I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people flying over the vast American West for the first time exclaim: “Who says we don’t have plenty of room for millions more people? There’s nothing but empty space down there!”
Now, these are not necessarily people with master’s degrees in urban planning, to be sure. Empty space is one thing; water is another. The Mojave and Sonoran deserts don’t have a lot of it. Nor do Utah or West Texas, for that matter.
But those who came before us somehow built Los Angeles, for instance. Yes, their “Chinatown” scam famously stole the water from up north to do that, but needs must. There was a lot of water in the Eastern Sierra. Still is.
Could we build a California city today? We certainly need one—or five, or 10. There’s not enough housing for those of us here already, not to mention for our grandchildren. Civilizations have been building cities ever since we emerged from the caves. Can-do Americans can do anything we put our minds and backs to, right?
Wrong. You can’t build a new city in our state, at least not easily. A consortium of Silicon Valley billionaires calling itself California Forever has for years been trying to build a fairly large new city in the rural north near the Sacramento Delta. Once again this year, efforts to get the project going died in the state Legislature before its latest session ended this month.
“It’s just incredibly hard to do large projects in California,” Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, told The New York Times.
The pioneers who built the California cities in which we now live had their own obstacles to overcome. But they never encountered one as large as the bureaucracies we have created today.
The consortium trying to build in Solano County southwest of Davis is called California Forever. It proposes to put up not only a city of 400,000 residents, but also a shipyard and a manufacturing center that would create lots of jobs. The plan is flush with cash, with money from venture capitalists including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve. Labor unions like it, as does Gov. Gavin Newsom.
I like it, too. But along with navigating the crazy regulatory climate that faces anyone trying to build something—anything—in California, the group has also done pretty much everything wrong.
You don’t build trust among rural landowners, including some farming families in the area that have owned their acreage for over a century, by secretly and anonymously buying up property. But that’s what the company originally did as it assembled about 70,000 acres as a start.
Since no one would say what was going on, rumors started to circulate about foreign money being involved in the mysterious scheme. Another massive PR stumble: When the Times first reported on California Forever and some landowners collectively refused to sell, the company filed suit, claiming collusion among the current owners to get a better price for their farms.
Lawsuits never win friends.
Then, two years ago, California Forever planned to win approval for the city by putting a ballot issue up for a vote in Solano County. Polling showed that the initiative would fail at the polls, so the company stopped that effort. Now, one of the newer ideas is to get a quaint incorporated town called Suisun City to annex 23,000 acres of agricultural land to make development easier.
It’s a sweet idea: the city would feature low-rise, three-to-five-story buildings and lots of parks. But you know who’s not so popular these days? Tech moguls.
The state desperately needs new housing. But so far, this scheme is more like California Never.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.