Development from the outside in: Can Irvine become a central city? | Hacker News Reader

Development from the outside in: Can Irvine become a central city?

scottsumner.substack.com

14 pointssurprisetalk8 comments

I admire this authors optimism but I don’t see Irvine becoming less suburb like in at least the next 4 decades.

All new development is very car oriented. The shopping plaza areas are all either strip mall style or mall style. As the author noted there is no downtown and that was by design. It’s an un-walkable place and does not have any sort of city character feel. It feels sterile, HOAd into bland brownness and grass. It’s like living in a 2000’s office park.

I do not get the impression there is an effort to make it more city like with any downtown area or less sterile feeling.

I used to live near there and had to troll: https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/dotqa6/very_d...

There’s a movie from the 1990s called Demolition Man. Always wondered if the setting was inspired by Irvine.

Seriously though… if you added light rail and turned things like the Irvine Spectrum Center into mixed use you could get a start.

SoCal being so car dependent is absurd. The weather is so nice. You want to be outside.

I understand what you’re saying. But the car orientation makes it great for workers and families in many ways. Irvine has high speed limits that make it quick to get around. Parking is everywhere. The walking tends to be within destinations (like parks) rather than around town in general.

But apart from that the city is just run well. Everything is clean. Amenities are maintained properly. Public safety is high. Schools are great. It’s why so many like settling down in the area once they hit their 30s.

Walking is horrible when traffic is going 50+ mph and everything is a mile apart.

Anyway, yes some people do like Irvine. But the article is about being city like, it’s not and isn’t going to be. It’s upscale suburbs with apartments.

Those craving character are probably not the target audience.

> Liu was motivated by Irvine’s good schools and low crime rate

As long as the fundamentals are there, it just seems poised to attract LA money and SF Bay Area money, even if Asian buyers move on to something else.

In the early 80's I lived in the UC Irvine campus trailer park and used to hike daily in the surrounding Irvine Company land. I hardly ever saw anyone else out there other than a scary pack of feral dogs. Looking at a satellite pic now I see the whole area built up with development. I used to bike to a job on Balboa Island along the estuary. That was a beautiful ride at the time but now looks all suburbified.

To get away from all of that population I moved to a very remote subdivision in rural New Mexico. I was the first inhabitant and had almost the whole place to myself for the first decade. It was glorious. Now it's full up and I have neighbors on three sides.

I feel like the old cowboys must have when they saw all of that barbed wire going up. No matter how far I run modernity is patiently coming after me.

I'm hungarian, but I used to live in Irvine in the 90s, specifically on Turtle Rock. I went to University High School. I think Irvine is a prototypical rich US residential town: very boring, lots of doctors/engineers/lawyers, 2-3 car garage standard houses (like in the Simpsons), never meet the neighbours, you need a car to get anywhere, etc.

Nothing wrong with that really, can be appealing for adults in their 40s (like me today) but as a teenager I was bored out of my socks. I would probably not move to a place like that, I'd want my kid to have more stimulation. But happy to read that Irvine is doing well, I still have a lot of friends there.

I lived in Irvine for 5 years. Even though I love suburbia, I felt Irvine was somewhat dystopian in a Stepford Wives way. No, it won't be a central city.

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