a summer house that’s off the grid.
Funny enough, there is a similar city in John Brunner‘s Sheep looking up, I believe. Established in the Bay Area as a utopian place after California became a postapocalyptic nightmare following a giant earthquake.
Superficially it looks like a California version of Lake Nona to me.
California Forever (awful name) seems to just be fairly normal planned city so far.
Or, in other words, now that we already own the land and can have the conversation on the terms we dictate.
Most of the investors in the article are the ones pushing back against the affordable housing project in Atherton. Atherton is roughly five square miles so affordable housing in the middle of that has residents “worried” about what affordable housing brings to their oasis.
With this new town they’re proposing I can envision investors on one side, state mandated affordable housing on the opposite side, and city services, retail, etc., separating the two residential zones.
I’m not American, so my opinion hardly matters here, but I wish to see a new successful city built from scratch…I’ve always pondered about the extreme difficulty of building and keeping cities in shape, and I’ll be amazed if someone actually pulls it off.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia
There may be other examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
And for a really dark example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Dignidad
Also Disney's failed attempt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)
Finally an example that actually worked:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemensstadt
...the project reminds me much more of the Chinese 'fake European cities' though:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/duplitecture-d...