Sneak Peek: Wed, Feb 21 2024 (Patreon)

OK, so the video coming on YouTube today (it's been up on Nebula since Sunday, and for you Nebula folks I'm slowly working towards having videos released a full week early over there), is NOT about California Forever. But I do talk about it a bit, because it's relevant.

(If you don't know what California Forever is, Google it, but basically it's the idea of building a brand new city in Solano County, just outside the Bay Area, as a way of addressing the housing crisis and/or as a moneymaking scheme for a small group of tech billionaires. Or maybe it's purely altruistic, who can really say?)

I may or may not make a video about California Forever at some point, but my big question is, does it really make sense to build brand new cities from whole cloth instead of filling in and densifying the cities we already have? I'm not even necessarily talking about San Francisco, LA and San Diego -- there are hundreds of cities in California that have significant housing undersupply, and plenty of infrastructure capacity to add thousands of housing units each. But: it's politically difficult! The people who live in a lot of those cities -- like the subject of today's video, San Luis Obispo -- didn't sign up to live in a dense city. It isn't the way those cities market themselves, and it's not what people move there for. I get all that. But building a brand new city is WAY more technically difficult, and requires orders of magnitude more planning, engineering, design, construction. It can't possibly make sense, can it?

Have you thought about California Forever? Or the idea of building a "new city" in ANY part of the US for that matter? What do you think? Good idea, or expensive cop out because we're unable to grapple with political issues we really need to solve? I kinda know what I think, but I love hearing opinions.

Happy Wednesday!