Ten New US Cities: Satellite Cities
This is the 8th short article of the series Where to Create Ten New Cities in the US.
The groundwork for this series came here:
The first seven articles in this series are:
You don’t need to read them in order. Enjoy!
Companies used to build new cities:
Many new cities have been built in the United States since World War II, including Irvine, California; Reston, Virginia; and Walt Disney World. Irvine, established by the Irvine Company and incorporated in 1970, has grown to a population of 300,000. Reston, inspired by the Garden City movement, now has more than 60,000 residents. Disney World secured substantial legal concessions from Florida, which functionally delegated county governing authority to it, though the state legislature recently revoked those concessions.—Mark Lutter and Nick Allen, Building Freedom Cities.
The best place for new cities is as satellites of existing ones, because they can tap into local demand.
Can companies build new satellite cities? Yes, that’s what companies like California Forever are famously doing. But they’ve been mired in controversy: secret land buy, lawsuits, cantankerous media, ballot wars… Will they be able to prevail over all this conflict? I wanted to know, so I talked with the founder of California Forever, Jan Sramek. I also talked with a couple of developers trying to build other cities, one in Utah and another one in the Texas Triangle.1 Here’s what’s going on, and how to build new cities.
The California Forever Case
California is mostly empty. The moment you leave urban areas, you encounter emptiness.
You can see this in the distribution of people (red) in the San Francisco Bay Area:
This is some of the most valuable land on Earth!—one reason why my third city proposal, Presidio, aimed to build a new city here. So any land immediately adjacent to what is already built up would have tremendous potential. Especially here:
This is mostly Solano County, and it’s quite empty. That made sense when SF and Sacramento were two distinct urban areas, but now, given remote work and the cost of living, people are willing to live in one and work in the other. I met so many people who live in Sacramento or Stockton and commute to San Francisco, Palo Alto, or Mountain View every day! That’s over 3h of transport per day! A community here would make so much sense, the same as Irvine made so much sense between Los Angeles and San Diego.
So this is what California Forever wants to do:
This is what it would look like:
Does this land contain forest we would need to cut? Natural reserves with endangered animals? Cozy little farms we would need to raze? None of the above. It’s non-prime grazing land, a politically correct label to say nothing much grows here besides some grasses.
The area is not on an earthquake line, it’s 20 miles away from the closest forest fire risk area, it’s between 20 ft and 80 ft above sea level so it’s resilient to sea level rise and tsunamis…
This is such a no-brainer for construction that when the Department of Commerce analyzed the Bay Area in 1958, it predicted that there would be a city here in 2020.
As a good European, the founder of California Forever, Jan, thought that housing quality in the Bay Area was not that great, and that there were few, if any, walkable neighborhoods. Unacceptable given the high cost of housing. He spent one year looking for ways to accelerate building in existing Bay Area cities, but he realized it would fall short of the housing California needed.2 Fun fact, despite all the YIMBY3 successes over the last few years, and the resulting bills passed in the California legislature, the building of new homes is down!4
But he also noticed on a fishing trip to Solano County that there was a bunch of land there that didn’t have much built on, or orchards, or even crops growing there. It was also very well placed, so eventually he raised money and started buying it up to convert into a bustling city.
Such a city would bring hundreds of thousands of jobs and residents to the area.
Controversies
But before you build a city, you need the land. Except if you announce that you will buy land to build a city, all prices will go up. So you need to buy the land without people knowing there will be a city here…
Of course, the moment the rumors started circulating, land owners started asking for inordinate amounts of money. California Forever accused them of collusion to keep prices high.
Then, some organizations started opposing the project:
Frances Tinney, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, which evaluates developers’ environmental impact reviews, said that California Forever is “inherently unsustainable,” because it would require building entirely new water, wastewater, power and transportation systems, paving over ecosystems, increasing water use and polluting the air with constant traffic.
Well, building entirely new water, wastewater, power and transportation systems, paving over ecosystems, increasing water use and polluting the air with constant traffic is the definition of cities. According to this logic, humans should have no cities.
The logic is not just flawed for this reason. It also rests on mistaken assumptions. Concentrating people in cities is actually more friendly to the environment, because it limits the footprint people have on land, and because they emit less pollution per person when they share resources. Put another way: The current structure of Solano County (where California Forever would be) is less environmentally friendly than California Forever would be because in the current structure, people are dispersed.
And of course, given the current discourse on the environment, California Forever has tried to address it with its plans of a water recycling system, parks, circular economy, and the like.
The other typical criticism is primarily economic:
The buildout alone could leave Solano at a $103.1 million fiscal deficit, according to a report commissioned by the Solano County Board of Supervisors.
California Forever believes they would add a $40-50 million surplus.5
The media loved hating on California Forever, because it represents three infinitely clickable controversies:
Progress
Cement
Tech billionaires funding the two above
The move to withdraw the measure comes a week after a report by Solano county stated that the proposed city would likely cost the county billions of dollars, create substantial financial deficits, reduce agricultural production, harm climate resilience and potentially threaten local water supplies.—The Guardian
So the NIMBYs and media launched a campaign against California Forever. Spirits got heated. Moods soured, opposition rose. Despite that, Jan believes a ballot to approve the project and rezone the area will be ready for 2026, and it will pass. Why?
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