The error was in the Guardian piece. now corrected
This sounds like the backstory for a dystopian movie where the founders appoint a Judge Dredd type sheriff to keep homeless addicts away by killing them.
The car commute from Montezuma Hills in roughly the geographic weighted center of the land purchases to San Francisco looks like roughly 3 hours and ten minutes round trip on the average working day.
So about an hour and a quarter in and then the same back? That's not *terrible* (there's people in my town do that to the city where they have their pharma, etc., job) but of course the longest part of the trip will be getting into the city. Unless they set up some kind of rail service/commuter bus service, and I doubt that is going to happen. So the "dense, walkable city" idea is knocked on the head from the get-go, as you are going to need a car to get to your tech job.
A couple would definitely need two cars. And over three hours of commuting per day to San Francisco would mean it's not that much more desirable of a location than existing downscale exurbs like Stockton, which could depress the quality of residents who'd be attracted by it.
It would nice to have a rail commute: commuting by passenger rail, like in "Mad Men," is the most pleasant way to get to work during rush hour. In the Chicago suburbs, for example, the most desirable suburban locations are within a reasonable walks of train stations: 15 minute suburbs.
There's a train track between Sacramento and San Francisco that's about 10 or 20 miles away, but most railroads in the U.S., other than specifically commuter railways in places like NYC and Chicago, prioritize freight over passengers, so schedules for passenger trains are often fictional, with passenger trains being sidetracked to let freight roar by. (America, by the way, has very efficient freight trains in return for having terrible inter-city passenger rail.)
An alternative would be to extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail line from Antioch under or over the river/estuary to this new city. But that would cost many, many billions and would probably require the new city to have a population of, say, a half million. Also, BART raises fears of Oaklanders or some of the exurban slum dwellers (e.g., Pittsburg) riding mass transit out to the new city to raise havoc. If you can only get to this new city by a long car trip, it will have low crime rates.
In sum, there are good reasons of geography why this piece of land is so empty. On the other hand, this coalition of billionaires is not unimpressive. I wish them well.
It seems to me like the early targets would be people who mostly WFH, maybe only going to the office a few times a month. (Or you're entirely remote but don't want to stray too far from the Bay Area for other reasons)
Having local jobs is clearly part of the plan. These investors are historically more interested in industrial projects than residences.
Speculative: I doubt the wind farm is coincidental. There is even a windmill in the californiaforever.com logo, at the bottom of the page. Note that in the PNW datacenters get built next to hydroelectric facilities.
Wildly speculative: if you expect fusion reactors in ten years or so, where do you expect them to get built?
>The specific utopian city is going to look like this:
Their images are AI generated. Wrong number of stripes on the American flag, leaves floating in mid-air, bricks/vinyl siding that doesn't match, nearly a perfectly square aspect ratio, etc, etc, etc.
Kind of funny to see The Guardian analyse the details of the images ("a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods") like they're not Midjourney sludge that means absolutely nothing.
Doesn't seem wrong to me - if the company prompted Midjourney with "a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods", that communicates information about their plans. The pipeline is always going to be "a leader who knows the strategy says a few sentences to an artist, the artist draws their impression of those few sentences, the leader either takes their work or asks them to try again". AI might slightly degrade the communication step, but not enough that you can't think of it the same way.
Ideally a project like this, at this stage of development, should already have some actual architects involved, and those architects should have some plans at least some thought-through concept art showing what they actually intend to build.
It's a lie though, a deception not even by omission - they're portraying an image of 'the final result' that is not going to happen. I know advertising is brazen, but this is pretty egregious even for that. It's not going to be a Tuscan village, it's going to be stacks of apartment blocks in a scrubland.
The Prospera stuff is poor, but at least they are going to (try and) build the housing/offices as portrayed in their 'artist's impression'. Solano (whatever they end up calling the thing) is not going to be remotely like what they're showing here.
Ah, the wonders of AI - only fledgling as yet, and we're already using it to lie to our fellows!
So the AI was using reference photos of (what looks to me like) New York housing, but mashed together with the "walkable suburban street" prompt. I have to admit, I like the flag flying in the background - are they trying to appear patriotic and evoke American values of The Frontier, or is this just an artefact from whatever reference materials the art used? 😀
This billionaire's coalition is pretty ideologically diverse, but they seem like people who might unironically approve of flying the American flag.
They are probably influenced by Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso's highly popular Americana outdoor shopping mall in Glendale, CA, which looks like a prosperous small city in Ohio in 1910. Caruso's immensely popular Grove mall looks like an Italian hill city. People in L.A. will drive long distances and pay to park to walk around a walkable simulacrum of city from before cars.
I think Kerguelen Island would be an ideal spot for resurrected Ice Age megafauna like Woolly Mammoths to be hunted by billionaires using only spears assisted by atlatls.
Does Kerguelen have residents? It seems to me that uninhabited land would operate differently than what you suggest, because a referendum would be irrelevant if there are no residents.
Article 1 of the French Constitution of 1958 states that "France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic." The term "indivisible" in this context implies that the territorial integrity of the French Republic is sacrosanct and cannot be divided by selling off a part of its territory. This would apply to overseas territories like the Kerguelen Islands as well.
Article 11 allows the president to submit to referendum "any Government Bill dealing with the organisation of the public authorities." Algeria's independence was approved after such a referendum, that's the constitutional mechanism, the government had no legal authority to let Algeria go without it.
It's implied, but the meaning is open to interpretation. Also, if it did mean that, would probably only apply to the Republic proper; the various "departments', both in and outside Europe that are represented in the National Assembly.
My wife and I were sailing from the Galapagos Islands to Hawaii on a small sailboat.
Normally you would go west then north to avoid the "doldrums", i.e. the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, where the weather is unpredictable and even dangerous. But that year the ITCZ was far south so we decided to cut north and then catch the trade winds to Hawaii.
That brought us right on a path to Clipperton. At first I didn't expect that we would get close, and even if we did the timing would probably not be right. We had no charts of the area (none exist, as far as I know). The general nautical chart we used only showed a cross to signify the approximate location of a danger to avoid, so we needed stay clear at night. But as the winds got us closer it became more likely that we'd be near the island early in the morning.
So I mentioned it to my dad by email on my daily report to him (via satellite). And he replied that he knew a lot about it because he saw a documentary on television about a French scientific expedition to the island. I told him it was too bad I didn't have any chart of the area. He replied that there was a map in the TV guide he likes to buy. "Wow," I said, "ask Mom to scan the map and send it to me!"
The map was, huh, barely useful, but it gave me a sense that maybe we could anchor somewhere. So we decided to try it. We got close to the lagoon around 8am. Perfect. We entered a cove on the east side that looked promising on the "map". But although the depth looked good (10 meters), it was clearly full of rocks, and the swell made me very nervous. One thing I didn't want was to get wrecked 1000 miles away from the nearest port. So we moved to the west side, which I hoped would be more sheltered from the trade winds and the swell.
We dropped the anchor in 12 meters of depth, but once the chain was extended the depth was 30 meters! The island is the tip of a volcano and we were sitting on a steep slope. Still, we got in the water with mask, snorkel, fins. It was INCREDIBLE! Hundred feet of visibility, super clear water, friendly fish, a few sharks (also friendly!), and many boobies.
At some point I was swimming down and could see a booby on the surface. He was putting his head regularly just below the surface and maybe eating plankton (?). He looked like he could see me, but as I got close he totally ignored me. So there I was, swimming maybe a foot under a booby, looking at him and him totally ignoring me, just doing his business.
We only stayed a few hours. The swell breaking on the reef made it extremely difficult and dangerous to land. And like I said, not a good place to be stranded (or hurt). We had lunch and dinner at anchor, then left toward Hawaii in the evening.
Though I'm looking at the "artist's impressions" of the New Garden City and then the real landscape and going "No [expletive deleted] way that is going to translate into reality".
I *can* see what they mean about some farmland, but I have a notion they might go for commercial forestry, that kind of scrubby land is best suited for it. As for the rest of it - mmm, well. Maybe? I'm wondering about where they're going to get the water for all those tree-lined streets and boating and marinas and so forth. Is there a river nearby?
(Mostly I'm going "What the hell are the Collinson brothers doing involved with this? Too rich and grand and posh now for Tipp, are we?")
(Also, "Gosh amighty, is there no limit to the brazenness of artist's impressions? You are not going to recreate a Tuscan or Umbrian village on the banks of the local whatever river or lake is there, no matter how many red-roofed houses sloping down to the shore with cypresses on the skyline you paint in").
Dormitory town for the tech workers needed by the various employers putting money into this is the most likely result, I'm thinking.
EDIT:
"Three months ago, Flannery sued a group of local farmers who wouldn’t sell to them, accusing them of “conspiring to inflate the value of the land”."
Well, yeah. You'd think a company with a name like "Flannery" would be well familiar with the concept of 'road frontage' 😁
Re: Prospera and its legal troubles - well well well. I am shocked, shocked! I tell you. Who could possibly have foreseen this would happen? I mean, I never expected that if you head off to South America in order to build your own little company town because of weak governments that won't meddle with you so long as you pay off the right ministers and people in power due to political instability meaning everybody wants to line their pockets while they're in power, that this would come back to bite you in the backside when there is rapid turnover due to said political instability and the opposition party comes into power which then decides to soak the rich foreigners even more or boot them out because they made a deal with the last lot, not with them? Never expected that at all!
The area is near the San Joaquin Delta where the rivers of the Central Valley drain into SF Bay, and there's some swampland nearby, but I wouldn't have associated it with large bodies of water. One of the founders said in an interview that he enjoys kayaking in the area, so there must be something.
It's the "in the area" bit that is ringing alarm bells, because that can cover a lot of ground. Apparently there is a Lake Solano which is a national park and you can go kayaking there, but that does not seem to be at all the same thing as "when we build our new city, you can kayak and boat by the shoreline" because I'm not seeing any shoreline as such:
The Guardian article says the Flannery company has been buying up land around Travis Air Force Base, which is just east of Fairfield, and zooming in on that map and looking at it - there's not really any kind of shoreline like the pretty pictures, which are definitely misleading and definitely selling a *vision* of Norman Rockwell Utopia which is not going to be the reality.
There's rivers east and south, but around the air force base it looks like desert/scrubland (which I would expect). I'm in agreement that if you start building there, yeah you'll have plenty of open space to put up buildings but you better make damn sure you have the water supply, sewerage, and other utilities well planned out as to how you're going to manage them. There aren't going to be leafy green streets and kayaking by the shore, not unless you travel a fair distance to go to the river or sea-coast.
Travis AFB is a MAC base, Material Air Command. They fly freight, and its really loud. When its foggy, which it is often in the delta region, the foggy air really carries the sound. Flying freight is done with really big heavy aircraft, and they're very loud.
What these schemers do, is 'model the noise level' so ... basically all models are wrong, but some models are useful. So they model the noise level in a manner which allows development on the property. Then they build, then the residents complain, then the federal government gets involved, and starts to regulate the air traffic out of the air force base. The developers have long since absconded with their $$$$, and the shit-storm, its all SEP (Somebody Else's Problem).
Look, we have to have air force bases, and we intentionally put them in God forsaken out of the way places, where they can make shit-tons of noise, drop the occasional airplane, and do it in some out of the way place where the only casualties are the air crew. But then NOPE, some schemer sees a scam, and this is it, the taxpayers are being had yet again.
I think if you provide housing for 100,000 people in a state that's becoming a disaster area due to a massive housing shortage, this isn't a "scam" even if it requires a local air force base to change its noise policies.
My takeaway: some of the plots are in the Noise Military Compatibility Area (MCA), which is unsuitable for residential (without significant noise attenuation), but could be used for office/retail/industrial. Most of the plots are outside the Noise MCA, and are fine for residential: No change in Travis Base's Noise MCA would be needed to develop there.
You'll hear planes, but it will be like living in Vacaville.
At least in the last forty years, what the federal authorities have done about airport noise is not reduce the airport noise. It's to tell cities that they can have some assistance with residents' noise insulation improvements, _if_ they alter zoning to prevent any further construction. See for instance the Comprehensive Airport Land Use Compatibility Plan for the Environs of San Francisco International Airport:
I am a Planning Commissioner in San Bruno, and I live less than a mile from the airport, in the Belle Air neighborhood, just across 101. Basically under the deal that the local cities (South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Millbrae) made with the airport some decades back, we're not supposed to let anyone add housing too close to the flight path. (The technical term is "noise contours".)
South San Francisco has recently been trying to build some apartments just at the northwest tip of the area affected. They had thought they were going to be able to reach an agreement where they told the ALUC "hey we know the airport exists, we will build to high noise insulation standards and we agree we can't sue you". But the ALUC so far seems to be saying they don't want to grant an exemption.
It's not exactly clear yet what's going to happen with this, because it's bringing state law (which has been changed to push for more housing) into conflict with a quasi-federal authority. If the ALUC really stands firm, I suspect they'll win in federal court, but maybe they'll change their mind. (I've talked with my Congressman about this, I'm hoping there may be some action from Congress to get airport commissions generally to lighten up on blocking housing; it's kind of a wonky issue where you might be able to get bipartisan interest. Call it "deregulation / preventing frivolous lawsuits" for the Republicans, and "dealing with the housing / homelessness crisis" for Democrats.)
If I lived about 2-3 blocks further northeast, I would've been personally affected by this issue. I'm _just_ outside the 75 dB noise contour, and it's unclear whether the state ADU-streamlining laws would apply there. (I have just broken ground on an ADU, the design of which is taking advantage of some brand new rules letting you build at a slightly smaller setback if you're within half a mile of transit.) Our city planning department is kind of unsure what they should do with ADU applications under the contour. My impression is that they are inclined to just go ahead and approve stuff, because they're more afraid of Rob Bonta and YIMBY Law than they are of the ALUC. They'd just see if the ALUC notices / complains, but so far it hasn't come up.
YIMBYs already prepped a lawsuit against San Bruno once:
Ultimately the suit was dropped because the city came back and approved the project, although by the time they did we'd hit COVID, and then rising rates and construction material inflation, so the project has never broken ground. We extended their permits another couple years, earlier this year. I am skeptical it will ever happen, I think it is more likely we'll get the featureless seven-story concrete towers that were threatened under SB 35 in the immediate aftermath of the original rejection.
Yeah, but I don't think a military air force base is going to get regulated out of it, so I imagine any proposed development is going to be protested for the very reason you put forward. That does explain the concerns of Senator Dodd about 'harming the base', but I think Travis is probably a big enough local employer that any building proposed to go up near it is going to be pushed back.
If this really is intended as dormitory housing for workers commuting to SF, then the developers will expect "people won't be at home all day so they won't hear the planes". What you say about "God-forsaken out of the way places" makes the proposed "walkable leafy utopia" sound even more implausible with what will eventually be built.
It looks like it's not fully contiguous (yet!). The center (roughly the intersection of the 12 and the 113) is not particularly close to water, but the area is generally bounded by the Sacramento River in the south/east, Montezuma Slough in the west, and Lindsey Slough in the north. (I have no idea how good sloughs are as sources of water).
The area around Travis Air Force Base is in the far northwest corner of the purchased area.
In the Sacramento Delta, there is a legally mandated "X2" line, which is the point in the delta where salinity above that line must remain <2 ppt at all times. That line is upstream of Suisun bay and the marshes north of it. There are salinity control gates in various places in the sloughs in Suisun bay to prevent salt water intrusion upstream during the tidal cycle.
2-3 ppt is generally accepted as the threshold where humans can start to taste salt in water. So water in places like Montezuma Slough and others in the marshlands north of Suisun bay will often (although not always) be noticeably salty (although not necessarily dangerous)
Looking up sloughs, they're wetlands? So probably a ton of environmental protections in place, I wouldn't imagine you'd get permission to use them as reservoirs, and if you did, the point DangerouslyUnstable makes about the salinity means you're going to need one hell of a water treatment plant to make the water potable.
"Sloughs are ecologically important as they are a part of an endangered environment; wetlands. They act as a buffer from land to sea and act as an active part of the estuary system where freshwater flows from creeks and runoff from the land mix with salty ocean water transported by tides. Restoration is a big effort in California wetlands to restore slough and ridge landscapes. Examples of restoration projects on slough landscapes include The Elkhorn Slough Tidal Wetland Project, Dutch Slough Tidal Restoration Project, and the McDaniel Slough wetland enhancement project."
If they're planning on getting water from the river, that's going to be another headache, given California's general problems with water supplies.
In the NY Times map, you can see that a large portion of the purchased parcels are directly adjacent to the Sacramento River, the largest river in California and a source of fresh water well above the X2 line. Physical access to fresh water is no problem. In California, the more relevant question is do you have political and legal access to water. The Sacramento River is highly regulated and subscribed. But they are north of the Delta - that's better than being to the south. It means they could potentially participate in the north-of-delta water markets, making a deal with a State Water contractor for a portion of their annual allocation.
I am reminded of all the canal projects in England in the 18th century. Some of them were reasonable (and got built), but a lot of them looked OK until you looked at a topographical map and said "This canal route of 20 miles is going to need a hundred locks because it's going up a mountain and back down again."
> I suppose if Tom Monaghan can do it with Ave Maria City, there's no reason tech very rich people can't do it in California:
Sure there is.; the vastly different legal and cultural environments around development in Florida as opposed to California. Among other things, Florida's state legislature is in the long habit of creating special local government districts (pretty much starting with Disney World), and did so in Ave Maria's case.
It depends how bad the housing need is, and how unsuitable for other use the land is, to get exemptions. It looks like scrubland, so use for manufacturing/office/residential would be "not using it for anything otherwise" (unless sheep are grazing it).
I agree there will be lots of obstacles in the way re: legal environment, but this is probably as good a test of YIMBYism as you're going to get in California; 'we want to build in the desert and make it blossom like the rose'.
Commercial forestry: this is the year that all of Canada and most of the Mediterranean caught fire, releasing gigatonnes of really nasty particles into the air, and a stack of CO2. Being against the Ents is like being against motherhood and apple pie, but at some stage it has to sink in that trees are part of the problem, not of the solution. Other vegetation does as good a job of carbon capture, some of it burns less, all of it burns less intensely.
Is this one too many zeroes, or from rural Missouri am I misunderstanding what a "town" is: a few "~100,000 person towns scattered across the county." 100,000 is big city where I am from.
Fairfield, Vacaville, and Vallejo are all 100,000+ and I don't think of them as real cities; other people in the area can correct me if I'm being unfair.
"Fairfield, Vacaville, and Vallejo are all 100,000+ and I don't think of them as real cities; other people in the area can correct me if I'm being unfair."
How do you think of Palo Alto (pop. 66,000) and Mountain View (pop. 81,000) and Berkeley (pop. 117,000)? That provides context for size (if not for 'sophistication').
I've never been to Charleston but I would have instinctively classified it as a city, probably partly because it's the biggest one in its area. I do notice Wikipedia says the Charleston urban area is 600,000 people.
"Biggest one in the area" is useful. Now we can focus on what we/you mean by "area" :-)
NOTE: I don't have a problem with city vs town. The PRIZM cluster (marketing) folks have the concept of "Second City Elite" which implies 2nd 'level' of city. I suspect that it is dependent on how far away the next 1st city is. And it implies that Salt Lake City (pop. 200,000) might be a 1st city because it dominates Utah while Fremont (pop. 250,000) isn't because it is dwarfed by San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
A place with a mayor, city government, FD, PD, etc. Probably a city planning department.
I mean if you get down to 500 person towns where the whole town government is 4-5 people not all of whom are even full time, sure maybe not a city. But a city isn't skyscrapers, its an administrative entity. Were there no cities before 1900 in your mind?
This is just a crazy definition of "city". Anything over a few thousand is for sure a "city". And legally they are almost all cities.
When there used to be more "hamlet/village/town/city" classifications in some states, the thresholds were often like 50/200/500/2000 or something like that.
Most states have collapsed that all down to just cities and towns, or even only just cities and unincorporated.
I think population or density numbers are not that useful for deciding if something is a city or not. I think the city is the economic center of its region, where people do most of their trade with other economic regions. 100k towns around San Francisco are not going to be the center of anything. If someone wants to start a business, they're going to San Francisco to do it because that's where all the people and ideas and resources come together. (Silicon Valley is not exactly a city, but it has a very powerful convergence point for people and ideas: Stanford University.)
I think a lot of "real city" comes from "I've heard about it."
I've heard of many of these places, so they end up in my mind as "cities" (unless they've been described as small).
I live in a place called Mississauga. You've probably never heard of it, but it's just under a million people, in a sprawling built up area that has has something like 8 million people in it.
The reason you've likely not heard of it is because it's not in California, so no films are actually set there. When there are movies made, it's pretending to be someplace else.
One of the classic New Urbanist developments, aka nostalgia streetcar suburbanism. Which is better than standard-issue sprawl, to be fair, but can't really be the basis for a core city of any significant size.
> Building progress: last I heard Duna Residences were supposed to be ready Q2 2023, but a recent video shows them still under construction.
Yeah, they're delayed a bit, but deliveries are happening over the next 4 months (they're doing it in phases as they get them finished), starting with the commercial units this month and finishing with the top floor in December.
I assume the project is done in the spirit of YIMBYism, which hates cars and wants to make things as hard as possible for them. This is both trendy and economically useful because it means higher density. Probably there will be some compromise with reality but I don't know where it will be. Even if YIMBYism is practical in big cities (which remains to be seen) it might be harder in Solano County where there's nothing for dozens of miles except whatever these people build themselves.
One model might be a dense walkable center with good buses; a free (or cheap) shuttle to either SF, the nearest BART station at Pittsburgh/Bay Point, or both; and maybe the same level of grudging acceptance of cars as SF or NYC. See the neighborhood of Cul-de-Sac in Arizona for a model that's been shared widely around the YIMBY community and is probably on their minds.
Assume that the location on Google Maps called "Montezuma Hills" is about the center of the Flannery land purchases. Well, it's 30.6 miles by road to the Pittsburg BART station due to first having to drive 9 miles toward Sacramento to cross the Sacramento River at Rio Vista. This city would really need another bridge or tunnel to open up a more direct route across the Sacramento River.
BART goes all the way to Antioch out past Pittsburg, so the shuttle to BART would be less than 31 miles, but still a big number. In summary, the reason this place has virtually nobody living on it is that it is way out in the boonies.
> Even if YIMBYism is practical in big cities (which remains to be seen)
Do you mean politically or from an engineering/planning perspective? The latter has been done successfully in many cities around the world, it's not anything new outside of a narrow post-1950s American context. The former is probably harder but should be doable in this model (especially if you're mostly selling specifically to people who like it), but I guess isn't experimentally proven.
I feel like the whole movement has a weird tension between multiple groups:
1. Utopian dreamers who want everyone to give up their cars, walk home from the supermarket in the rain carrying 20 kg of reusable canvas bags, and at least strongly consider eating cricket slurry for at least two meals a day.
2. Normal home-buying people who want ordinary suburbs, but nicer. They'd like to be able to walk everywhere in theory, as long as they can still drive there nine times out of ten in practice.
3. Property developers who DGAF and just want to cram as many houses onto a piece of land as they're legally allowed and sell them for as much money as possible.
I think the biggest YIMBY group is none of those, but rather people who just want housing to be affordable as a result of increased supply.
(Off topic, but nearly every political movement has a weird tension between multiple groups. For example libertarians and Christians in the Republican party)
This is FOR SURE not the core of the YIMBY movement. The core of the movement is upper middle class and middle class urban planning people, many of whom are childless, who like big city dense living and want to pretend that everyone likes it (or worse yet just don't even consider their fellow citizens preferences).
The random dude who wants a cheaper house isn't like "damn those planning regulations and lack of more budlings. They don't make the connection.
/r/fuckcars obviously hates cars, but who says they are YIMBY? I imagine YIMBYs are overrepresented there, but so are many other demographics such as Democrats, young people, queer people, etc. YIMBYism doesn't require hating cars any more than being a Democrat requires hating cars.
New York isn't "grudging acceptance of cars" - 10% of the land surface is given over to the free storage of cars! They heavily subsidize cars, which is the only reason there are so many cars in such a densely populated area.
You stick a service alley in the back, perhaps with access to a garage. Look up "New Urbanism" and then Google Maps of some of the examples. In theory these places are designed to be transit-oriented and walkable, and I'm sure they succeed to various degrees, but realistically if you put a city in that location people are going to want to have cars, and they are going to park those cars somewhere.
Over my dead body. I will never stop going on weekend trips and longer road trips. I will never "own nothing and be happy" and no IoT drone crap will cross my property lines.
I will not live in a pod, I will not eat bugs, I will not own nothing, I will not surrender my privacy. FAFO.
The whole "new urbanism" movement really fails in that it ignores people's actual real life preferences. I mean the most efficient and environmental solution is we all live in coffin apartments and work from those same apartments and are fed nutrient paste. You could fit the whole global population in like the city limits in Denver in one giant skyscraper. No transportation or outside time needed!
Except people don't want that, not even the most extreme YIMBYS.
So where do you draw the line between that and everyone living on big 40 acre farms? Well that is the beauty of markets, you let the people make the decisions and value what they value.
Instead you have a bunch of childless young urban professionals, living like childless YPPUIES and then demanding everyone else must live like that.
You don't need to. All that matters is that a substantial fraction of people are happy to adopt the new ways. You can be just like the people who still own horses and/or don't have cell phones.
"Come back in a decade or two and people probably won’t own cars."
My _existing_ cars will probably last a decade (quite possibly two - though then they might probably outlast _me_). I don't think I'm that unusual. Tens of millions of existing vehicles will probably still be in use in a decade.
There's no plausible scenario where cars are gone in the US within ten or even twenty years. Some dense cities can survive with most of the population not using them, but most of the US is far too rural to sustain public transport necessary to completely forego cars. What your suggestion will sound like to most people is the COVID lockdowns forever - which they will not support or accept.
They're not talking about people foregoing cars for public transit - they're talking about people foregoing *ownership* of cars for easy access to self-driving cars. It's like how people have given up landlines and cable subscriptions in favor of cell phones and streaming video.
Are there any googleable New Urbanism designs that you'd recommend as examples to aspire towards?
Looking at a couple of examples, Prospect New Town in Colorado looks reasonably pleasant but not fundamentally different to a lot of other new suburban developments. Mountain House California looks similar but worse, a bunch of little two-storey houses, not much greenery, and almost zero shops.
Most of the projects have been fairly small, nowhere near 100k people. One of the biggest is Central Park (formerly Stapleton) in Denver. But that basically looks like typical parking lot urban sprawl in the commercial areas, with houses packed in tightly with no front yards in the residential areas.
You can have something nice and pretty and tiny like Seaside, Florida. But that's 1000 people. With enough money I guess you can scale it up, but the complexity is much, much greater.
If you want 100k people, you obviously need a large number of jobs, and if those jobs aren't in your planned community, the residents need transportation out of your community. And if those neighboring communities don't have good transit, your residents are going to need cars, even if you've laid out a beautiful, walkable city with a good transit system. And if they have cars, they probably don't care if your city's transit service is good or not. So it seems to me (although I'm no expert) that you really need to have some major sources of good jobs as a key part of your city; otherwise you've only managed to build a bedroom community.
I personally played a lot of sports on my front lawn from age 5 to 12 before outgrowing it, but I don't see kids playing in their front yards much anymore. So, getting rid of front lawns seems like the easiest gain in density.
I don't think Seaside scales, and the clue is in the name. Seaside only works because it occupies a stretch of beautiful warm sunny Florida beach; if you put it in the middle of a field somewhere then you couldn't sell the houses for millions; if you couldn't sell the houses for millions then you couldn't pump so much money into making the development look nice, and if you can't pump so much money into making the development look nice then it's just another crappy suburb in a field somewhere.
You can only build as many Seasides as you have unoccupied sections of warm-climate beachfront land.
I agree generally, but wonder if you could create such a development if you could get a group of high-value residents to all agree to live in the same place? That would presumably make the schools great, crime low, etc. Having a beach would obviously help, but maybe being close enough to SF might do the trick?
I think the Mueller development in Austin, TX is a good example, a master-planned exploitation of a 700-acre site that magically opened up mid-city when the municipal airport was relocated. There is a section of big-box sprawl at the West end, but also many areas of high-density residential and mixed-use.
In the late 1990s, I looked at a sort of New Urbanist/Old Villageist development in the Chicago suburbs much like the top picture, with houses arranged around a village green. There was an alley behind the houses for cars but your kids could visit the neighboring few dozen houses without crossing traffic, which was definitely appealing. I recall the asking price being about 40% more than conventional Chicago suburbs, which seemed reasonable for what you'd get but also tough to manage.
What's wrong with giving people front yards, if they're going to be building from scratch? That would allow people to park their car in front of their house, off the street, so the footpath is still walkable (for pedestrians, people pushing buggies and kids on bikes).
I walk the dog around my suburban neighborhood and I seldom see kids playing in their front yards anymore. Instead, they are more likely to put cones in the street and play in their low-traffic street. The athletic family with three kids behind me has created a child paradise, but they have made their front yard ornamental rather than a lawn; instead, the five of them are out playing sports on the asphalt of the culdesac with various devices for slowing traffic. I don't get it, but they are obviously great parents, so that what great parents do these days.
I think we value privacy at our homes more than we used to? Not sure why though. I agree that front lawns seem to be used far less than they used to be. Back lawns (less visible to the street) seem to be used some still.
In Vauban (a development I'm familiar with in Germany) there is a large multi story car park within easy walking distance of the houses, along with a tram service and good bike infrastructure. You don't need a car to live there but you can have one and park it in the multi story car park. There are also a lot of zipcar like services. It's definitely slightly inconvenient for doing car like things, but it is surprisingly nice to walk and cycle (and unicycle) around an environment designed for it.
That style of house often has garage access in the back. There's a pretty front door visitors walk up to (parking on the street) but the owners drive in from the rear. I used to own a house in a development just like that. Here's the redfin link for my old house - photos #8 and #9 show the back alley with garage access:
Those look a lot like parts of London; I live in Terraced housing, my tiny front garden is directly onto a park (so it doesn't matter that I don't have much outdoor space; just enough to let the dog out and relax in private if needed, but the park has a huge play area for my kid and is great for walking the dog). There's a dead-end road in the back, and I have a one-car garage that faces onto that; there's also some on-street parking on that low-traffic road. Public transit is excellent, though, so I don't actually own a car, it's just for visitors. There are lots of small shops and restaurants on the bottom floor of c. 3-story houses.
> So once 10,000 people live in their town, what’s to stop those people from becoming NIMBYs and voting against further growth?
Part of it would probably also be which people you have. Palo Alto nimbys are mostly people who moved to Palo Alto because they like having one-story houses with big yards and lots of roads. Presumably the sort of people who move into smaller high-density apartments in an area advertised as high-density would be more okay with keeping that level of density?
(Or even if they eventually change their minds and start objecting, this takes time and within a decade or two you've already probably built or at least zoned for a lot of the density you want).
I wrote my PhD thesis on this topic and yes: at least in some case studies I looked at, people who move to a place based on marketing for a walkable community are more willing to accept density than people who moved to the burbs with the goal of not being downtown. This is based on interviews and newspaper articles, mind, not quantitative surveys.
Here you go. It's an analysis of four attempts to transform suburban communities into downtowns, focused on political, institutional, and economic barriers (and how to overcome them). The Uptown Core has the clearest example of residents fighting for the walkable community they were sold. They fought a car dealership, and are open to density, unlike their suburban peers, who often oppose any density. If you like, I can also send some more quantitative studies on this subject.
Relatedly, I also find many examples, in all four retrofits, of suburban residents supporting or opposing change. Many accept that density will cut traffic, for example, while others believe it is the cause of traffic. I found it interesting and somewhat surprising that walkability can be extremely popular among suburbanites. In Surrey, the Mayor got a 72% approval rating for attracting sense walkable growth, in an almost entirely car dependent suburb. I know you don't like podcasts but I discuss this all on the most recent Strong Towns podcast.
That's certainly been my experience living in Chicago's South Loop, where I've gotten a lot of firsthand knowledge of my neighbors' preferences by being on an HOA board the last 7 years.
I think it will depend significantly on how quickly the area urbanizes and becomes fully walkable. If the area is mostly car-centered for lack of size for 5-10 years, those people will have to adapt and may be less likely to want the density. If there's continual construction and the place becomes walkable quickly, that's less likely.
> The specific utopian city is going to look like this
The street scene looks fairly retro, like some children's book from the 1950s. Maybe that is deliberate, to look reassuringly familiar to potential investors and buyers. But, among other things, where are the solar panels on the roofs, and the flat roofs to park all the hydrogen powered flying cars?
With a couple of hundred square miles at their disposal, the land footprint is sufficient to build a giant ziggurat, or "pyramid", with sides maybe a couple of miles wide at the base and with say fifty ascending terraces each bounded by an outer wall tall enough to ensure privacy for residents round the outside by preventing them being overlooked by the levels above (Or one could design terrace outer glass walls that are transparent when looked through fairly horizontally, but opaque when looked at with a downward or upward slant). I assume most residents would value privacy when out and about on their terrace gardens.
Shopping malls, public areas, lower value private accomodation, and hydroponic growing areas with artificial UV light, could occupy the interior, and it could be truncated at the top to allow a large park. There could also be a large water storage area near the top, to supply the inhabitants, water the plants, and for emergency use in fires, and to stabilize the temperature throughout. Also, the whole thing could rotate on giant bearings, so that all residents round the outside would get their fair share of sunshine, and to help equalize the temperature.
Given a few weeks I'm sure I could plan the whole thing down to the last detail! :-P
I'm not familiar with either of those. But I think with careful design a proposal similar to what I sketched would be better to live in, and more flexible for amenities, than giant vertical glass box skyscrapers.
I think these are the people who were against those politics. Marc Andreessen isn't exactly a fan of the current San Francisco city government!
"hour’s drive northwest of San Francisco"
northeast
Thanks, I'm a moron.
The error was in the Guardian piece. now corrected
This sounds like the backstory for a dystopian movie where the founders appoint a Judge Dredd type sheriff to keep homeless addicts away by killing them.
The car commute from Montezuma Hills in roughly the geographic weighted center of the land purchases to San Francisco looks like roughly 3 hours and ten minutes round trip on the average working day.
So about an hour and a quarter in and then the same back? That's not *terrible* (there's people in my town do that to the city where they have their pharma, etc., job) but of course the longest part of the trip will be getting into the city. Unless they set up some kind of rail service/commuter bus service, and I doubt that is going to happen. So the "dense, walkable city" idea is knocked on the head from the get-go, as you are going to need a car to get to your tech job.
A couple would definitely need two cars. And over three hours of commuting per day to San Francisco would mean it's not that much more desirable of a location than existing downscale exurbs like Stockton, which could depress the quality of residents who'd be attracted by it.
It would nice to have a rail commute: commuting by passenger rail, like in "Mad Men," is the most pleasant way to get to work during rush hour. In the Chicago suburbs, for example, the most desirable suburban locations are within a reasonable walks of train stations: 15 minute suburbs.
There's a train track between Sacramento and San Francisco that's about 10 or 20 miles away, but most railroads in the U.S., other than specifically commuter railways in places like NYC and Chicago, prioritize freight over passengers, so schedules for passenger trains are often fictional, with passenger trains being sidetracked to let freight roar by. (America, by the way, has very efficient freight trains in return for having terrible inter-city passenger rail.)
An alternative would be to extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail line from Antioch under or over the river/estuary to this new city. But that would cost many, many billions and would probably require the new city to have a population of, say, a half million. Also, BART raises fears of Oaklanders or some of the exurban slum dwellers (e.g., Pittsburg) riding mass transit out to the new city to raise havoc. If you can only get to this new city by a long car trip, it will have low crime rates.
In sum, there are good reasons of geography why this piece of land is so empty. On the other hand, this coalition of billionaires is not unimpressive. I wish them well.
It seems to me like the early targets would be people who mostly WFH, maybe only going to the office a few times a month. (Or you're entirely remote but don't want to stray too far from the Bay Area for other reasons)
Having local jobs is clearly part of the plan. These investors are historically more interested in industrial projects than residences.
Speculative: I doubt the wind farm is coincidental. There is even a windmill in the californiaforever.com logo, at the bottom of the page. Note that in the PNW datacenters get built next to hydroelectric facilities.
Wildly speculative: if you expect fusion reactors in ten years or so, where do you expect them to get built?
>The specific utopian city is going to look like this:
Their images are AI generated. Wrong number of stripes on the American flag, leaves floating in mid-air, bricks/vinyl siding that doesn't match, nearly a perfectly square aspect ratio, etc, etc, etc.
Kind of funny to see The Guardian analyse the details of the images ("a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods") like they're not Midjourney sludge that means absolutely nothing.
Doesn't seem wrong to me - if the company prompted Midjourney with "a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods", that communicates information about their plans. The pipeline is always going to be "a leader who knows the strategy says a few sentences to an artist, the artist draws their impression of those few sentences, the leader either takes their work or asks them to try again". AI might slightly degrade the communication step, but not enough that you can't think of it the same way.
Ideally a project like this, at this stage of development, should already have some actual architects involved, and those architects should have some plans at least some thought-through concept art showing what they actually intend to build.
Prospera has this, at least.
Alternatively, they're not going to design it until they have some idea where they're allowed to build?
Why wouldn‘t architects use generative AI to create concept art?
It's a lie though, a deception not even by omission - they're portraying an image of 'the final result' that is not going to happen. I know advertising is brazen, but this is pretty egregious even for that. It's not going to be a Tuscan village, it's going to be stacks of apartment blocks in a scrubland.
The Prospera stuff is poor, but at least they are going to (try and) build the housing/offices as portrayed in their 'artist's impression'. Solano (whatever they end up calling the thing) is not going to be remotely like what they're showing here.
Ah, the wonders of AI - only fledgling as yet, and we're already using it to lie to our fellows!
They're ideological/aesthetic gestures: we want it to look like Ithaca, NY in 1925 or Tuscany in 1500, but not like Cabrini Green in 1965.
Brazen or not, it's pretty much SOP in the world of future project architectural renderings.
Yeah it is literally how this always looks, even 20-40 years ago. Ridiculously over idealized images that make no sense.
Mock Victorians with no front stoop. Must have been created by AI.
Aren't those the things on the left you can see with the railings? AI seems to be a bit confused about how ti line them up with the doors though.
And you see plenty of victorian houses that you don't have to walk uphill to get into in the UK. (Is it to fit a cellar underneath?)
"And you see plenty of victorian houses that you don't have to walk uphill to get into in the UK."
Like this row of terraced houses:
https://www.booking.com/hotel/gb/cheerful-4-bedroom-victorian-house-with-garden.en-gb.html?activeTab=photosGallery
But there are also ones where you do have front steps up:
http://knowledgeoflondon.com/victorianhouse.html
So the AI was using reference photos of (what looks to me like) New York housing, but mashed together with the "walkable suburban street" prompt. I have to admit, I like the flag flying in the background - are they trying to appear patriotic and evoke American values of The Frontier, or is this just an artefact from whatever reference materials the art used? 😀
This billionaire's coalition is pretty ideologically diverse, but they seem like people who might unironically approve of flying the American flag.
They are probably influenced by Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso's highly popular Americana outdoor shopping mall in Glendale, CA, which looks like a prosperous small city in Ohio in 1910. Caruso's immensely popular Grove mall looks like an Italian hill city. People in L.A. will drive long distances and pay to park to walk around a walkable simulacrum of city from before cars.
"Although her concerns seem kind misplaced, her name makes her sounds like a powerful and majestic opponent."
Lmao
I'm pretty sure the Kerguelen islands thing isn't real? I can't find any legitimate sources repeating the claim.
Thanks; removed until I can learn more.
I think Kerguelen Island would be an ideal spot for resurrected Ice Age megafauna like Woolly Mammoths to be hunted by billionaires using only spears assisted by atlatls.
"France offers to sell Kerguelen Island" this is against the French constitution, completely impossible.
Does Kerguelen have residents? It seems to me that uninhabited land would operate differently than what you suggest, because a referendum would be irrelevant if there are no residents.
Article 1 of the French Constitution of 1958 states that "France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic." The term "indivisible" in this context implies that the territorial integrity of the French Republic is sacrosanct and cannot be divided by selling off a part of its territory. This would apply to overseas territories like the Kerguelen Islands as well.
Algeria was allowed to secede from France in 1962, so you aren’t interpreting the constitution the way French government does
Article 11 allows the president to submit to referendum "any Government Bill dealing with the organisation of the public authorities." Algeria's independence was approved after such a referendum, that's the constitutional mechanism, the government had no legal authority to let Algeria go without it.
That doesn’t in any way contradict my point.
It's implied, but the meaning is open to interpretation. Also, if it did mean that, would probably only apply to the Republic proper; the various "departments', both in and outside Europe that are represented in the National Assembly.
True. I've been to Clipperton Island and the only permanent residents are boobies.
(Not a joke.)
Not much to say. We stayed only a few hours.
My wife and I were sailing from the Galapagos Islands to Hawaii on a small sailboat.
Normally you would go west then north to avoid the "doldrums", i.e. the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, where the weather is unpredictable and even dangerous. But that year the ITCZ was far south so we decided to cut north and then catch the trade winds to Hawaii.
That brought us right on a path to Clipperton. At first I didn't expect that we would get close, and even if we did the timing would probably not be right. We had no charts of the area (none exist, as far as I know). The general nautical chart we used only showed a cross to signify the approximate location of a danger to avoid, so we needed stay clear at night. But as the winds got us closer it became more likely that we'd be near the island early in the morning.
So I mentioned it to my dad by email on my daily report to him (via satellite). And he replied that he knew a lot about it because he saw a documentary on television about a French scientific expedition to the island. I told him it was too bad I didn't have any chart of the area. He replied that there was a map in the TV guide he likes to buy. "Wow," I said, "ask Mom to scan the map and send it to me!"
The map was, huh, barely useful, but it gave me a sense that maybe we could anchor somewhere. So we decided to try it. We got close to the lagoon around 8am. Perfect. We entered a cove on the east side that looked promising on the "map". But although the depth looked good (10 meters), it was clearly full of rocks, and the swell made me very nervous. One thing I didn't want was to get wrecked 1000 miles away from the nearest port. So we moved to the west side, which I hoped would be more sheltered from the trade winds and the swell.
We dropped the anchor in 12 meters of depth, but once the chain was extended the depth was 30 meters! The island is the tip of a volcano and we were sitting on a steep slope. Still, we got in the water with mask, snorkel, fins. It was INCREDIBLE! Hundred feet of visibility, super clear water, friendly fish, a few sharks (also friendly!), and many boobies.
I love boobies. And yeah, I know how that sounds.
https://www.google.com/search?q=booby+bird
At some point I was swimming down and could see a booby on the surface. He was putting his head regularly just below the surface and maybe eating plankton (?). He looked like he could see me, but as I got close he totally ignored me. So there I was, swimming maybe a foot under a booby, looking at him and him totally ignoring me, just doing his business.
We only stayed a few hours. The swell breaking on the reef made it extremely difficult and dangerous to land. And like I said, not a good place to be stranded (or hurt). We had lunch and dinner at anchor, then left toward Hawaii in the evening.
Voila.
I suppose if Tom Monaghan can do it with Ave Maria City, there's no reason tech very rich people can't do it in California:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria,_Florida
Though I'm looking at the "artist's impressions" of the New Garden City and then the real landscape and going "No [expletive deleted] way that is going to translate into reality".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
I *can* see what they mean about some farmland, but I have a notion they might go for commercial forestry, that kind of scrubby land is best suited for it. As for the rest of it - mmm, well. Maybe? I'm wondering about where they're going to get the water for all those tree-lined streets and boating and marinas and so forth. Is there a river nearby?
(Mostly I'm going "What the hell are the Collinson brothers doing involved with this? Too rich and grand and posh now for Tipp, are we?")
(Also, "Gosh amighty, is there no limit to the brazenness of artist's impressions? You are not going to recreate a Tuscan or Umbrian village on the banks of the local whatever river or lake is there, no matter how many red-roofed houses sloping down to the shore with cypresses on the skyline you paint in").
Dormitory town for the tech workers needed by the various employers putting money into this is the most likely result, I'm thinking.
EDIT:
"Three months ago, Flannery sued a group of local farmers who wouldn’t sell to them, accusing them of “conspiring to inflate the value of the land”."
Well, yeah. You'd think a company with a name like "Flannery" would be well familiar with the concept of 'road frontage' 😁
https://www.farmersjournal.ie/have-ya-any-road-frontage-680553
Re: Prospera and its legal troubles - well well well. I am shocked, shocked! I tell you. Who could possibly have foreseen this would happen? I mean, I never expected that if you head off to South America in order to build your own little company town because of weak governments that won't meddle with you so long as you pay off the right ministers and people in power due to political instability meaning everybody wants to line their pockets while they're in power, that this would come back to bite you in the backside when there is rapid turnover due to said political instability and the opposition party comes into power which then decides to soak the rich foreigners even more or boot them out because they made a deal with the last lot, not with them? Never expected that at all!
The area is near the San Joaquin Delta where the rivers of the Central Valley drain into SF Bay, and there's some swampland nearby, but I wouldn't have associated it with large bodies of water. One of the founders said in an interview that he enjoys kayaking in the area, so there must be something.
It's the "in the area" bit that is ringing alarm bells, because that can cover a lot of ground. Apparently there is a Lake Solano which is a national park and you can go kayaking there, but that does not seem to be at all the same thing as "when we build our new city, you can kayak and boat by the shoreline" because I'm not seeing any shoreline as such:
https://www.paddlingcalifornia.com/lake_solano.html#:~:text=The%20lake's%20placid%20surface%20is,will%20have%20an%20enjoyable%20time.
Looking at this map, it does depend where they build it in order to have access to the coast/river delta:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solano_County,_California#/map/0
The Guardian article says the Flannery company has been buying up land around Travis Air Force Base, which is just east of Fairfield, and zooming in on that map and looking at it - there's not really any kind of shoreline like the pretty pictures, which are definitely misleading and definitely selling a *vision* of Norman Rockwell Utopia which is not going to be the reality.
There's rivers east and south, but around the air force base it looks like desert/scrubland (which I would expect). I'm in agreement that if you start building there, yeah you'll have plenty of open space to put up buildings but you better make damn sure you have the water supply, sewerage, and other utilities well planned out as to how you're going to manage them. There aren't going to be leafy green streets and kayaking by the shore, not unless you travel a fair distance to go to the river or sea-coast.
The main information I've heard is that it "surrounds Travis Air Force Base on three sides"; TAFB doesn't seem close to the watery parts.
Oh ... shit. I know what this means.
Travis AFB is a MAC base, Material Air Command. They fly freight, and its really loud. When its foggy, which it is often in the delta region, the foggy air really carries the sound. Flying freight is done with really big heavy aircraft, and they're very loud.
What these schemers do, is 'model the noise level' so ... basically all models are wrong, but some models are useful. So they model the noise level in a manner which allows development on the property. Then they build, then the residents complain, then the federal government gets involved, and starts to regulate the air traffic out of the air force base. The developers have long since absconded with their $$$$, and the shit-storm, its all SEP (Somebody Else's Problem).
Look, we have to have air force bases, and we intentionally put them in God forsaken out of the way places, where they can make shit-tons of noise, drop the occasional airplane, and do it in some out of the way place where the only casualties are the air crew. But then NOPE, some schemer sees a scam, and this is it, the taxpayers are being had yet again.
I think if you provide housing for 100,000 people in a state that's becoming a disaster area due to a massive housing shortage, this isn't a "scam" even if it requires a local air force base to change its noise policies.
Presumably, they could use whatever magic wand they have to cast Protection From Nimbyism somewhere where the houses would be more useful.
A hundred thousand people in California isn't that many.
How many houses do you think could be freed up in California simply by enforcing existing immigration laws? A couple of million?
Having been to Vacaville, I don't think noise will be a problem.
But wait! I can do better! I took the map of plots purchased from the NYTimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/business/economy/california-land-solano-county.html) and combined them with the Travis Air Force Base Sustainability Study (https://www.solanocounty.com/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?blobid=36198 or page 41-42 here https://oldcc.gov/sites/default/files/mis-studies/Travis%20Air%20Force%20Base.pdf), to get a map of the overlap.
See the combined map on twitter here: https://twitter.com/brinkwatertoad/status/1698887068506546393?s=20 (zoom in to see better)
My takeaway: some of the plots are in the Noise Military Compatibility Area (MCA), which is unsuitable for residential (without significant noise attenuation), but could be used for office/retail/industrial. Most of the plots are outside the Noise MCA, and are fine for residential: No change in Travis Base's Noise MCA would be needed to develop there.
You'll hear planes, but it will be like living in Vacaville.
At least in the last forty years, what the federal authorities have done about airport noise is not reduce the airport noise. It's to tell cities that they can have some assistance with residents' noise insulation improvements, _if_ they alter zoning to prevent any further construction. See for instance the Comprehensive Airport Land Use Compatibility Plan for the Environs of San Francisco International Airport:
https://ccag.ca.gov/plansreportslibrary-2/airport-land-use/
I am a Planning Commissioner in San Bruno, and I live less than a mile from the airport, in the Belle Air neighborhood, just across 101. Basically under the deal that the local cities (South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Millbrae) made with the airport some decades back, we're not supposed to let anyone add housing too close to the flight path. (The technical term is "noise contours".)
South San Francisco has recently been trying to build some apartments just at the northwest tip of the area affected. They had thought they were going to be able to reach an agreement where they told the ALUC "hey we know the airport exists, we will build to high noise insulation standards and we agree we can't sue you". But the ALUC so far seems to be saying they don't want to grant an exemption.
https://everythingsouthcity.com/2020/09/planning-commission-approves-338-units-at-former-century-plaza-on-noor-avenue/
https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/agencies-differ-on-south-city-development/article_b9be346c-14e0-11eb-917d-db7d806758f9.html
It's not exactly clear yet what's going to happen with this, because it's bringing state law (which has been changed to push for more housing) into conflict with a quasi-federal authority. If the ALUC really stands firm, I suspect they'll win in federal court, but maybe they'll change their mind. (I've talked with my Congressman about this, I'm hoping there may be some action from Congress to get airport commissions generally to lighten up on blocking housing; it's kind of a wonky issue where you might be able to get bipartisan interest. Call it "deregulation / preventing frivolous lawsuits" for the Republicans, and "dealing with the housing / homelessness crisis" for Democrats.)
If I lived about 2-3 blocks further northeast, I would've been personally affected by this issue. I'm _just_ outside the 75 dB noise contour, and it's unclear whether the state ADU-streamlining laws would apply there. (I have just broken ground on an ADU, the design of which is taking advantage of some brand new rules letting you build at a slightly smaller setback if you're within half a mile of transit.) Our city planning department is kind of unsure what they should do with ADU applications under the contour. My impression is that they are inclined to just go ahead and approve stuff, because they're more afraid of Rob Bonta and YIMBY Law than they are of the ALUC. They'd just see if the ALUC notices / complains, but so far it hasn't come up.
YIMBYs already prepped a lawsuit against San Bruno once:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/24/approaching-peak-housing-dysfunction-in-california
Ultimately the suit was dropped because the city came back and approved the project, although by the time they did we'd hit COVID, and then rising rates and construction material inflation, so the project has never broken ground. We extended their permits another couple years, earlier this year. I am skeptical it will ever happen, I think it is more likely we'll get the featureless seven-story concrete towers that were threatened under SB 35 in the immediate aftermath of the original rejection.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Bruno-rejected-plan-for-425-homes-Now-14698779.php
Yeah, but I don't think a military air force base is going to get regulated out of it, so I imagine any proposed development is going to be protested for the very reason you put forward. That does explain the concerns of Senator Dodd about 'harming the base', but I think Travis is probably a big enough local employer that any building proposed to go up near it is going to be pushed back.
If this really is intended as dormitory housing for workers commuting to SF, then the developers will expect "people won't be at home all day so they won't hear the planes". What you say about "God-forsaken out of the way places" makes the proposed "walkable leafy utopia" sound even more implausible with what will eventually be built.
The NYT has a good map of the specific parcels that Flannery Associates bought: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/business/economy/california-land-solano-county.html
It looks like it's not fully contiguous (yet!). The center (roughly the intersection of the 12 and the 113) is not particularly close to water, but the area is generally bounded by the Sacramento River in the south/east, Montezuma Slough in the west, and Lindsey Slough in the north. (I have no idea how good sloughs are as sources of water).
The area around Travis Air Force Base is in the far northwest corner of the purchased area.
In the Sacramento Delta, there is a legally mandated "X2" line, which is the point in the delta where salinity above that line must remain <2 ppt at all times. That line is upstream of Suisun bay and the marshes north of it. There are salinity control gates in various places in the sloughs in Suisun bay to prevent salt water intrusion upstream during the tidal cycle.
2-3 ppt is generally accepted as the threshold where humans can start to taste salt in water. So water in places like Montezuma Slough and others in the marshlands north of Suisun bay will often (although not always) be noticeably salty (although not necessarily dangerous)
Looking up sloughs, they're wetlands? So probably a ton of environmental protections in place, I wouldn't imagine you'd get permission to use them as reservoirs, and if you did, the point DangerouslyUnstable makes about the salinity means you're going to need one hell of a water treatment plant to make the water potable.
"Sloughs are ecologically important as they are a part of an endangered environment; wetlands. They act as a buffer from land to sea and act as an active part of the estuary system where freshwater flows from creeks and runoff from the land mix with salty ocean water transported by tides. Restoration is a big effort in California wetlands to restore slough and ridge landscapes. Examples of restoration projects on slough landscapes include The Elkhorn Slough Tidal Wetland Project, Dutch Slough Tidal Restoration Project, and the McDaniel Slough wetland enhancement project."
If they're planning on getting water from the river, that's going to be another headache, given California's general problems with water supplies.
In the NY Times map, you can see that a large portion of the purchased parcels are directly adjacent to the Sacramento River, the largest river in California and a source of fresh water well above the X2 line. Physical access to fresh water is no problem. In California, the more relevant question is do you have political and legal access to water. The Sacramento River is highly regulated and subscribed. But they are north of the Delta - that's better than being to the south. It means they could potentially participate in the north-of-delta water markets, making a deal with a State Water contractor for a portion of their annual allocation.
I am reminded of all the canal projects in England in the 18th century. Some of them were reasonable (and got built), but a lot of them looked OK until you looked at a topographical map and said "This canal route of 20 miles is going to need a hundred locks because it's going up a mountain and back down again."
> I suppose if Tom Monaghan can do it with Ave Maria City, there's no reason tech very rich people can't do it in California:
Sure there is.; the vastly different legal and cultural environments around development in Florida as opposed to California. Among other things, Florida's state legislature is in the long habit of creating special local government districts (pretty much starting with Disney World), and did so in Ave Maria's case.
It depends how bad the housing need is, and how unsuitable for other use the land is, to get exemptions. It looks like scrubland, so use for manufacturing/office/residential would be "not using it for anything otherwise" (unless sheep are grazing it).
I agree there will be lots of obstacles in the way re: legal environment, but this is probably as good a test of YIMBYism as you're going to get in California; 'we want to build in the desert and make it blossom like the rose'.
Commercial forestry: this is the year that all of Canada and most of the Mediterranean caught fire, releasing gigatonnes of really nasty particles into the air, and a stack of CO2. Being against the Ents is like being against motherhood and apple pie, but at some stage it has to sink in that trees are part of the problem, not of the solution. Other vegetation does as good a job of carbon capture, some of it burns less, all of it burns less intensely.
Is this one too many zeroes, or from rural Missouri am I misunderstanding what a "town" is: a few "~100,000 person towns scattered across the county." 100,000 is big city where I am from.
Fairfield, Vacaville, and Vallejo are all 100,000+ and I don't think of them as real cities; other people in the area can correct me if I'm being unfair.
"Fairfield, Vacaville, and Vallejo are all 100,000+ and I don't think of them as real cities; other people in the area can correct me if I'm being unfair."
How do you think of Palo Alto (pop. 66,000) and Mountain View (pop. 81,000) and Berkeley (pop. 117,000)? That provides context for size (if not for 'sophistication').
I think of them as hard to analyze because they're part of a larger urban agglomeration.
Okay :-) How about Charleston, South Carolina (pop. 150,000)?
I'm wondering if you think of 'real city' as 'real metropolitan area' and have a lower limit of 500,000+.
I've never been to Charleston but I would have instinctively classified it as a city, probably partly because it's the biggest one in its area. I do notice Wikipedia says the Charleston urban area is 600,000 people.
I am not going to be able to specify a perfect bright line between city and town, but if you haven't been to Vacaville, I urge you to look at its Google Maps pictures: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Vacaville,+CA/@38.3565773,-121.9877444,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipOQcfpfpPgDsjtN0ernCjBS10FrwYye_m06jDbJ!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOQcfpfpPgDsjtN0ernCjBS10FrwYye_m06jDbJ%3Dw114-h86-k-no!7i1600!8i1200!4m7!3m6!1s0x808517cf9f7df407:0xe4aac8df639b631c!8m2!3d38.3565773!4d-121.9877444!10e5!16zL20vMGdqOV8?entry=ttu
I've been to Vacaville :-) And Los Banos.
"Biggest one in the area" is useful. Now we can focus on what we/you mean by "area" :-)
NOTE: I don't have a problem with city vs town. The PRIZM cluster (marketing) folks have the concept of "Second City Elite" which implies 2nd 'level' of city. I suspect that it is dependent on how far away the next 1st city is. And it implies that Salt Lake City (pop. 200,000) might be a 1st city because it dominates Utah while Fremont (pop. 250,000) isn't because it is dwarfed by San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
A place with a mayor, city government, FD, PD, etc. Probably a city planning department.
I mean if you get down to 500 person towns where the whole town government is 4-5 people not all of whom are even full time, sure maybe not a city. But a city isn't skyscrapers, its an administrative entity. Were there no cities before 1900 in your mind?
Palo Alto and Mountain View are more like suburbs of a larger conglomeration than real cities.
This is just a crazy definition of "city". Anything over a few thousand is for sure a "city". And legally they are almost all cities.
When there used to be more "hamlet/village/town/city" classifications in some states, the thresholds were often like 50/200/500/2000 or something like that.
Most states have collapsed that all down to just cities and towns, or even only just cities and unincorporated.
I think population or density numbers are not that useful for deciding if something is a city or not. I think the city is the economic center of its region, where people do most of their trade with other economic regions. 100k towns around San Francisco are not going to be the center of anything. If someone wants to start a business, they're going to San Francisco to do it because that's where all the people and ideas and resources come together. (Silicon Valley is not exactly a city, but it has a very powerful convergence point for people and ideas: Stanford University.)
I think a lot of "real city" comes from "I've heard about it."
I've heard of many of these places, so they end up in my mind as "cities" (unless they've been described as small).
I live in a place called Mississauga. You've probably never heard of it, but it's just under a million people, in a sprawling built up area that has has something like 8 million people in it.
The reason you've likely not heard of it is because it's not in California, so no films are actually set there. When there are movies made, it's pretending to be someplace else.
I think a reasonable HIGH LEVEL model of what they are trying to accomplish is Celebration, Florida.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
in *theory* I might want to live in a place like this. In practice ... well, it depends on the actual city/town.
One of the classic New Urbanist developments, aka nostalgia streetcar suburbanism. Which is better than standard-issue sprawl, to be fair, but can't really be the basis for a core city of any significant size.
> Building progress: last I heard Duna Residences were supposed to be ready Q2 2023, but a recent video shows them still under construction.
Yeah, they're delayed a bit, but deliveries are happening over the next 4 months (they're doing it in phases as they get them finished), starting with the commercial units this month and finishing with the top floor in December.
"who has already demonstrated willingness to spend 11-figure sums on horrible places that it will ruin his life to own"
How'd it ruin his life? It got him bad press in the NYT, that's for sure.
Anton Bakov, a Russian monarchist, had various schemes of trying to buy land for his own country which always fell through for one reason or another:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Bakov
I see those pics and all I think of is...where do you park your car?
I assume the project is done in the spirit of YIMBYism, which hates cars and wants to make things as hard as possible for them. This is both trendy and economically useful because it means higher density. Probably there will be some compromise with reality but I don't know where it will be. Even if YIMBYism is practical in big cities (which remains to be seen) it might be harder in Solano County where there's nothing for dozens of miles except whatever these people build themselves.
One model might be a dense walkable center with good buses; a free (or cheap) shuttle to either SF, the nearest BART station at Pittsburgh/Bay Point, or both; and maybe the same level of grudging acceptance of cars as SF or NYC. See the neighborhood of Cul-de-Sac in Arizona for a model that's been shared widely around the YIMBY community and is probably on their minds.
Assume that the location on Google Maps called "Montezuma Hills" is about the center of the Flannery land purchases. Well, it's 30.6 miles by road to the Pittsburg BART station due to first having to drive 9 miles toward Sacramento to cross the Sacramento River at Rio Vista. This city would really need another bridge or tunnel to open up a more direct route across the Sacramento River.
BART goes all the way to Antioch out past Pittsburg, so the shuttle to BART would be less than 31 miles, but still a big number. In summary, the reason this place has virtually nobody living on it is that it is way out in the boonies.
> Even if YIMBYism is practical in big cities (which remains to be seen)
Do you mean politically or from an engineering/planning perspective? The latter has been done successfully in many cities around the world, it's not anything new outside of a narrow post-1950s American context. The former is probably harder but should be doable in this model (especially if you're mostly selling specifically to people who like it), but I guess isn't experimentally proven.
YIMBYism doesn't hate cars, it just doesn't want cars to receive special subsidies. YIMBYism is fine with market rate parking, just not free parking.
You can't fool me, I've seen https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/ and https://twitter.com/anticarsls
I feel like the whole movement has a weird tension between multiple groups:
1. Utopian dreamers who want everyone to give up their cars, walk home from the supermarket in the rain carrying 20 kg of reusable canvas bags, and at least strongly consider eating cricket slurry for at least two meals a day.
2. Normal home-buying people who want ordinary suburbs, but nicer. They'd like to be able to walk everywhere in theory, as long as they can still drive there nine times out of ten in practice.
3. Property developers who DGAF and just want to cram as many houses onto a piece of land as they're legally allowed and sell them for as much money as possible.
I think the biggest YIMBY group is none of those, but rather people who just want housing to be affordable as a result of increased supply.
(Off topic, but nearly every political movement has a weird tension between multiple groups. For example libertarians and Christians in the Republican party)
This is FOR SURE not the core of the YIMBY movement. The core of the movement is upper middle class and middle class urban planning people, many of whom are childless, who like big city dense living and want to pretend that everyone likes it (or worse yet just don't even consider their fellow citizens preferences).
The random dude who wants a cheaper house isn't like "damn those planning regulations and lack of more budlings. They don't make the connection.
/r/fuckcars obviously hates cars, but who says they are YIMBY? I imagine YIMBYs are overrepresented there, but so are many other demographics such as Democrats, young people, queer people, etc. YIMBYism doesn't require hating cars any more than being a Democrat requires hating cars.
> I assume the project is done in the spirit of YIMBYism, which hates cars and wants to make things as hard as possible for them.
Well, unless you suggest actually placing restrictions on suburban sprawl.
New York isn't "grudging acceptance of cars" - 10% of the land surface is given over to the free storage of cars! They heavily subsidize cars, which is the only reason there are so many cars in such a densely populated area.
You stick a service alley in the back, perhaps with access to a garage. Look up "New Urbanism" and then Google Maps of some of the examples. In theory these places are designed to be transit-oriented and walkable, and I'm sure they succeed to various degrees, but realistically if you put a city in that location people are going to want to have cars, and they are going to park those cars somewhere.
Over my dead body. I will never stop going on weekend trips and longer road trips. I will never "own nothing and be happy" and no IoT drone crap will cross my property lines.
I will not live in a pod, I will not eat bugs, I will not own nothing, I will not surrender my privacy. FAFO.
Aggressively formulated, but true. Nobody forced people to have cars, they‘re just damn practical in an individual-liberty-loving society.
The whole "new urbanism" movement really fails in that it ignores people's actual real life preferences. I mean the most efficient and environmental solution is we all live in coffin apartments and work from those same apartments and are fed nutrient paste. You could fit the whole global population in like the city limits in Denver in one giant skyscraper. No transportation or outside time needed!
Except people don't want that, not even the most extreme YIMBYS.
So where do you draw the line between that and everyone living on big 40 acre farms? Well that is the beauty of markets, you let the people make the decisions and value what they value.
Instead you have a bunch of childless young urban professionals, living like childless YPPUIES and then demanding everyone else must live like that.
You don't need to. All that matters is that a substantial fraction of people are happy to adopt the new ways. You can be just like the people who still own horses and/or don't have cell phones.
"Come back in a decade or two and people probably won’t own cars."
My _existing_ cars will probably last a decade (quite possibly two - though then they might probably outlast _me_). I don't think I'm that unusual. Tens of millions of existing vehicles will probably still be in use in a decade.
There's no plausible scenario where cars are gone in the US within ten or even twenty years. Some dense cities can survive with most of the population not using them, but most of the US is far too rural to sustain public transport necessary to completely forego cars. What your suggestion will sound like to most people is the COVID lockdowns forever - which they will not support or accept.
They're not talking about people foregoing cars for public transit - they're talking about people foregoing *ownership* of cars for easy access to self-driving cars. It's like how people have given up landlines and cable subscriptions in favor of cell phones and streaming video.
Are there any googleable New Urbanism designs that you'd recommend as examples to aspire towards?
Looking at a couple of examples, Prospect New Town in Colorado looks reasonably pleasant but not fundamentally different to a lot of other new suburban developments. Mountain House California looks similar but worse, a bunch of little two-storey houses, not much greenery, and almost zero shops.
Most of the projects have been fairly small, nowhere near 100k people. One of the biggest is Central Park (formerly Stapleton) in Denver. But that basically looks like typical parking lot urban sprawl in the commercial areas, with houses packed in tightly with no front yards in the residential areas.
You can have something nice and pretty and tiny like Seaside, Florida. But that's 1000 people. With enough money I guess you can scale it up, but the complexity is much, much greater.
If you want 100k people, you obviously need a large number of jobs, and if those jobs aren't in your planned community, the residents need transportation out of your community. And if those neighboring communities don't have good transit, your residents are going to need cars, even if you've laid out a beautiful, walkable city with a good transit system. And if they have cars, they probably don't care if your city's transit service is good or not. So it seems to me (although I'm no expert) that you really need to have some major sources of good jobs as a key part of your city; otherwise you've only managed to build a bedroom community.
I personally played a lot of sports on my front lawn from age 5 to 12 before outgrowing it, but I don't see kids playing in their front yards much anymore. So, getting rid of front lawns seems like the easiest gain in density.
I don't think Seaside scales, and the clue is in the name. Seaside only works because it occupies a stretch of beautiful warm sunny Florida beach; if you put it in the middle of a field somewhere then you couldn't sell the houses for millions; if you couldn't sell the houses for millions then you couldn't pump so much money into making the development look nice, and if you can't pump so much money into making the development look nice then it's just another crappy suburb in a field somewhere.
You can only build as many Seasides as you have unoccupied sections of warm-climate beachfront land.
I agree generally, but wonder if you could create such a development if you could get a group of high-value residents to all agree to live in the same place? That would presumably make the schools great, crime low, etc. Having a beach would obviously help, but maybe being close enough to SF might do the trick?
Seems difficult to pull off, but maybe possible?
I think the Mueller development in Austin, TX is a good example, a master-planned exploitation of a 700-acre site that magically opened up mid-city when the municipal airport was relocated. There is a section of big-box sprawl at the West end, but also many areas of high-density residential and mixed-use.
https://muelleraustin.com
In the late 1990s, I looked at a sort of New Urbanist/Old Villageist development in the Chicago suburbs much like the top picture, with houses arranged around a village green. There was an alley behind the houses for cars but your kids could visit the neighboring few dozen houses without crossing traffic, which was definitely appealing. I recall the asking price being about 40% more than conventional Chicago suburbs, which seemed reasonable for what you'd get but also tough to manage.
What's wrong with giving people front yards, if they're going to be building from scratch? That would allow people to park their car in front of their house, off the street, so the footpath is still walkable (for pedestrians, people pushing buggies and kids on bikes).
https://www.daft.ie/property-for-sale/ireland/terraced-houses
I walk the dog around my suburban neighborhood and I seldom see kids playing in their front yards anymore. Instead, they are more likely to put cones in the street and play in their low-traffic street. The athletic family with three kids behind me has created a child paradise, but they have made their front yard ornamental rather than a lawn; instead, the five of them are out playing sports on the asphalt of the culdesac with various devices for slowing traffic. I don't get it, but they are obviously great parents, so that what great parents do these days.
I think we value privacy at our homes more than we used to? Not sure why though. I agree that front lawns seem to be used far less than they used to be. Back lawns (less visible to the street) seem to be used some still.
In Vauban (a development I'm familiar with in Germany) there is a large multi story car park within easy walking distance of the houses, along with a tram service and good bike infrastructure. You don't need a car to live there but you can have one and park it in the multi story car park. There are also a lot of zipcar like services. It's definitely slightly inconvenient for doing car like things, but it is surprisingly nice to walk and cycle (and unicycle) around an environment designed for it.
That style of house often has garage access in the back. There's a pretty front door visitors walk up to (parking on the street) but the owners drive in from the rear. I used to own a house in a development just like that. Here's the redfin link for my old house - photos #8 and #9 show the back alley with garage access:
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Mountain-View/105-Pacchetti-Way-94040/home/12172124
Those look a lot like parts of London; I live in Terraced housing, my tiny front garden is directly onto a park (so it doesn't matter that I don't have much outdoor space; just enough to let the dog out and relax in private if needed, but the park has a huge play area for my kid and is great for walking the dog). There's a dead-end road in the back, and I have a one-car garage that faces onto that; there's also some on-street parking on that low-traffic road. Public transit is excellent, though, so I don't actually own a car, it's just for visitors. There are lots of small shops and restaurants on the bottom floor of c. 3-story houses.
It's by and large a great place to live!
> So once 10,000 people live in their town, what’s to stop those people from becoming NIMBYs and voting against further growth?
Part of it would probably also be which people you have. Palo Alto nimbys are mostly people who moved to Palo Alto because they like having one-story houses with big yards and lots of roads. Presumably the sort of people who move into smaller high-density apartments in an area advertised as high-density would be more okay with keeping that level of density?
(Or even if they eventually change their minds and start objecting, this takes time and within a decade or two you've already probably built or at least zoned for a lot of the density you want).
I wrote my PhD thesis on this topic and yes: at least in some case studies I looked at, people who move to a place based on marketing for a walkable community are more willing to accept density than people who moved to the burbs with the goal of not being downtown. This is based on interviews and newspaper articles, mind, not quantitative surveys.
Is your PhD thesis online? I'd like to see it.
Here you go. It's an analysis of four attempts to transform suburban communities into downtowns, focused on political, institutional, and economic barriers (and how to overcome them). The Uptown Core has the clearest example of residents fighting for the walkable community they were sold. They fought a car dealership, and are open to density, unlike their suburban peers, who often oppose any density. If you like, I can also send some more quantitative studies on this subject.
https://dalspace.library.dal.ca//handle/10222/82562
Relatedly, I also find many examples, in all four retrofits, of suburban residents supporting or opposing change. Many accept that density will cut traffic, for example, while others believe it is the cause of traffic. I found it interesting and somewhat surprising that walkability can be extremely popular among suburbanites. In Surrey, the Mayor got a 72% approval rating for attracting sense walkable growth, in an almost entirely car dependent suburb. I know you don't like podcasts but I discuss this all on the most recent Strong Towns podcast.
That's certainly been my experience living in Chicago's South Loop, where I've gotten a lot of firsthand knowledge of my neighbors' preferences by being on an HOA board the last 7 years.
I think it will depend significantly on how quickly the area urbanizes and becomes fully walkable. If the area is mostly car-centered for lack of size for 5-10 years, those people will have to adapt and may be less likely to want the density. If there's continual construction and the place becomes walkable quickly, that's less likely.
> The specific utopian city is going to look like this
The street scene looks fairly retro, like some children's book from the 1950s. Maybe that is deliberate, to look reassuringly familiar to potential investors and buyers. But, among other things, where are the solar panels on the roofs, and the flat roofs to park all the hydrogen powered flying cars?
With a couple of hundred square miles at their disposal, the land footprint is sufficient to build a giant ziggurat, or "pyramid", with sides maybe a couple of miles wide at the base and with say fifty ascending terraces each bounded by an outer wall tall enough to ensure privacy for residents round the outside by preventing them being overlooked by the levels above (Or one could design terrace outer glass walls that are transparent when looked through fairly horizontally, but opaque when looked at with a downward or upward slant). I assume most residents would value privacy when out and about on their terrace gardens.
Shopping malls, public areas, lower value private accomodation, and hydroponic growing areas with artificial UV light, could occupy the interior, and it could be truncated at the top to allow a large park. There could also be a large water storage area near the top, to supply the inhabitants, water the plants, and for emergency use in fires, and to stabilize the temperature throughout. Also, the whole thing could rotate on giant bearings, so that all residents round the outside would get their fair share of sunshine, and to help equalize the temperature.
Given a few weeks I'm sure I could plan the whole thing down to the last detail! :-P
This could almost be a SimCity 2000 reference, but I have to admit that I remembered the much more depressing Night Land world first.
I'm not familiar with either of those. But I think with careful design a proposal similar to what I sketched would be better to live in, and more flexible for amenities, than giant vertical glass box skyscrapers.
I still think the arcologies of SimCity were pretty cool, even if I wouldn’t want to live in one.
What’s Night Land? Seems like a vaguely familiar reference.