I understand the skepticism and all, but I’ve seen something similar-ish work in South Lake Union in Seattle.
It was a wasted neighborhood, with parking lots, old motels, fast food, and a Hooters.
Two billionaires that I’m not super fond of, Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos, put a bunch of money on the line to make a pretty nice, walkable area, with restaurants and parks and whatnot. I’m glad they did.
Who knows if these people can pull this off - it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t - but I wish them the best.
It was a wasted neighborhood because Vulcan bought it all up and then sat on it for years while the land appreciated.
There was a good Joeys, Chandler’s crab house, and more which died during the wait. Now it’s Amazon central with carbon copies of restaurants from other places and ridiculous lines. Not a locals spot. It does look better now, and is walkable during work, but to find many day-to-day basic services requires leaving the neighborhood.
Originally there was a Central Park plan that Vulcan proposed, but when that didn’t pan out they gave up on development for a couple decades.
Denny Park used to be a huge green space for gathering, with outdoor movies and concerts, but those parcels have been bought from the city and sold against the wish of the commons. They’ve also closed the basketball courts (!?).
> The person at most fault for the failure of the Seattle Commons is Paul Allen. The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft asked voters to approve $250 million in new taxes to build the park. During the second Commons campaign Allen made $1 billion during a stock rally on a single day.
> the Commons-less SLU is a neighborhood without a center, a heart, or a great park.
> The person at most fault for the failure of the Seattle Commons is Paul Allen. The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft asked voters to approve $250 million in new taxes to build the park. During the second Commons campaign Allen made $1 billion during a stock rally on a single day.
This is extremely dishonest reporting. So what that he made a billion in a single day? He probably also lost a billion some other day...
If he didn't make a billion in a day, would he not be at fault for the failure?
Vulcan removed commons areas and built a limited amount of housing that they profit from. In 2013 Amazon had 15,000 employees in Seattle. Now they employ 55,000 at the downtown Seattle campus.
California, legendary NIMBYs included, built the most prosperous and popular state in the nation, with its largest and fastest growing companies, with more innovation and scientific discovery than any other part of the country, with by far the best public university system in the country, and with maximal tolerance for immigrants and people with uncommon religious beliefs, sexual and gender inclinations, and approaches to work and life generally.
It was historically flexible enough about development to accommodate more people than any other state. I wouldn’t be so cynical as to think that greenfield development in a place where basically no one is now will not win over a substantial part of the population (even if some of the supporters would oppose the project if it was in their own metaphorical backyard).
As an ex Californian I know as well as anyone how easy it can be to take the state’s many unique strengths for granted when you live there. But believe me, you miss a lot of it when you leave, and you also realize most other states face similar problems, or will, including with nimbyism, homelessness, addiction, you name it.
California is great and retains the capacity to surprise. And I think one of the strongest pieces of evidence for that is even the critics building this development away from everyone else in the state still called it California Forever.
the californians who made california are mostly dead now, have you been paying attention? prop 13, no housing ever, all transit projects + HSR ruined by local politics and deep suited corruption etc etc. california is circling the drain.
think how great california could have been if it hadn't stopped growing and the immense economic output had been harnessed over the past decades. SF would be amongst the largest cities in the world.
That sounds like a worse alternate history, there's no way SF could retain what made it unique if it became 'amongst the largest cities in the world'.
For example, even if only 10% of new residents insisted on driving a car no matter what for daily transportation, due to whatever personal reasons, then that would still be enough to put the city in permanent gridlock all day.
In case anyone is curious, private automobile use went up by 13% from 2019 to 2021 (and by even more since 2017). Driving alone is the most popular form of travel, followed by Uber/Lyft.
Residents don't "insist on driving" in a vacuum. You build the city you want and people move into it. If you don't build car habitats, you won't get cars.
Anyway, SF has desicively destroyed whatever formerly made it unique. The arts community has been extirpated by the housing cost crisis. Even the gay rights activists don't live there any more. The whole city has been hollowed out by Boomers like Cleve Jones who live elsewhere and maintain their vacant pieds-à-terre in prime SF neighborhoods.
Plenty of room. Panhandle upper deck, pave Dolores and GG parks. Bulldoze The Mission and Hayes like the Fillmore was... Plenty of room for flying car landing pads and Manhattanization. Utopia denied.
The problem will not be so severe if the problem was not both ways, nimbys and developers.
I remember Sunnyvale downtown projects were abandoned you can explain it but the reality is they (developers and city) did not meet their commitments and it leaves a bad taste. I saw aggressive campaigning myself in front of Cupertino library which was in line with reports of aggression and manhandling that the opposition to Valco talked about. And I supported the NIMBYs even though I was a renter because the opposition was just so ham handed.
So when citizens feel overpowered, in mega cities they don't have much choice but in mini cities they can have a say, and they do revolt and get called nimbys. If we had double the nimbys maybe the construction corporates will try a better faith negotiation with them. No?
I wouldn't exactly call SLU a "neighborhood." They chased out the poor people who used to live there, built Amazon's headquarters and a bunch of ugly condos and apartments that will probably fall down in a decade.
If SLU is your model for what California Forever could be... uh... I don't think that many people will willingly choose to live there.
This holding is 500x larger than SLU and has zero access to any infrastructure. SLU is a kilometer from the center of a top-10 American city. Apples and oranges.
Was there ever a hooters in SLU? I only remember the Red Robin, as a seattlite, I didn’t even see a Hooters until I did an internship in Florida in 1995.
It was on the first floor under (and predated) the Joey’s. That area used to be an awesome spot to watch floatplanes take off and land while having happy hour.
Now the Kraken office took over the Joey restaurant spot. And nothing is in the Hooters or Chandlers locations. Duke’s also moved out of that dock area to a larger location east but the service leaves something to be desired.
That sounds like after my time then. I left the Seattle in 1998 for grad school, and didn’t get to see how SLU evolved in the next 10 years (just moved back in 2017, so knew before and after, but not during).
The story of how Irvine went from a 93000 acre ranch in the 1960s to one of the largest cities in California is fascinating. Donald Bren, the sole owner of the Irvine Company, is now the wealthiest real estate developer in the US. It might have some parallels with how Solano county will evolve, assuming this plan goes through.
The Big Plan: History of Irvine and UCI, From Ranch to Global Community
Isn't Irvine full of strip malls, copy/paste corporate restaurants / chains and lack identity or urban planning (With public transit, lots of parks, walk-ability)?
I fail to see why we would hail Irvine as a great city when it's just a money maker for the Irvine company as a generic suburb.
They just happened to develop land that was in high demand due to its proximity to the coast, what else does it have going for it?
Irvine decided to put a 'strip mall' next to every major development so almost any house in irvine is a 10 minute walk from a grocery store and a handful of fast casual restaurants.
They've also created a very popular 'urban-esque' area by the Irvine Spectrum, where numerous automotive HQs are, Amazon has a large presence, all within walking distance of a huge number of mid rise apartments.
>I fail to see why we would hail Irvine as a great city
It's one of the most popular places right now to move to. It may not be your preference, but it seems it's popular enough to have prices go through the roof.
> almost any house in irvine is a 10 minute walk from a grocery store and a handful of fast casual restaurants.
How many people actually walk in Irvine? Based on the number of highways and lanes through Irvine, you will have a very difficult time convincing me it's different from most suburbs where you leave your house and jump into a car to do anything.
Putting a "grocery store" or a "handful" of restaurants near a home is useless is they don't want to use that store or restaurant. I end up having to drive 15-30 minutes RT to get to a TJ's or ALDI because the Ralph's where I live is incredibly overpriced and has horrible selection of fresh fruits and veggies.
> It's one of the most popular places right now to move to
Where is the data for this claim? The data I see doesn't list OC as growing. [1]
The only articles saying Irvine is one of the fastest growing cities is usually local Irvine news sites and they don't even cite any data for the last year. [2]
You should look at home price growth for California in the last 15 years, Irvine isn't even in the top. The Bay Area, parts of LA and San Diego lead the pack in price increases.
You might not be aware because you haven't looked for a home in the last 10 years?
You can’t look at aggregate city trends, especially given that it is trendy for builders to focus on high end or luxury.
According to redfin the city I live in (adjacent to Irvine) is in the top 10 in California but that is only because there have been a rapid rise of new developments that are significantly more sq ft than the average house.
The right metric is to check YoY model matches in various neighborhoods to see, but that isn’t reported on.
> full of strip malls, copy/paste corporate restaurants / chains and lack identity or urban planning (With public transit, lots of parks, walk-ability)?
That sounds like ideal American suburb which a lot of Americans seem to prefer. If not, by now we would have seen it getting decayed.
> as a generic suburb
What's wrong with generic suburbs?
> They just happened to develop land that was in high demand due to its proximity to the coast
Seems to fit description of this new place too (proximity to SV and SF)
A lot of what's wrong with generic suburbs is that they're not paying enough to cover their expenses (Prop 13 in CA) and the infrastructure that supports them is indeed decaying.
Of course a lot of people prefer their expenses get subsidized.
Meh. We almost got arrested when we walked into a movie together holding hands in Irvine. After 10 minutes of harassment by the mall-cops they eventually let us go.
Word of warning, Irving is not a safe space for queer folk.
lol. I think I typed "Irving" when I meant "Irvine".
You would think that Irving (in the heart of the D/FW metroplex) would be a place you would encounter homophobia, given the popular opinion of Texas. But people there seemed to not care who I was holding hands with.
I understand why it is so, but it’s weird that this is framed as a way to help Solano county residents with their immediate term problems when it’s pretty blatantly intended to be a new technology hub. It mentions jobs but you know… not what kind of jobs, or how Solano county residents will fill them.
I guess they had to scramble to hire some PR firm to spin their plans to Solano County residents and had to come up with something. But completely glossing over what they actually intend to do - attract techies and technology jobs - seems kind of like an insult to the intelligence of the people this is addressed to.
1) there are technology workers in solano county that commute to walnut creek or SF. 2) technology workers spend money at local restaurants. Workers in solano county that work in service industry jobs with 60 minute commutes to napa, walnut creek, or SF for high wages instead have well paying job opportunities within a 20 minute commute.
Everything a rural county can produce is a necessary input for a city. There will be some new jobs, cities have all kinds of jobs that a rural area doesn't need. And there will be some increased need for the existing jobs.
I kind of tend to agree with your skepticism / consternation broadly, but it does give _some_ indication as towards the types of jobs:
> This project can bring new employers to Solano, and independently create thousands of permanent, good-paying local jobs in construction, energy, services, and other industries. We are also interested in building trade schools and other educational paths that help Solano residents learn the skills they need to get those new jobs and build long-lasting careers
My ideal community is a college campus. I know there's a lot not to like, but they've ruined regular cities and towns for me.
Perfectly manicured lawns and open green spaces. Everyone has a purpose. Housing and facilities are planned to meet needs. Walkable environment where cars are often times banned. Wifi everywhere. Health services are provided for all residents. Maker spaces are still a thing on campuses providing access to fabrication equipment, 3d printers, etc. Libraries with access to any book or journal article you could want. There's a strong sense of community and comradery - even strangers feel connected to one another. Even the police are nicer, as they try to build a lot of good will with the community.
It's easy to meet people and engage in activities and hobbies. You can walk to a show put on by the local orchestra or drama group, go to a game played by the local team, eat food prepared by the local culinary students, or visit an art exhibition featuring world-famous or local artists. Or you can get involved in any of these activities by playing music or sports or making art!
And that's not to mention the world-class lectures and research that happen all the time.
When I graduated and went into the "real world" I was isolated and alone. Everything felt so chaotic and unorganized, and a huge step down from the kind of close community I was used to. In the "real world" everything seems centered around commerce and consumerism instead of people. I was unable to find anything like I had experienced in college, so I just went back and never left.
The ideal housing is an overpriced community of highly aspirational young people that effectively violates federal housings laws by pretending elderly people and families with young children don't exist?
I dont see how it scales outside of a college community.
Well I don't know about other places, but for us we have a daycare on campus that's affordable and available for anyone in the community. We have family housing that is multigenerational (many international students bring their parents with them and they live together). We have plenty of older community members of course - many of our teaching faculty are retirees, and emeritus professors are some of the oldest people on the planet!
Scaling is a problem though, that's for sure, although many colleges are in fact towns outright (like Penn State). However, there's a big incentive for colleges to turn into hedge funds/real-estate holding firms which works against the educational mission of universities IMO.
As for overpriced... I mean, you get what you pay for. I don't think it's overpriced because I've tried the alternative, and I've found it lacking. Although I see several avenues to cut costs while keeping service levels.
But if you think college campuses are just for the students, you're missing half the picture!
In the California suburb I live in (read: you need to drive everywhere) my rent is more than twice as much as what I paid on my walkable college campus.
The college I went to FINALLY tore down the slums south of campus (I guess maybe that was the city that condemned them) and built more, affordable student housing. It only took them 100 years.
I guess my point is, even college administrators from Texas can eventually learn that affordable housing for students and staff can be a benefit.
I was going to say "meh. you have to try harder," but the last paragraph made sense to me. The "real world" will make you feel isolated and alone unless you put in A LOT of work to find a social / friends group. And I think you have a point that college campuses are sort of set up to make socializing easier (if not easy.)
So... congrats... you changed someone's opinion on HN comments. I'm not sure it happens THAT often.
Agreed, suburban US lifestyle really aggravates that sense of isolation.
You go from your two car garage to Costco and back on an SUV with nothing in between but roads, gas stations and the occasional McDonald's drive-through.
A college campus and smaller European towns are the polar opposite of that, with mixed zoning, everything being walkable/bikeable, and everybody intermingling in the same space.
Here's a random musing: I recently thought about joining a fraternal organization just to have a ready-made friends group. Granted, they all seem WAY more extrovert than me, and the group is one of the ones with a mystos, so I don't think it's going to be a solution for EVERYBODY.
Maybe we need something like "Tech Masons" where you have a built-in social group, continuing ed and everyone promises not to disrespect each others' tech stack decisions. "Oh. So you're going with COBOL? I'm sure there are aspects of the project I don't understand that make COBOL the ideal language for that project. Let us grab a beer and talk about inverting trees, brother (and/or sister.)"
Those roads have plenty between the gas stations and McDonald's - other people's McMansions. The reason everything is so spread out is so that everyone can get their 4-bedroom house with the car garage and a generous yard, possibly a pool. Which is what kills density. It's a tragedy of the Commons, in part, because it's a problem because everyone was sold that same dream.
And how will kids be supported on such a campus? Among the ones I have seen, there were hardly any amenities (daycares, playgrounds, preschools and schools) for kids. Also, loud parties every weekend.
Well, all campuses are different. But see my reply to the other person who asked about that. We do have playgrounds, and a daycare for all, and 500 acres of athletic fields for football, soccer, cross country, lacrosse, baseball, etc. There's a community garden as well that kids get involved with to learn about gardening.
As for schools, there is an elementary, middle, and high school within a 3 block radius of the campus. Obviously these are funded by the city, but a lot of that funding of course comes from the school and employees through their taxes, so it's a symbiotic relationship. Many faculty here make it their mission to outreach to these local schools. We have events for children all summer long where they engage in physics, chemistry, computer science / robotics, environmental engineering, art, and music projects etc.
Loud parties are annoying but are only held off campus. There are noise ordinances on campus.
Quote from the website: "Our goal is to build homes of different sizes and price points integrated in the same walkable neighborhoods, with homes, shopping, dining, and schools all within walking distance. We are also interested in exploring new paths to homeownership for Solano residents through down-payment assistance programs and other solutions"
This sounds a lot like a community development project. This sounds very similar to other community development projects like Levittown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown
I don't think the investors in this project are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts even though the brochure website seems to imply that. If I am not mistaken this is a money making venture. They will provide value however by investing and building up Solano.
Redlining is awful, but it's sad that is really the only topic of discussion in that article. I'd like to know more about how they turned out, how they were received at the time, etc.
The wikipedia link above (that I assume you are talking about) says in part:
Built after World War II for returning white veterans and their new families, the communities offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city locations and apartments.
This is not accurate. World War II was the de facto end of The Great Depression and to their shock they were able to produce "more guns and more butter" because unemployment rates had been as high as 30 percent in the previous decade.
There was a tremendous need for housing. During the Great Depression, some people lived in the basement of their house and rented out the house to try to not lose the house. Others moved every thirteen months because if you could pay your rent on time and in full for twelve months in a row, you could get the thirteenth months free.
Levittown was the birth of the modern suburb and it helped resolve a massive need for new housing. It was so successful, we are still haunted by this ghost of Christmas past.
The entire country turned its collective will away from the newly finished war and towards building new housing. They created new policies and financing mechanisms and to this day it is challenging to build anything in the US other than suburban-style single family detached homes because our entire financing and policy infrastructure and collective subconscious supports the idea that a home in the 'burbs is the ideal home.
So we have grown 1950s-style suburban homes to be ugly homes on steroids, a la McMansions, and can't manage to build much else and then we wonder why there are so many homeless.
We are victims of the overwhelming success of Levittown.
I'm aware that racism tended to exclude people of color. I don't think this had much to do with it being the suburbs. If we had built towers of apartments in downtowns, I imagine redlining would have still kept out people of color.
Racism is not why they were suburbs. Them being suburbs is not primarily why people of color were excluded. Racism is people being shitty and they were going to be shitty in this particular way in that particular era regardless of the style of home which helped fill the overwhelming need this country had for additional housing and it finally had the means to build some of that for at least some people.
That's an...interesting take on redlining that avoids the shitty parts of the aforementioned "shittiness". The issue isn't simply that the shittiness exists, but how it's lead to current economic outcomes.
No, it doesn't. It just says that hating on suburbs because they are associated with racism doesn't fix it, so please don't get all up in my business about how much you associate suburbs with white supremacist shittiness.
That shittiness would have been associated with any housing type they built at that time to solve the housing issue. Sorry for the negative association and I wish we would find a path forward on more diversity in housing options, more walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, more genuinely affordable small spaces, more homes where you can easily live without a car, etc. instead of remaining mired in this same argument about who to blame and who to hate on.
Hating on me doesn't get more housing built. Full stop.
So please kindly find something else to say about my comment. Because this take is not productive.
Moral grandstanding on behalf of historically questionable narratives doesn’t get more housing built either, no matter how much righteous indignation is feigned.
I don't think you understand what a NIMBY is. They're fine with housing developments, halfway houses, public works projects, etc as long as they are "not in their backyard". Everything you're saying is 100% compatible with them, and in fact you're describing the exact hypocrisy for which they are labeled "NIMBY". Many are liberals who avowedly support statewide legislation for these things and then make the actual implementation of them impossible by constantly putting up legal red tape around their "backyards".
So, to reiterate, you're literally just describing a NIMBY.
Don't forget the intermediate step: startup employees rent housing in SF, rental income goes to local landlords who bought their property after working for VC backed startups in a previous generation
One thing their website looks rather short of is discussion of transport links other than roads.
I know that public transport is currently considered a scary hellhole by the Bay Area HN crowd, but it seems to me that train links to the rest of the Bay Area are a no brainer for a major new community not that far from it.
according to the map in this SF Chronicle, the southern end of 'California Forever' is just a stones throw from Antioch/Pitsburg bart. Ideally California Forever would make a light rail system. And Ideally that light rail system would connect with Bart by crossing the Sacramento River. This would make 'California Forever' well connected with rest of Bay Area.
Well it’s a cycle. Public transport is underfunded (somehow people think it needs to be profitable like a business rather than a public service like a school) which leads to degradation of quality which leads to decreased ridership which leads to funding cuts. All this while the infrastructure ages and doesn’t keep up with the places people need to go.
On top of all this, almost all American cities are built for cars. They are too spread out for public transport to be efficient. That said, buses are an underrated public transportation method, which although much less sexy than a metro, are adaptable and have far less overhead than a subway line.
There appears to be both a major freight line running close to the north as well as Amtrak and BART line across the river to the south. Certainly plenty of options to link up. Essential to keep trucks out of a European-style walkable city. I am quite excited to see what they come up with. Perhaps something like what Disney originally intended for EPCOT center. (Cue IGY by Donald Fagan, but maybe not so cynical lol)
> Something has killed enthusiasm and ambition for a better future in many of us.
The billionaires backing this aren't doing it for "a better future". I think the mixed/cynical feelings on this are understandable given that billionaires are rarely (ever?) doing anything with a primary goal of the betterment of humanity, whatever their expensive PR may say. That leaves a lot of room for speculation as to their real motives, i.e. how they'll get a return on this investment.
What's the transit story? The commute from Solano to the Bay is already miserable. While this seeks to keep jobs in Solano, people are going to want/need to get to SF. There's already train lines, but they're slow and underfunded.
Based on the map in the SF Chronicle article, the southern part of city is a stone's throw from Pittsburg Antioch Bart. Might be wishful thinking, but hopefully this is what brings bart to Solana county. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/solano-fairfield...
I imagine that part will be hard given that it will require the surrounding region bureaucracies to play ball, and we know how well that went when it was attempted for CA's High-speed rail.
This is the beginning of our decades-long collaboration with Solano’s residents, elected officials and agencies, as well as the many Solano stakeholders, including Travis Air Force Base, labor, business, agriculture, educators, police, fire, conservation, and many others.
For some decades now, the federal government has periodically made noises about closing Travis AFB. It could serve its mission from anywhere on the West Coast and, last I checked, it was one of two Superfund sites in Solano County.
In IIRC 2018, Amtrak opened a new train station near Travis AFB in line with Solano County's rail plan which was cooked up by the incorporated cities getting together and dividing up the political pie, then hiring a consultant to "pick the best sites for new stations* for each city in question.
In other words, it was not the consultant's job to pick the best rail station sites for the county as a whole. Furthermore, Travis AFB, not being an incorporated city, had no representation at this meeting.
Encroachment is a major factor in deciding to close military installations. Their already built station makes it more likely that Travis will eventually be closed.
It is -- or was when I lived there -- the single largest employer in the county to the tune of a billion dollars annually. This will gut the economy of the county, leave it with a Superfund site to clean up that will be challenging to redevelop and likely create a new Superfund site wherever they decide to relocate the functions of Travis.
Other than that minor detail, it sounds like a nice little plan. I wish them luck.
I welcome competition to the towns between SF and San Jose. They are very expensive to live in, and the amount of municipal taxes I pay for bad public schools is scandalous. I suspect bad governance that managed to get away with it because of tech money and the good times rolling.
An earlier utopia where my grandmother and her 8 siblings grew up. Her father is the namesake of Andersen Road in the Montezuma Hills. Her husband was a merchant seaman, captain, on the Sacramento Delta.
I keep thinking that as people lose faith in regular cities they are going to want to live in a Disneyland. Reminds me of Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Traveling into the general city outside the gates was a big deal.
What this "California Forever" proposal most reminds me of though is "Golden Oaks", which is Disney's latest attempt, less like a city, more like a large-scale retirement community.
Having visited Celebration, Florida, it actually looks pretty nice. However, I seem to recall reading that people ended up doing a lot of driving to big box stores to buy things at a reasonable price.
I don’t see a problem with it. Cities are machines that need an overarching plan to be optimized. They don’t just happen. Expecting them to just happen is how you get a disaster like LA.
A book I recommend is the Geography of Nowhere. This book addresses the question, what makes an ideal community? Are they legal to build? and why is America so boxy? It also talks about planned communities, and some cities in America that work, like Savannah, and Portland.
tldr. we were great at planning cities up until the 20's then the depression happened, then WW2 happened. These two events killed off anyone in America who could build a city, the car was invented, and then horrible urban sprawl happened.
California City was largely a fraud. There are a dozen planned cities in California that succeeded to counter the CC story. Irvine, CA would be a prime example.
Here's a letter signed by Marc Andreesen, one the major investors in this project, to the mayor and city council of Atherton, where he resides:
>I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
Do you live in the bay area? “T.T not enough housing!”, except traffic is out of control and we’re just building more massive apartment buildings along every inch of freeway we can. No one seems to be making any plan with anything close to a spec or goal.
The reality is that not everyone can live here. Should we cut down all the trees and cover Kauai in skyscraper apartments so more people can live there?
I don’t think so.
Even this project is kicking the can (eventually Corusucant). But at least they aren’t coming into someone’s community, that THEY PICKED because of the way it is, and saying oh no no, we need to build an ADU and multi family dwellings everywhere!
If only there were some sort of solution to cars clogging the road. Instead of one person in one car, we could (somehow, I haven't solved this part of the problem yet) have multiple people in a single, larger vehicle, and that single vehicle could go nearby to the places people need to go to, and they could walk from there to their destination. It's totally radical, I know, and could never work,
definitely wouldn't be working in many other places in the world. I'm not sure what we'd call this transportation option, but I'd have it open to the public so that everyone could use this to get around the city. Note that it needs to be a city to have the density to support such a "transportation for the public" option, which involves, you guessed it, building denser housing.
You're certainly entitled to your own opinion on the future of Kauai, but that very attitude is what's lead to San Francisco's current day problems.
The island of Lanai may never get developed. Thats the only way to preserve things how you want. Otherwise other people's opinions, in places of power, get what they want, regardless of what your want. Just look across the water to Honolulu, which is rife with skyscrapers.
Sadly, the Kauai from years past is already gone. Rose tinted glasses are nice to look at the past with, but amonst the extraordinary natural beauty, modern day Kauai has the same problems as everywhere else. Meth, fentanyl, and a lack of jobs.
This is a common misconception. Corporate directors do not have any legal requirement to maximize profits. Directors' fiduciary duty is not only to shareholders but to the corporate entity itself. They are required to act in the best interest of the company, and companies can have many goals other than shareholder profit. Of course money is the lifeblood for any corporation, and a powerful incentive for decision making, but there's nothing legal that forces a company to squeeze profits at the cost of all else.
There are a lot of place just like this that already exist in the US. Travel to the Midwest you will find towns and cities with this vision already in place.
Believe or not, but the majority of companies in the US respect the place they operate despite what you might think.
There’s one weird trick to avoiding unsheltered folks in your area: build shelters (or ideally, affordable housing). Major metro areas in California hate it!
There's an even weirder trick: If you don't want homeless people everywhere, build enough housing of the right type where more people can afford housing instead of being expected to stay in the shelter system.
Strangely, the major issue homeless people all have in common is not drugs or mental health issues. It's -- drum roll please -- a lack of housing.
And studies show this strongly correlates to a lack of housing stock and a lack of affordable housing. (Tip: Simply building more housing of pretty much any kind helps bring rents down. Something having to do with market forces. Supply and demand. Yadda.)
I find it a bit of a weird comment. As my city (outside the US) releases land bordering the outskirts of the suburbs for housing development, no one says "What's their plan for unsheltered folks?"
They're releasing land for developers to increase housing stock and hopefully improve housing affordability. Creating shelters. That's reasonable and realistic behaviour. They mention potential schemes for residents becoming home owners (rent to own, something like NRAS in Australia, etc).
Maybe there's an opportunity for charities or government entities to speak with them about a mix of affordable stock, but usually that's done as a trade off for concessions. And not going to appear in the first brochureware site.
Unsheltered is more accurate. For many people “home” has a connotation which is broader than shelter. It might be the place where you feel welcomed or comfortable.
I'd say their plan is to build a lot of houses of varying sizes and styles. Most of the other methods you'd typically use to address homelessness (safety nets, mental health funding, drugs legalisation/treatment and the like) are broader issues.
The same crops can be grown cheaply elsewhere. Artificially subsidizing California agriculture with unsustainably cheap water undercuts growers in other markets.
Stop giving insanely cheap water to large growers with inefficient water usage practices, and the market will quickly right itself and move production elsewhere. At a more sustainable price, with less ecological imbalance.
For some reason, the same utilities in California sell the same water for agricultural use for 1/20 - 1/10 the price as they sell it to residential or commercial users. To me, this screams inefficiency.
I suspect that agricultural users are being charged too little, and so they have too little incentive to be efficient. (Or they are pumping groundwater and paying nothing.) And residential users are being charged more than the service really ought to cost.
The only semi-legitimate justification I can come up with is that there are fixed costs associated with water users, and each residential user uses much less water than an agricultural user. But there are better ways to handle this.
What's the water level like coming down the rivers there? I'm not from the area, but looking on satellite views, there are what look like wetlands nearby, a shipping channel going past. No reservoirs in the immediate area.
I quickly googled and it suggests Sacramento pulls from the rivers and underground, SF gets its supply from Hetch Hetchy.
This area has an abundance of water. An over abundance of water. In fact any rational analysis would conclude that water is the main natural hazard of this area.
Can't find much info on this other than that several billionaires are planning to build their vision of utopia. Sounds like something out of dystopic science fiction. Perhaps one day it will be surrounded with laser fences and guarded by robots.
I know nothing of them but a quick perusal of their website makes them look like not much more than a fancy real estate developer.
In fact the imagery on the website furthers my point. Looks like modern apartment buildings and malls, very similar in feel to those in Demolition Man.
They are one of the pioneers of 'master planned' communities, in that they owned almost all of the land that became the city Irvine. They carefully selected various lots for types of homes, which areas would be luxury homes, which would be industrial, which areas would be 'cheaper' homes and the like.
It is a fancy real estate development company, but they're really building cities and reshaping them in a holistic way.
Given what's written on the site, perhaps you could at least let the democratic process go a few steps down the road before assuming that what your Huffington Post betters told you to believe is actually true?
It was a wasted neighborhood, with parking lots, old motels, fast food, and a Hooters.
Two billionaires that I’m not super fond of, Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos, put a bunch of money on the line to make a pretty nice, walkable area, with restaurants and parks and whatnot. I’m glad they did.
Who knows if these people can pull this off - it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t - but I wish them the best.