The blog post doesn't do a good job of explaining why the best way to do this was some shadowy group, funded by tech billionaires, anonymously buying up a bunch of farmland.
If there were all these great ideas about incorporating a new city with different zoning laws, why not just go to some unincorporated land or very small city, live there, and get these changes voted in? Why does one company apparently need to own all the land and treat it as a master development?
> Why does one company apparently need to own all the land and treat it as a master development?
Likely because they wanted that full control and had the wealth to achieve it. They may want this for several reasons, like because generally people like having control, or maybe because they thought this had the fewest barriers to success.
Getting changes voted in can be difficult, even if the changes are objectively good: a) a small number of people are engaged enough to vote on municipal issues, b) sometime people are just suspicious of any change whatsoever and so reflexively vote to keep things the same, c) almost always there will be some people(s) who will not benefit from the change and will fight very hard to sabotage/corrupt/discredit it.
I have traveled all over the US several times over as part of my job for the last 8 years. I've stayed in, worked from, and explored way too many American cities.
Most American cities have a small walkable core, that is unaffordable for most, surrounded by affordable, but completely car-dependent, suburbs.
Public transportation in most of these walkable cores is a complete joke. Most rely on buses that don't go where you need to be and don't come often or reliably enough to build a routine around.
To wit: the only cities that I travel to that I can safely avoiding renting a car in are NYC, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Traveling to LITERALLY EVERY OTHER CITY requires calculating and pre-planning how long it will take to go places by bus or light rail (if they have it!), juxtaposing that against the customer I'll be visiting and destinations that look interesting, and ultimately concluding "yeah, a rental car's easier." Mind you, I LOVE walking and can walk miles and miles per day when given the option!
The suburbs that run rampant throughout the US don't have sidewalks, cluster everything you need into shopping centers (with comical parking lot sizes that, you guessed it, is completely unsafe to walk through because of cars driving all over it) and have road plans that encourage high-speed traffic feeds into large highways/freeways at the cost of making walking completely infeasible.
(Oh, right, and flying 15+ mph past these already bonkers high speed limits is so completely normal, that driving the actual speed limit becomes dangerous! Imagine riding your bike on a two-lane 45mph road with no sidewalks or shoulder where the drivers behind you would travel 60mph on if given the chance. Aggression central. That was my life for two years. Worst two years of my life in that aspect.)
But, hey, you can get a huge (2400+ sq. ft.) house "for the kids", a yard for the dogs and kids to "safely" run around it, and a two-car garage to store an ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE amount of pure crap with your mandatory cars parked in front of it for less than $350,000!
This becomes increasingly true the more Southern the city is.
I don't have data to back this, but I strongly believe that the modern suburb is THE driving force behind the increased divisiveness our country is experiencing (or the maxim of the divisiveness that has always existed within this country). The suburbs are designed from their core to separate and isolate, a feature only exacerbated by the infinite stream of entertainment that today's Internet provides. Community only happens naturally when people are close to each other, and that just doesn't happen within suburbs.
Having grown up in an extremely walkable city (outside the US) with top notch public transportation, neighborhood markets, farmer's markets, entertainment options and cultural activities, I'm so thankful for being able to escape that anthill and live in a hardcore Southern suburban cookie-cutter neighborhood where I can enjoy peace, quiet, birds, my man-cave+home theater and comprehensive shopping options that don't require me to literally fight people for parking.
It's great that you get to enjoy birds and your home theater. Birds are amazing.
That shouldn't be the _only_ option for people trying to buy an affordable SFH that isn't an apartment the size of a closet.
I also don't think suburbs shouldn't exist at the cost of walkability. We lived in a modern suburb for two years. Parking was easy (driving to the parking was horrible), but I absolutely hated that walking anywhere was completely infeasible.
Early suburbs were smaller, highly walkable and had (smaller) single family homes. I grew up in such a suburb after my first years in NYC. Our house was small (by today's standards), but I walked to school, walked to the main strip to hang out with friends and took the bus to the mall (though its schedule sucked) and to NYC (when I began working).
Love the idea and lived in London to experience this. Amazing way to work but long term living is expensive as everyone wants to live like this, the photos shared in the article in London and Amsterdam are some of the most expensive places to reside. I believe what many feel is this is just another development exclusively for the $500k+/yr family and ultimately will lead to more traffic congestion for the surrounding areas and less affordability for surrounding towns.
As others have commented why not redevelop existing cities, rather than creating more urban sprawl? If bureaucracy/corruption in local government is a problem then fund politicians and get voters out to change this. Why arent feds involved in redevelopment? SF/Oakland/Berkeley are nowhere near the dense living of europe but they are going in the right direction. The problem these cities have is they simply arent run very well and have weak leadership that flop along with whatever the current thing is.
I lived in Rio Vista. Which is already a quiet, picturesque and walkable town on the river with a laid back country vibe. Surrounding it are cute farms, green hills, and windmills, with an immense amount of culture up and down the Delta dating back to the gold rush.
So the plan is to take this beautiful place, build block apartments and take one of the last parts of the SF Bay that’s both affordable and hasn’t been trashed, and turn it into a psycho developer wet dream. Honestly, screw these people, their propaganda, and everything they stand for.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 34.8 ms ] threadIf there were all these great ideas about incorporating a new city with different zoning laws, why not just go to some unincorporated land or very small city, live there, and get these changes voted in? Why does one company apparently need to own all the land and treat it as a master development?
Likely because they wanted that full control and had the wealth to achieve it. They may want this for several reasons, like because generally people like having control, or maybe because they thought this had the fewest barriers to success.
Getting changes voted in can be difficult, even if the changes are objectively good: a) a small number of people are engaged enough to vote on municipal issues, b) sometime people are just suspicious of any change whatsoever and so reflexively vote to keep things the same, c) almost always there will be some people(s) who will not benefit from the change and will fight very hard to sabotage/corrupt/discredit it.
I have traveled all over the US several times over as part of my job for the last 8 years. I've stayed in, worked from, and explored way too many American cities.
Most American cities have a small walkable core, that is unaffordable for most, surrounded by affordable, but completely car-dependent, suburbs.
Public transportation in most of these walkable cores is a complete joke. Most rely on buses that don't go where you need to be and don't come often or reliably enough to build a routine around.
To wit: the only cities that I travel to that I can safely avoiding renting a car in are NYC, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Traveling to LITERALLY EVERY OTHER CITY requires calculating and pre-planning how long it will take to go places by bus or light rail (if they have it!), juxtaposing that against the customer I'll be visiting and destinations that look interesting, and ultimately concluding "yeah, a rental car's easier." Mind you, I LOVE walking and can walk miles and miles per day when given the option!
The suburbs that run rampant throughout the US don't have sidewalks, cluster everything you need into shopping centers (with comical parking lot sizes that, you guessed it, is completely unsafe to walk through because of cars driving all over it) and have road plans that encourage high-speed traffic feeds into large highways/freeways at the cost of making walking completely infeasible.
(Oh, right, and flying 15+ mph past these already bonkers high speed limits is so completely normal, that driving the actual speed limit becomes dangerous! Imagine riding your bike on a two-lane 45mph road with no sidewalks or shoulder where the drivers behind you would travel 60mph on if given the chance. Aggression central. That was my life for two years. Worst two years of my life in that aspect.)
But, hey, you can get a huge (2400+ sq. ft.) house "for the kids", a yard for the dogs and kids to "safely" run around it, and a two-car garage to store an ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE amount of pure crap with your mandatory cars parked in front of it for less than $350,000!
This becomes increasingly true the more Southern the city is.
I don't have data to back this, but I strongly believe that the modern suburb is THE driving force behind the increased divisiveness our country is experiencing (or the maxim of the divisiveness that has always existed within this country). The suburbs are designed from their core to separate and isolate, a feature only exacerbated by the infinite stream of entertainment that today's Internet provides. Community only happens naturally when people are close to each other, and that just doesn't happen within suburbs.
That shouldn't be the _only_ option for people trying to buy an affordable SFH that isn't an apartment the size of a closet.
I also don't think suburbs shouldn't exist at the cost of walkability. We lived in a modern suburb for two years. Parking was easy (driving to the parking was horrible), but I absolutely hated that walking anywhere was completely infeasible.
Early suburbs were smaller, highly walkable and had (smaller) single family homes. I grew up in such a suburb after my first years in NYC. Our house was small (by today's standards), but I walked to school, walked to the main strip to hang out with friends and took the bus to the mall (though its schedule sucked) and to NYC (when I began working).
Why can't more suburbs be like this?
As others have commented why not redevelop existing cities, rather than creating more urban sprawl? If bureaucracy/corruption in local government is a problem then fund politicians and get voters out to change this. Why arent feds involved in redevelopment? SF/Oakland/Berkeley are nowhere near the dense living of europe but they are going in the right direction. The problem these cities have is they simply arent run very well and have weak leadership that flop along with whatever the current thing is.
So the plan is to take this beautiful place, build block apartments and take one of the last parts of the SF Bay that’s both affordable and hasn’t been trashed, and turn it into a psycho developer wet dream. Honestly, screw these people, their propaganda, and everything they stand for.