California Forever should’ve been government-led from the start
New cities on the edge of fantastically expensive regions aren’t particularly radical in the global context. What’s radical is the U.S. government’s disinterest in urban development.
They wanted to move fast and build things. Instead, they’ll have to tread carefully and negotiate.
Last month, California Forever, the company behind a plan to build a city of 400,000 people on the fringes of the Bay Area, pulled its referendum from the November ballot in Solano County. The project, funded by a who’s who of tech billionaires, was probably forced to pull its initiative by necessity. Polling suggested the measure would lose in a landslide. Instead, the developer will work with local elected officials to draft a new plan, in the hopes of putting forward a ballot initiative in 2026.
There was a great deal of premature dancing on top of California Forever’s grave by opponents of the new city. In reality, it’s way too early to say what will become of this project.
But it is now clear that California Forever tried to do things backwards. There’s a reason why, in other countries, governments are virtually always the entities that spearhead the development of new cities and new urban neighborhoods. Securing public buy-in, weighing economic and ecological tradeoffs, connecting to transportation and utility networks—these are hard problems that government is specifically designed to address.
Unfortunately, in the U.S., the government has almost completely exited the home-building and urban development business. That leaves a void in housing-starved places like the Bay Area, which California Forever was all too eager to fill.
What California Forever proposes—a new city on the periphery of a fantastically expensive region—isn’t particularly radical in the context of global urbanism. What’s radical is that, faced with such a severe housing crisis, the state or federal government didn’t propose its own, superior version of California Forever first.
California leaders have done an admirable job of making it easier to build housing in existing urban neighborhoods. Other high-cost states, like New York and Massachusetts, have likewise encouraged more infill development. Those policies are just beginning to bear fruit, as cities like San Diego post new highs in housing production. But these efforts are still far, far short of addressing pent up housing needs. In 2023, 112,000 new homes were constructed in California,, roughly one-third of the state’s annual housing production goal. The Texas model of unfettered sprawl development can work to bring down housing costs, but it’s not always possible in mountainous or coastal regions, nor is it ecologically or economically desirable.
A different model is percolating in Hawaii. Here, the state government is pushing ahead with a concept known as social housing: government-built housing that’s available to people across the income distribution. The state has already begun the process of redeveloping roughly 1,000 low-density public housing units into nearly 11,000 social housing units across nine sites. Much has been made of the politics and economics behind this form of housing tenure. But there’s been less talk of the urbanism of Hawaii’s plans. State Senator Stanley Chang, the leading champion of social housing in Hawaii, envisions “forests of towers” with thousands of residents next to the newly opened metro stations in the Honolulu suburbs.
“We're very fortunate with the Skyline [metro system], because the state is the largest land owner along the Skyline and most of the stations are on parcels where there's a potential for large-scale redevelopment,” he said in a recent interview. “With this proposal, we can credibly say not one inch of existing greenfield agricultural conservation land will ever be touched.”
While radical in the U.S., this concept is normal in other countries. Chang was inspired to develop this program after visiting Singapore, which addressed its housing shortage through a massive social housing program characterized by towers surrounding transit stations.
In northern and central Europe, most major cities are undertaking government-led urban expansion projects, says Michael Eliason, a Seattle-based architect and housing activist who previously worked in Germany. Most of these projects are on “brownfields,” former airports, ports, or other post-industrial lands, as compared to “greenfield” development on formerly natural or agricultural land.
“Cities themselves have real estate teams in their government that spearhead the planning, design, and implementation of these projects,” Eliason says. These projects nearly always entail an expansion of the local transit system if there isn’t transit access already. And even though they typically involve partnerships with private developers, these projects always include a high percentage of affordable or social housing.
At Oberbillwerder, a new neighborhood with as many of 7,000 homes being built on the periphery of Hamburg, one-third of units will be subsidized for low-income households, one-third will be market-rate rentals, and another third will be for-sale townhomes and condos. One of the largest social housing projects is Aspern Seestadt, a new neighborhood for 26,000 residents being built on a former airfield outside Vienna. Despite being very high density, about half of the land at Seestadt will be open space, as part of the designers’ vision of creating a feminist neighborhood with lots of playgrounds, ground floor shops, and high-visibility walking trails.
The United Kingdom, which has a housing crisis as bad, if not worse, than the one in the U.S., is now looking to copy these continental projects. The new Labour government has revived the nation’s postwar New Towns program that built 32 communities collectively housing millions of people. The new New Towns initiative will be designed to house 1.5 million people, in a collection of communities of at least 10,000 residents apiece. These will be from-scratch greenfield cities or extensions of existing cities; but all will adhere to design and sustainability standards currently being developed by the government. All New Towns will offer 40% of homes at below market rates.
Cambridge, the UK’s tech hub, with one of the worst housing crunches in the country, is farthest along in its planning for a new town. The local government has proposed establishing a “new urban quarter,” housing as many as 150,000 residents, which would roughly double the city’s current population. No locations or designs have been released, but Cambridge planners say they’re inspired by the growth patterns in Freiburg, Germany, which built urban extensions as “eco-districts” connected to the old city by tram lines.
California Forever resembles these other projects in its scale and ambition and perhaps even in its urban design, with its renderings of a medium-density, walkable, bikeable metropolis. But the similarities end there. California Forever is far from existing population centers. It’s being built on greenfield land. It’s not integrated with regional transit—at least not initially. And it will have a smaller proportion of affordable housing than its peers around the world, since government-owned real estate companies don’t need to make a profit.
Ironically, now that the government is involved in California Forever, it’s possible the project will get worse, not better. Mitch Mashburn, chair of the Solano County board of supervisors, told the Los Angeles Times that he expects California Forever will look quite different from what was initially proposed. “We’re starting over from scratch,” he said. “There are some incredible obstacles that have to be overcome.”
(Notably, Mashburn has also said, "Many Solano residents are excited about Mr. Sramek's optimism about a California that builds again… We cannot solve our jobs, housing, and energy challenges if every project takes a decade or more to break ground.")
Right now, local government in the U.S., and particularly in California, is set up to shrink or block urban development projects, not lead them. The levers of the urban development process—zoning, environmental review, community engagement—tend to facilitate smaller projects than developers would like to build, or which the economic fundamentals demand. Local residents, in turn, have grown accustomed to a political system whose core function is keeping the cityscape largely as it is.
In Germany, Eliason says, governments have the opposite orientation. When introducing a project to the public, government agencies begin with the premise that “this needs to be built,” he said. Public engagement flows from that mutual understanding as the public weighs in on competing designs, not whether the project should be built.
“In the US. public engagement becomes like a bully veto,” Eliason says. “It makes it really difficult to do bigger projects.”
This article originally appeared in Fast Company. It is republished here with permission.
Interesting to read the German approach. One systemic difference is that in the US we treat homes as investments. That's a big reason why Americans are so bothered by changes that could threaten their home values and by more housing supply in the market. In contrast, Germany's homeownership rate ranks among the lowest in the developed world.