Can a new dream city solve California’s affordable housing problem? | The Excerpt

On a special episode (first released on April 25, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: For the past five years, a small group of Silicon Valley investors has spent nearly a billion dollars quietly buying up over 50,000 acres of farmland in northern California. The goal? To create an ambitious new California dream city, something that hasn’t been done in America for over a century. The California Forever project aims to create a livable, workable, walkable city that puts working families at the heart of its design, creating new housing for up to 400,000 people. Skeptics abound, but could this be the solution to one of California’s most intractable problems? The city’s designated architect, urban planner Gabriel Metcalf, joins The Excerpt to discuss the hurdles and possibilities of developing an entirely new city.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Hello and welcome to The Excerpt, I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, April 25th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

For the past five years, a small group of Silicon Valley investors spent nearly a billion dollars quietly buying up over 50,000 acres of farmland in Northern California. The goal, to create an ambitious new California dream city, something that hasn't been done in America for over a century. The California Forever Project aims to create a livable, workable, walkable city that puts working families at the heart of its design, creating new housing for up to 400,000 people. Skeptics abound, but could this be the solution to one of California's most intractable problems, affordable housing? Here to help me dig into it, is urban planner, Gabriel Metcalf, the city's designated architect.

Gabe, thanks for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

So let's start with why you're here. How did you first hear of the project and what was it that convinced you to sign on?

I guess the real reason I'm here is because I love cities. I think cities are in a way humanity's greatest invention, and I've spent my whole career working on making cities work better. But the great cities of America have run into a big problem, they have all gotten super expensive. They've gotten so expensive. They have stopped performing their historical role of bringing all kinds of people together because it's gotten to be that only people who have a lot of money can get in.

I guess it started to seem to me that part of the problem is that all of the places that are walkable are places that existed 100 years ago, and that the problem is that we have lost the art of making new cities, making new walkable places. If we could figure out a way to make new cities, new walkable places, again, it might take the pressure off and help places like San Francisco, where I'm sitting right now, might help them not have such intense pressure on them. And so I obviously was not the only one thinking along these lines. When I got offered the chance to come be the head of planning for this project, I jumped at it.

So what's the vision here in a nutshell?

Yeah, in a nutshell we're talking about a community on 17,500 acres of land in Eastern Solano County, which is in the Bay Area. It has room for up to 400,000 people. The first phase would be 50,000. We are proposing a mixed use compact, medium density community. So it's not single family suburbia. It's not Manhattan. It's in between, medium density. And while many people I think are most excited about its contribution to housing supply and what that could do for California, it's really important to us that this is not only about housing. This is very much about providing an economic engine for part of the Bay Area that has been left behind by some of the job creation that's happened in other parts. And the vision is for this to very much be a mixed use community. So shops and schools, industry, office, civic uses, sports, entertainment, everything that would be part of a small city.

Gabe, before we move on from housing, as I mentioned in my intro, one of California's biggest problems is the lack of affordable housing. How does the group plan on keeping it affordable?

If you have enough money to afford to live in San Francisco or the East Bay where Berkeley and Oakland are, then great. Good for you. Cities that developed organically over centuries will always be really interesting. They're wonderful. Our business thesis is that there are a bunch of people who would love to live in a city but cannot afford places like San Francisco. And so in essence, our idea is to try to offer urbanism at a more affordable price point. We have funding commitment in the ballot measure that people will be voting on in November that provides 400 million for affordable housing on the first phase, and then it just keeps going up after that. So if we did the full build out of 400,000 people, it would be $3.2 billion invested in affordable housing.

The project's website talks about the theory of new urbanism as an inspiration for the city plan. What distinguishes this style and why do you think it will be effective here?

Yeah. Well, the new urbanists were really pioneers starting in the 1970s of the attempt to rediscover really timeless principles of urbanism, smaller streets, building more compactly, designing around the pedestrian rather than the automobile. And so I certainly take a lot of inspiration from what they did. I think they were pioneers.

Infrastructure will obviously be a huge issue to tackle. Water, sewage, transportation, et cetera will all need to be created from scratch and be fully in place before people move in. But how will those systems be funded?

Yeah. Well, we have to pay for them, and it's inherent in a new town strategy is that you pay less for the land, but you pay more because you have to build all of the infrastructure. It's a big part of the planning work that we're working on this year and next year. Water, power, wastewater, transportation. One thing that's important is we try to phase it so we don't have to build the full capacity for 400,000 people day one. You just have to stay ahead of the growth of the city. You have to have enough infrastructure for the phase you're working on. We're doing a lot of work right now on what the needs are for the first 50,000 people.

The plan also talks about access by proximity. As a central tenant of the new city, what does that mean and how will it be implemented?

Yeah. Access by proximity is a phrase we just mean it's contrasted, I suppose, with access by movement. So instead of needing to get 30 miles to your job or in some cases 10 miles to the store, having a lot of those things close at hand so you can just walk. It's the best transportation solution. It's way better for the environment. It saves everybody money. And it actually provides a lot of the joy of city life. It's being able to walk to a great local shopping street, so the densities and the street network in the city plan are being laid out to make it really easy to get to all that stuff. That's what access by proximity means.

The plan also talks about creating streets that fulfill dual roles. I'm trying to picture it, but also what are those roles and what does this mean in practice?

Streets are really interesting. They are both an infrastructure system to facilitate movement, but they're also public spaces. And if you think about the great cities, I mean maybe if any of your viewers have been to European cities, that experience of being out in public and just enjoying city life, we're really trying to emphasize that part of streets. And so, it is a balancing act because you have to allow movement, but by keeping speeds slower, by putting in wide sidewalks and street trees, by having really interesting buildings built right up to the sidewalk. All of those kind of traditional urban features, the goal is to make it be really a joy to be out in public enjoying city life on a stroll.

The project aims to create up to 15,000 new jobs. What industries are going to support those jobs?

In the long run we aim to attract way more jobs than 15,000. But in the first phase, 15,000 is what we're aiming for. A few sectors we're focused on. One is defense-related industries that are excited about the chance of being in the same county as Travis Air Force Base. Second are companies that are innovating in the space of constructing housing where we might be able to be a big customer for them, and the chance to scale up new techniques to build at lower cost could be a big industry. Companies that want to be in the Bay Area for innovation, but need the room because they're building things in physical space, not just software, are a really good fit for us. So that could be in all kinds of industries that are at the intersection of innovation and the real world. And I should say also that all the regular jobs of teachers and cops and chefs that go along with any population are important too. Planning for those.

Gabe, you're in charge of design. Who's going to be in charge of zoning and regulation? Is that going to be investors? The county? A new city agency? Who's in charge here?

It's a few different phases of how that works. There is a voter initiative that will be voted on this November by the voters of Solano County that will put in place high-level zoning, high-level building standards, so things like densities and heights and kind of basic uses, what's allowed to go where. After that the next phase is more detailed planning, a full environmental impact report, and working toward a detailed development agreement with the county board of supervisors that will spell out in much more detail all of the design standards and things like that.

As I mentioned earlier, there's been quite a bit of backlash against the plan. The mayor of nearby Fairfield recently shared with The Daily Beast that of the hundreds of messages she's received regarding the project, 95% are opposed to it. How do you win over those people?

We have half a year now to make the case about what the benefits are to current residents of Solano County. So we are spending a lot of time in the community, talking to people one-on-one in small groups. It's always controversial, especially in California it's always controversial when people are proposing to build things, and that's, I suppose, one of the reasons why it's been hard to manage growth in California. But I think the tide is really changing on that, and there are a lot of people who understand that in order to solve the problems people care about, whether that's switching to renewable energy to deal with climate change or getting more housing built to deal with affordability, we have to build. And so we will be making that case and then we'll see. We'll see in November if we were successful or not.

What happens if voters reject this ballot initiative?

I don't know the answer to that because we have a mindset of planning for success. But we will, I suppose, regroup, have some hard conversations, have some honest conversations with people in the county, and try to figure out a way forward. And there are really some timeless principles that we are drawing on.

Who gets the first crack at housing? Or are you not that far yet?

One of the things I hope is that the first housing might go to some of the construction workers that built the housing. It's an idea we've talked about a lot. That's absolutely one of our goals is that the people who work in the community and the people who build the community can afford to live in the community. But wouldn't it be nice if its building trades members and carpenters union members who are themselves the first residents? I think that would be a beautiful symbolism.

Gabe, thank you for being on The Excerpt.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.