Building New Towns in California
How not to do it, and how to do it differently
“...the region also needs to be able to build large housing projects, and even consider New Towns for a growing region.” - Road to Resegregation (2018), p.278
When the news first broke about the proposal to build a new city on Solano County farmland, I admit I was slightly mortified. I was at an event and as soon as I got home I grabbed my copy of Road to Resegregation and flipped to the end where the quote above is. I knew that I had called for building New Towns, what we planners tend to call new ‘cities’, but I didn’t remember whether I had specifically mentioned Solano County. Turns out I did not, but it’s one of the places I was thinking of when I wrote it.
This is because Solano County was, and is, a good place to build new homes and even new communities at scale. Solano County is such an important place for the future of Northern California, whether for housing or jobs, energy or food production.
But this proposal, which may or may not end up on a contentious 2024 ballot, is not the way to get there. We should not build a new town, or much of anything, in most of the places currently proposed. We should not build one in the way they are proposing to do it - wealthy men buying land in secret and trying to shove it through by ballot measure or other means. We should not build it under the proposed terms and conditions whereby the people who do and would live there are secondary to the dreams of wealthy landowners and their hired planners and architects.
I too dream of a California that can build bigger, one that can be more ambitious in housing. But getting there does not mean ‘dusting off’ old plans, or simply recapturing a lost sense of ambition. It means having the courage to build a more radically inclusive and sustainable ambition, not going back to a past that is better left behind.
Lessons Unlearned
One thing I have learned as a student and occasional writer of history is that the proverb about “those who fail to learn their history being doomed to repeat it” doesn’t come true very often. So when it actually happens on the front page of the paper, it’s kinda mind-blowing.
I spent a decade researching and writing the Road to Resegregation, which is a book about many things - race, change, segregation, the Bay Area, housing, transportation, etc. The book is not primarily an argument that the Bay Area has resegregated. Most of the book is about why the Bay Area resegregated.
How did the richest and supposedly most progressive region in the world become a major epicenter of a global housing crisis?
How did we help invent a new form of segregation in America where folks of color found the American dream hours away from their jobs in communities with less opportunity, weaker infrastructure and worse fiscal situations - places like Solano County?
The answer goes like this.
In the postwar era, we built a massive urban and suburban development machine, one that chopped up BIPOC (and especially Black) communities in cities and built a massive, sprawling suburban world for everyone else. People rebelled against this postwar “growth machine” from all sides - environmentalists because it was environmentally destructive, people of color because it was racist and destroying their communities, the right because it involved government money and power, NIMBYs because they already had theirs, and so on.
Many organizations, including groups who do not like each other or agree on much, pushed back against this growth machine that was driven by a white male business elite that didn’t really care about who it helped or who it hurt on the way to realizing dreams cooked up in very small rooms - many in the name of the greater good or the public welfare.
When people rebelled against the growth machine, we didn’t replace the growth machine with a better machine that was less racist and destructive, less socially and environmentally insensitive, one that wasn’t led by white male elites. We also didn’t stop to appreciate the useful things that were made - transit systems, water and power infrastructure, parks and schools whole neighborhoods - and figure out how to make them better.
Instead we weakened our system for building a livable, sustainable, and healthy region so much that it could no longer produce the region and the homes we need. We shredded the system whereby government funds underwrote the infrastructure needed to build homes and communities, leaving cash strapped cities to fend for themselves and pass the burden onto developers and ultimately houses. We spent money building prisons rather than building transit systems. We bound our local and state development system in legal aspic, making it harder to do even small things - and almost impossible to do big things at all, let alone well. And over and over, we fought amongst ourselves, never building the type of cross-sector, cross-racial coalition that was needed to build the California we needed.
This is why we don’t have enough homes, enough of the right type of homes in the right places, why our transport and energy and water and other infrastructure systems aren’t as good or stable as they need to be, why our fiscal situation at every level is constantly strained and inadequate.
Other countries are better at housing and moving people because they didn’t lose faith in city building, even after they too had their share of modernist hubris and terrible projects, unwise freeways, inhuman landscapes, bulldozed neighborhoods, and suburban follies. They largely worked to fix their systems. We simply fragmented ours into thousands of sectors and agencies and ideologies and agendas, one that especially struggles when projects reach a certain size.
Why This Project Doesn’t Work
New Towns in a place like Solano County could be the kind of thing that helps build a new growth machine, one that supports Northern California values like racial justice, environmental equity or living wages. Building enough houses is not incompatible with giving people real voice or real equity in their homes and communities. Mega-projects offer opportunities to change industries, build new practices, open up all kinds of possibilities, because of their size.
But not if we do it this way.
Sadly, this isn’t just about harkening back to 1956 (or 1856, when it comes to the land deals) and making the same mistakes when it comes to who has power and influence, whose ideas get built, and whose vision of urban development is ascendent.1 But this willful attempt to repeat past failures can’t be ignored. We can’t repeat all the tropes about rich guys who think they can buy their way to some sort of grand vision and then expect everyone to like and accept it, while they demand credit, power, and profit in equal portion. We can’t build in a way where a bunch of people with degrees that look like mine somehow know what other folks want, need and deserve. We need to include the humans who will actually live there in real planning and idea development.
Regional transportation needs
If the only problem with this plan was the 1950’s elitist vibe, we could make some changes and keep going. But this plan flies in the face of so many other hard truths we’ve learned about urban development. The idea that this will be a walkable paradise, with its Brooklyn densities in the middle of Solano farmland, ignores all the lessons from New Urbanism and other efforts which ignored regional transportation infrastructure. Even if this project were built to be internally walkable, it is still part of a region. People need to get places, and because it is so far from highways, public transit, and every other part of our infrastructure network, it will undoubtedly reproduce auto-dependency. This is why people are right to call it sprawl 2.0, even if I don’t like the term sprawl (and it’s honestly 6.0).
There is no way to produce truly walkable and sustainable places in an infrastructure vacuum like what we have on the lands Flannery has purchased.
What about jobs?
Even more unbelievable is the sales pitch that this development will be a jobs center - a key piece of their walkability logic. But alas, this is not how economic development and employment work. Houses go where they are planned for. Jobs do not. If the authors of this plan had read the Road to Resegregation, they would have learned that the cities of eastern Contra Costa and southern Solano County have been ‘planning’ for jobs since they started suburbanizing en masse in the 1960s. They too envisioned suburban job centers, bikeability, walkability, and local jobs that didn’t require their residents to spend hours everyday in soul-crushing traffic. But they didn’t get it, anymore than California Forever will get jobs to locate in greater Rio Vista - at least not enough to make it so that folks can work where they live.
Jobs are a regional phenomena, and the only way to link jobs to housing is through a robust regional transportation network - which this project is designed to ignore from day one.
Political damage
Finally, there is the question of political damage. In the Road to Resegregation, I wrote about the damage caused by the fight over Dougherty Valley (Chapter 3), outside of San Ramon. This unassuming valley became the flash point for development wars in the early 1990s, a battle that spawned lawsuits, expensive ballot campaigns, and broke a nascent coalition that was actually poised to do real work on transportation infrastructure and growth issues. Developers and environmentalists, both flush with cash and both feeling they were on the right side of history, fought tooth and nail for years. And guess what? Nobody won, especially not the people in the Bay Area who needed housing. I called this fight the Dougherty Valley Dilemma, which was defined as a fight between two wealthy and powerful sides in which the region as a whole - and especially low-income people and BIPOC communities - loses no matter what happens. This project is poised to be Dougherty Valley 2.0, but only if Dougherty Valley was twice the size of San Francisco.2
The political damage is honestly what concerns me the most, and is my single biggest reason for opposing this project. This is not a visionary project. It is an incredibly cynical project, one that says to so many organizations that the efforts we have been making to transform housing and land use policy are for naught. Rather than build on the growing progress we have made across the board on housing production, preservation, and protection, it throws this coalition under the bus and threatens to divide it.
It says to all the folks who have been part of what I think of as the Carpenters Revolution - organizations coming together to transform housing policy without sacrificing affordability, environmental goals, tenant protections or living wages for those who build - that we need not bother with the hard work of implementation and infill development. It ignores all the brownfields and old military bases and dying shopping centers and aging office parks and transport-dense corridors where we increasingly have the opportunity to build. It ignores the fragile progress we’ve made on social housing. It ignores the coalition coming together around BAHFA, state housing bonds, and threatens to undermine it. Just when California housers of different stripes are finally showing signs that a grand bargain is possible, just when the ‘unrealized coalition’ I discuss in the Road to Resegregation seems possible in the near future, a project comes along which threatens to send us all back to fighting amongst ourselves.
But here is the really hard part, at least for me. I understand that former Goldman Sachs wonderboys and wealthy venture capitalists may not have read their urban and regional history - few have.3 Some of the folks involved in the various land deals or lawsuits or general subterfuge and secrecy that preceded this plan tumbling out into the public eye may not have known about the previous 180 years of land speculation and land grabs in the Golden State. Sadly, the history of how the West was bought, built and/or taken isn’t standard curriculum anywhere.
But there are people on this project who absolutely know their history, and absolutely know what they were doing. As planners and professionals, we need to own the fact that some of our community willfully walked all of us back a half century, and not in a good way.
It’s Not Too Late
The good news is that even though we’re still somehow watching a really bad remake of an even worse movie, it’s not too late. We can still advance big ideas, big dreams, big plans, and even bigger projects - including in Solano County.
So how do we move forward?
First, facts on the ground are facts on the ground. They bought all this land. But it’s not too late to stop us from reliving Dougherty Valley on the front page of the New York Times. Now it is time to put it into trust, donate some of it, let some of it sit and let everyone heal. Flannery and California Forever should walk away if they’re courageous enough, or at least step back and see if they can build trust they never had. Interesting ideas like a land swap are emerging, and I hope they have the courage to embrace these ideas and run with them. Leave the future of this land and this issue to others. Nothing should happen on that land at the moment besides farming and energy production and a whole lot of nothing.
If anyone connected to the project is reading, I beg of you, do not drag us into an absurdly expensive fight when those resources, energy, ideas, and spirit are better used almost anywhere else but on that land. Do not push this towards a ballot and waste millions of dollars and human hours on both sides of the issue so that we can have a fight in which few win and most of us lose. If the authors of this plan want to make history, having the courage to take a different path at this moment would be making history in the true sense, rather than etching a sad note into a future sequel to Road to Resegregation.
Second, we need to focus on rebuilding our megaproject capacity in California - something I wrote about last year - so that we can do these things and do them right.4 To be able to dream big means building the political and technical infrastructure to actually build big.
This means two things.
One, we need a concerted State and regional effort to support the redevelopment of major bases, malls, stadium, campuses, and infill sites like Concord Naval Weapons Station and the Oakland Coliseum. These are the kinds of places - often publicly owned, transit accessible, and near existing jobs rather than cows - where we can build new neighborhoods successfully. These are places already in our existing region, places where we can build in a way that does everything the growth machine did not - include BIPOC communities as owners of the homes and business that will be built, and owners of the business that build the homes. These are places where we can go beyond public participation to actual real ownership of what gets made, and get people excited because they can see in these new developments a future for themselves and their communities.
Two, we need to rebuild redevelopment5 as a fiscal and administrative tool in California, enabling these projects to pull together the complex infrastructure financing that makes all the things we want - affordable housing, good paying jobs, parks and schools and job centers - possible. These projects only work if every level of government is contributing financially, and we have all the tools in the toolkit to make things pencil. They also only work when the public sector can act as a driver of the process, rather than an arbitrator.
Once we have this new capacity (one that is capable of actually building large places, and doing it in a way that leaves the communities that will live, work, and build there owners of what gets made), then we will be ready for the New Town level. One of those New Towns should be in Solano, but not where California Forever bought land. It belongs on our existing transportation infrastructure, part of what could be a high speed train connection between Sacramento and the Bay, ideally connecting to a new BART extension to Vallejo. This would actually leverage New Towns to strengthen our region, much as planners have learned to do in other countries.
That future is only possible once we have the State and regional structures in place for redevelopment and megaprojects. Sadly, it also requires a better future when we no longer need to use that space for war, a fact that California Forever has also seemed to learn the hard way. I know that these days, a world when Travis doesn’t need to be an Air Force Base seems a long way off, but so is the day when we’re ready to do it. That doesn’t mean we can’t take steps to get there, and those steps start on an old military base in Concord, on an old stadium site in Oakland, and many other places like it around this glorious and Golden State. If there are another set of billionaires who want to sink a billion dollars into big housing dreams, that is where we start.
The New York Times has an ongoing California Reading List called “Books That Explain California”. If you read the Road to Resegregation and felt it furthered your understanding of the Gold State consider suggesting it to CAtoday@nytimes.com.
This project is a double failure to read history. It’s a screwed up mix of postwar modernism and straight up 19th century land grab.
For those with an even deeper historical memory, this project is also Marincello 2.0. Marincello was a proposal for a city of 80,000 people in the Marin Headlands, a proposal which helped sparked the anti-growth revolution in which my home county became a centerpiece. Even the landscape is reminiscent in many ways.
California Forever founder Jan Sramek does talk about looking backwards extensively is his promotion of this idea. But he seems to focus on urban form and imagined lifestyles, not on the political economy of how any of that got made. This too is a classic error of the modernist era, like a suburban Le Corbusier.
Ezra Klein recently captured the moment well in a smart piece about this growing reactionary ideology in Silicon Valley. California Forever epitomizes the reactionary, toxic masculinity of Andreesen’s embrace of everything aggressive and brutal, a reactionary return to a dark era. Yes we need to reengage with progress and building and making, but not this way.
We took the first steps in creating a new vision for this last legislative turn (AB930, Friedman), but there is much more to be done.