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As a self-identified pro-housing (ie, YIMBY) advocate, I am not opposed to the California Forever plan. However, I very much doubt that it will end up being the
by jlhawn 2y ago
As a self-identified pro-housing (ie, YIMBY) advocate, I am not opposed to the California Forever plan. However, I very much doubt that it will end up being the type of community they are claiming it will be. I expect it will end up being another exurban car-centric community as it's still very far from the major job markets of the core SF Bay Area.
Given the location, I expect most potential residents would prefer to live in a community more like Mountain House, CA (with relatively larger private living space with a few schools and a single strip mall shopping center) than to live in a community with homes built like Noe Valley in SF but without all the benefits of urban amenities that come with living in SF because those benefits are endogenous to the urban economics of a place like SF.
edit to everyone talking about how the backers have the influence to attract tech jobs to their new city. Great, but even if that's the case ... a community like this can't be maintained by people who work in tech alone. It's going to require service workers who will need to live somewhere and while it's nice that the houses in this new city will cost less ($400k to $600k), the more affordable housing stock for service workers will mostly be found in the nearby (yet still to far for public transit so they will need cars) communities of vallejo, fairfield, antioch, stockton, etc. I have yet to read anything about how they plan to fund any subsidized housing in the community (this article only mentions subsidizing businesses). As a Georgist, I know they _could_ do it by establishing something like a community facilities district with much higher taxes on land, but as this project is fundamentally a speculative land investment for its backers I doubt they'd be interested in that.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoI would think with the wealth and network of the folks sponsoring California Forever, they'd have enough pull to move offices to the community in order to create jobs for folks desiring to live there. That's the problem, right? People need jobs to live where they want to live. Building the housing alone isn't enough, you have to bring the jobs or otherwise make them available (if you're not supporting remote folks who can bring their own job with them to the housing).
- pshc 2y agoIf they actually do build Barcelona-style superblocks full of young families, then tech companies will be chomping at the bit for office space in those same blocks.
- zjp 2y agoCalifornia Forever just seems like a bunch of VCs getting tired of watching increasing amounts of money go to vampire NIMBYism and fantasizing about how they could solve the problem.