Earlier this fall, the Silicon Valley dreamers proposing to construct a 400,000-person metropolis and manufacturing hub on rangeland 50 miles northeast of San Francisco launched an in depth rendition of their plan, which they name “California Forever.” It’s in contrast to something america has seen earlier than: exurban in location, intensely city by design.
The brand new metropolis can be laid out on a compact grid, with interlocking streets, rapid-transit routes and greenways for pedestrians and cyclists. Town’s least dense residential neighborhoods can be zoned for 85-foot condominium buildings, taller than basically each condominium constructing erected earlier than 1880. Home hunters will have the ability to buy row homes as in the event that they have been looking for actual property in nineteenth century Brooklyn, not in cookie-cutter suburban sprawl.
This imaginative and prescient — so distant and so dense — represents a stark break with what has usually bought properly on the exurban frontier. The Woodlands, Texas, one of the profitable exurban developments of the previous 50 years, is just 30 miles from Houston and is constructed overwhelmingly round single-family properties. Solely in radically underhoused California might you even think about promoting People flats which can be significantly farther away from present employment hubs.
But California Endlessly represents greater than a guess that the Bay Space’s excessive housing scarcity has created a sturdy marketplace for “super-commuters” primarily based within the Central Valley. Relatively, it’s an audacious effort to operationalize the final 30 years of analysis in city economics.
One lesson of this analysis is that “building up” in present neighborhoods is usually irksome to people dwelling close by. (Put your new metropolis some place else, should you can.)
Density productiveness
A second lesson, extra vital and fewer intuitive, is that packing extra individuals and companies right into a small geographic space makes everybody extra productive. Individuals who stay and work shut collectively be taught from one another. They’ll take entrepreneurial dangers, as a result of if one scheme doesn’t pan out, different alternatives await. Thick labor markets give employees bargaining energy and allow them to seek out the best employer. People and corporations additionally profit from sharing services which have excessive mounted prices to construct, resembling an opera home or airport. Economists name this package deal of benefits the “agglomeration benefits” of city density.
However there’s a catch: A small-scale developer who’s constructing a house or a small condominium constructing doesn’t seize the agglomeration advantages of the density they bring about. If the people who find themselves housed by the developer open a restaurant or give a employee a increase, the developer doesn’t profit. Unusual builders haven’t any declare on the proceeds of the town’s collective creativeness. Thus, left to their very own units, builders underinvest in density. NIMBY pressures make issues worse.
The massive guess of California Endlessly is that by buying sufficient land to construct a complete metropolis from scratch, the buyers can revenue from the economics of agglomeration. Their first row homes and flats could lose cash, however the ensuing inhabitants density will enhance the worth of the town’s downtown workplace and manufacturing districts.
As a result of the buyers who personal the residential land additionally personal the downtown and manufacturing areas, they’ll take into account the advantages a brand new constructing brings to the entire group, not simply what potential residents would pay to stay within the new constructing.
Proudly owning all of it additionally offers California Endlessly high-powered incentives to enhance colleges and public security, and to mitigate visitors congestion. In most large cities, well-meaning planners lack the assets and incentives to remove city gridlock. In California Endlessly, the buyers’ fortunes rely on creating an urbanism that soars.
If it ever will get began.
The roadblocks to founding a brand new metropolis are daunting. Virtually anyplace in america at the moment, a big growth requires approvals from quite a few native, state and generally federal businesses, every of which wields a veto. Analysis by certainly one of us finds that strict land-use regulation induces builders to pursue smaller tasks and in the end fragments the constructing trade. This reduces productiveness and innovation within the development sector.
NIMBYism entrenched
At a minimal, the California Endlessly undertaking would require approvals from one metropolis (Suisun), one county (Solano) and ultimately one state company (the California State Water Sources Management Board). Every approval triggers assessment underneath the California Environmental High quality Act and probably years of litigation and delay. A Solano County supervisor has already instructed California Endlessly, “Go somewhere else.” If she persuades two of her colleagues, the undertaking is lifeless.
California wants tens of millions of recent properties. The state has handed tons of of housing legal guidelines, but few have moved the needle on manufacturing. The forces of NIMBYism are deeply entrenched. California Endlessly might transmit Silicon Valley’s dynamism into the Central Valley, backed by buyers with incentives to develop an environment friendly and scalable group of dense city housing and high-tech manufacturing. Nobody metropolis or county should have an absolute veto over such an vital undertaking.
Clear-energy coverage provides a path ahead. In Massachusetts and California, lawmakers have developed “comprehensive permit” packages for power and transmission tasks of statewide significance. A single official underneath the governor makes the project-approval choice, after listening to suggestions from the numerous state and native actors that will historically have a veto over the undertaking.
The excellent allow mannequin ought to be prolonged to city growth tasks of statewide significance, together with California Endlessly. A era in the past, the California Supreme Court docket declared that native governments have a responsibility to heed their area’s wants. However expertise has proven that regionally elected officers are hardly ever good stewards of regional pursuits. A brand new state allowing pathway can open up tomorrow’s important experiments in city-building.
Chris Elmendorf is a professor of regulation at UC Davis. Ed Glaeser is a professor of economics at Harvard. ©2025 Los Angeles Occasions. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
