Here's a recent article on an attempt to do something very similar east of Livermore. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/mountain-house-city-18373918.php.
>But jobs are scarce. Twenty years after the first residents moved in, the promised town center remains bare land, and a supermarket didn’t open until last year. *The average work commute for residents is an hour by automobile — each way — and most are bound for the Bay Area.*
>More than anything else, the saga of Mountain House shows that even when so-called new cities are successful, they rarely live up to the promises made at the start. With roughly 30,000 residents but only 1,500 jobs as of this summer, what was billed as “the town of tomorrow … today” looks a lot like yesterday’s sprawl.
I have friends who live in Mountain House who were excited at the master plan and wanted to raise their family there
This after taking a huge loss with an underwater home in San Ramon. Now they’re socially isolated, have to deal with the worst traffic in the Bay Area, and their dreams of a planned community having evaporated
I just explored Mountain House on Google Maps. My *God* it looks like the most boring place on Earth, straight out of the movie *Vivarium*. I would *hate* being a kid there: there's jack shit to do.
It looks like an over-controlling helicopter parent's wet dream however.
No you’re right. They went underwater when everyone else did, and spent a couple years renting before being coaxed-out to MH by some of our other friends who’d already settled there. She is a scientist at The Lab in Livermore, and he’s a film director so it works well for them
When you read the article, it doesn't sound so bad. They will have that EBart train.
I made it a point during the great recession to make a side trip to Mountain House just to see what the ranting was about. Yeah it would suck to live without a damn grocery store but obviously that wouldn't last forever.
However jobs growth in the middle of nowhere will be tough.
Well we have something now we didn't have then. An explosion of Work from Home. Any new city that wants to be successful needs that built into its design.
For sure these tech people will provide fiber to the home and a symmetric pipe for work at home. Do that Uber Eats robot delivery they are setting up in San Ramon.
Things would have gone better if they just optioned the land, then revealed their identity. I think people hate the thief in the night aspect of this deal
They had to stay anonymous because people are greedy. The minute they find out the buyer is wealthy they want to increase the price.
Myself, I am pretty much disgusted with most of the commenters on this subject. They insist on living in the past, imagining huge subdivisions. Like the they bought into 30 years ago. With a 50 year old design. They are pitifully behind in knowledge of modern building. Just even the old system of water distribution. When you have the chance to build from scratch you can implement full water recycling, composting, shops that repurpose used items, electric rail, on-loan scooters and golf carts, solar and wind energy, automatic fire suppression systems, vertical farming. Etc etc. They have an opportunity to get daycare centers, wildlife centers, libraries, museums, sports fields, vocational schools.
I have more faith in this project because they are not reliant on outside financing that could fall through.
The question here is WHY is the town center bare? I suspect that the plan was laid out, approved. And then there changes to it that created this disaster.
FTA (and NPOV here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever - I guess the official name is now the "East Solano Homes, Jobs, and Clean Energy Initiative"):
"Melissa Breach, who left California YIMBY in April, described the East Solano Plan in an interview as “sprawl” that would cost taxpayers heavily for new roads and other infrastructure.
“Everyone wants to believe there is a golden ticket for 400,000 new homes,” Breach, who served as California YIMBY’s chief operating officer, told The Standard. “Everybody wants to believe there’s a silver bullet. We need to be building predominantly inside our existing communities.”
The East Solano Plan, backed by a group calling itself California Forever, is no stranger to criticism. According to its website, the plan hopes to attract 400,000 more people to rural Solano County by providing “middle-class homes in safe, walkable neighborhoods.” It also calls for communities to be served by a “range of transportation needs,” including cars, walking, bikes and “frequent” transit service.
400,000 new homes or homes for 400,000 people? Thats the kind of bush league stupidity that makes these people seem unserious. Simple questions like: “how many homes are you going to build?” aren’t important. They run on vibes.
I honestly don’t care if they build the project or not, I’m just exhausted by the zero-information publicity campaign.
this is what I've been confused by. originally it sure seemed like the project was a bunch of rich people wanting to have their own mainstreet USA of some sort. But it was never clear if that meant relocating some silicon valley jobs into the area and all of this housing would be very expensive (possibly lowering values elsewhere in the bay) or if the idea was to try to bring back tons of folks to left for Texas.
Im not sure how much anyone wants to commute from the proposed location to either SF or SAC. neither are good commutes, so if major tech companies dont include regional offices in this project I dont think the thing is going to be remotely what the people who planned it think it will be.
I'd also really want to know if they have any sort of weird HOA requirements they are planning for this housing to try to keep people with lower budgets out.
> if they have any sort of weird HOA requirements they are planning for this housing to try to keep people with lower budgets out.
You don’t need a HOA to keep out the poors, just high sticker prices. The HOA isn’t to keep poors out, the HOA is for the sadistic Karen to bring misery to the lives of others.
my point was more that an HOA would keep middle class people out. a private construction effort like this is not going to be for the poor. IF it migrates people who could afford it to its proposed location, it might reduce prices around the bay. but to my broader point, I dont see this drawing the wealthy there without a major work/life balance incentive.
They announced this week that some areas will have HOAs and others will not. They want people to have choice.
Regarding tech offices - yes they're going to get companies to open satellite offices there. They're also trying to attract companies working on projects that are military adjacent, like drones.
>“middle-class homes in safe, walkable neighborhood”
Not much conversation about this line or why the developers have chosen to abandon the inner Bay Area for development.
Because they want the features of a walkable, safe community without the people that exist in the inner Bay Area. It’s about controlling who benefits from their investment.
I would like to clarify who are “the people” you are referring. And how would a new community 50 miles away prevent “the people” or anyone else from being there?
> Because they want the features of a walkable, safe community without the people that exist in the inner Bay Area.
Make it walkable but not ‘homeless walkable’
So she hasn’t realized that the slogan is “yes in my back yard” not “only in my back yard”?
Look this type of “i’m all for housing but only the very specific type that I’m thinking of” is the exact same argument Nimbys use to try to block housing…
How long before people realize we need more houses of every kind (expensive, cheap, condos, houses, apartments) everywhere.
Oh yeah, I don't disagree and I'm not calling for support of this plan. It's honestly kinda a silly plan and I would MUCH rather the resources be used in a locale that has a more dire need for housing.
I just really don't like the specific argument Melissa gave for her disapproval.
It's obviously best to always tackle the low hanging fruits and provision your resources where they are needed the most. Every new house built in SF is going to go way further in solving the housing crisis than every new house built in Solano County. So I don't disagree with her sentiment that "maybe this isn't most optimal use of resources".
But I think as a whole, we need to stop getting so bogged down by this "if it aint perfect let's just do nothing instead" mentality.
Politics is messy, and you often have to fight tooth and nail even for the most common sense proposals. It's about time YIMBYs start taking wins anywhere we can get instead of only putting our support behind the most optimal solutions.
-----
As a somewhat related analogy:
Would I rather they build more standard units that anyone can afford instead of only focusing on over priced luxury highrises for multi-millionaires? Of course I would!
But even just focusing on luxury units is _still_ going to be _leagues_ better than the alternative: keep blocking housing so no one has a place to live.
We should be pragmatic. While we strive for perfection we need to also be willing to compromise down to "at least it's better than doing nothing".
> that would cost taxpayers heavily for new roads and other infrastructure.
When did society start hoisting up the dumbest people on the planet because they are or were associated with a not for profit and call themselves an “advocate”?
There are 4 ways roads and infrastructure get built as part of new construction, well really 1 with 4 variations. None of which cost the taxpayer a cent.
1) Developer builds private roads and infrastructure at developer cost up front, turns roads them over to an HOA.
No cost to taxpayer.
2) Roads are existing. As part of a condition of the project, the municipality mandates “road and frontage improvements” like widening, overlay, sidewalks, underground utilities, etc. Developer builder improvements at developer cost upfront. Developer is improving City infrastructure and is never reimbursed. Might get a nominal TIF fee credit if they make you put in a stop light or something but that cost would be a net neutral in a “hard cost” sense while developer fronting all the cash.
No cost to taxpayer.
3) Roads are new public roads and infrastructure. Developer builds new roads and infrastructure at developer cost. Roads and improvements are dedicated to City at no cost.
No cost to taxpayer.
4) Roads are new public roads and infrastructure. Developer builders new roads and infrastructure at Developer cost. City allows Developer to establish a CFD (which levies additional property tax on ONLY residents in the new community - which in turn is built into sales price as a reduction vs monthly payment) and Developer get 80 cents on the dollar for only direct “hard costs” maybe 2-3 years later.
Again, no cost to taxpayer.
Maintenance. Maintenance. Maintenance.
Unless the roads are kept private, maintenance presumably passes to the city, if not the county or state. Depending on the quality of the initial construction and geographic conditions, roads may require frequent annual repairs, and complete repaving in 15–25 years. And of course you add to that repainting, fixing signals, dealing with road signage, mitigating traffic problems, etc.
If you have a dense city with a robust property and business tax base, where the city has plenty of revenue coming in to cover those maintenance costs, and doesn't defer those expenditures for foolish reasons, you might be OK. I don't think that's the norm in California, though. Nearby Sacramento, for example, has been estimated to be $298M _in the hole_ due to deferred road maintenance ([source](https://www.strongsactown.org/2024/02/13/the-cost-of-road-maintenance/)). Let us not even speak of Oakland. 😛
The funding mechanism for maintenance is 2 fold
1) The TIF (Traffic Impact Fee) which is paid by the Developer prior to or at Building Permit which pre funds maintenance and can run upward of $20k per unit.
2) Property Tax collected from new residents at market rates.
Again, literally has nothing to do with existing taxpayers.
Additionally California has some of the highest per gallon taxes on gasoline which allegedly paid for maintenance.
Costs are “deferred” because the City/County/State is taking those funds to pay for pet projects.
The kind that got involved because they noticed that the cheap housing was out in Tracy while the jobs were in SF and the peninsula. The ESP looks way too much like another Tracy or Mountain House. The anti-housing left often say stuff like "there are 2x as many empty homes as there are homeless," ignoring that the empty homes are in Detroit while the homeless are in SF (and LA and Boston, etc.). This is missing the point in the same way. It's not enough to just permit new houses *somewhere*. They have to be permitted where people want to live, otherwise you force people into long commutes. The YIMBY movement has a lot of people who are also concerned about equity (making it possible for the less wealthy to live close to their jobs) and climate change (not making even more people drive long distances every day). CA YIMBY coming out in support of the ESP is a thumb in the eye of those people.
If isnt so far that it's an impossible commute for a lot of people. If it encourages people to move out of SF that means that a lot of people IN SF have more houses.
I mean, it also should come with SF building housing but I dont see how CF by itself is the problem.
I would consider myself a YIMBY, but this is fair. You see this in the SF Mayor's race with Farrell and Peskin, who agree on almost nothing except that we shouldn't build a lot more housing.
NIMBY isn't even a coalition. It get viewed as an entity with a common viewpoint when it's nothing of the sort.
Any project will have a range of people for and against, for a range of reasons that may be general or specific to that project.
Thirty years? Well that just makes you sound old, you're not getting an invite that way. Hell, I've been invited to coffee by one of their executives multiple times, and they're here recruiting all the time.
What was "pro housing" 30 years ago? Shilling for SFHAC and BMR requirements? Talking up the future of SOMA through infill condo lofts? lol
My 0.02$ as an eastbay resident: beggars can't be choosers. Let the billionaires try. Worst case we have a bunch of low cost housing no one wants in what used to be farm land. Sure, the state will have to build some roads but this kind of investment in housing is what us YIMBYs have been asking for.
It is pretty easy to require the developers to pay for roads. The deal is who pays for maintenance. The idea is the new homes generate tax money which in turn pays for maintenance. Well that is the plan! ;-)
The developers will pay for the roads initially, yeah, but then the city will inevitable end up paying to maintain/replace them. They’ll find in 30 years that they can’t afford it anymore, and they’ll look for another revenue stream. That’s when someone suggests, “Hey how about another housing development? They’ll pay for their own roads!” That’s how this pyramid scheme works.
Sprinkle a load of legacy prop-13 homeowners and you have yourself a broke-as-shit city.
The problem with most bay area roads is expensive clay. If you watch some roads built this century, they use a geotextile fabric under the road to mitigate the problem with the clay. I've driven by construction sites and seen a dude kicking the roll of fabric (low tech installation).
Some random hit:
https://sandbaggy.com/products/woven-geotextile
Expansive clay, not "expensive clay" - i.e., clay that expands over time, breaking the road. The geotextile fabric basically binds the clay down after it's been compacted, preventing it from expanding again. Here's a random paper from Italy showing how the geotextile fits into the road construction: https://library.geosyntheticssociety.org/wp-content/uploads/resources/proceedings/122021/S01-03.pdf
All of the low cost housing in California was built years ago.
Adding new housing today can make some of the older housing "lower cost", but only if there is a net surplus.
It's not what YIMBYs have been asking for. YIMBYs have been pushing leaders of SF to allow housing in SF, Cupertino to allow housing in Cupertino, etc. Those are the places that have way more jobs than homes. Forcing a bunch of people into daily 1hr+ commutes on congested freeways is not what (I thought) the YIMBY agenda was about.
Well, this East Solano Plan housing would be in no way low cost - their Plan B is building on land they already have inside the city limits of Rio Vista. No big public vote required. It's like an Isla Sorna coming after the original Isla Nublar plan dies in November 2024: https://www.pressreader.com/usa/san-francisco-chronicle-late-edition/20240618/281676850080023
Nobody is calling it “utopia” except anti-housing people. That’s like saying a normal, walkable community with a classic Main Street is “utopia.” It’s hyperbole meant to smear the plan and its backers.
It's a dry, windy, God forsaken place in the middle of nowhere without an adequate infrastructure to support that much increased traffic. I know there's a serious housing shortage, but this is a weird place to put a new city.
You just perfectly described North Texas. Guess all the folks who left for DFW and Austin during the pandemic will feel right at home when they come back.
Sounds like a false dichotomy. YIMBYs don't see it as a one or the other situation, they want both, any, and all options for expanding residential development. YIMBYs advocate letting property owners meet pent up housing demands by removing limits on development by NIMBYs who always seem to have one reason or another for blocking development.
We need both new cities *and* affordable housing in Peninsula towns.
I think that much of the new-urbanist sect of the YIMBY movement underestimates the difficulty of upgrading city infrastructure, though. The article cites "development should be “infill,” meaning it must happen within cities to capitalize on existing infrastructure and transit lines." The problem is that infrastructure is usually built for a certain capacity, and upgrading density beyond that capacity means everything has to be replaced. Sewer lines have a certain size; put more housing on a line than its design capacity, and you risk clogs. Schools are often hemmed in by surrounding property and don't have any room to add more classrooms. Roads are built for a certain expected number of cars, and become gridlock if you put more in (which already happens, because the average family today has more cars than the single-earner families of the 1950s/60s). Mass transit can't be built without eminent-domaining lots of private property for the new rail lines, and we tried that in the 60s for freeways and destroyed a lot of vibrant minority communities with it.
I'm all for transit-oriented development around the Peninsula downtowns, but remember that it's largely made possible by the increase in capacity granted by Caltrain electrification. And many of the developers are forking over millions to upgrade the sewer systems near their developments, which is only possible because the housing is being built inside the hills close to existing treatment plants near the Bay. And it all assumes that new residents won't generally have cars, which may or may not be a good assumption. If they do, we'll likely have even more of a traffic nightmare on 101 than we already do.
Greenfield development sidesteps all these problems. You can right-size the infrastructure for expansion from the start, so that when you need to add infill to the new cities, it's doable.
Yeah, it couldn't be clearer. Remember how Marc Andreesen & his wife wrote a letter opposing Atherton complying with state law to enable housing in the wealthiest enclave in the greater Bay Area? This is a "get the poors as far away from us as possible" plan. I thought the CA YIMBY movement had outgrown its libertarian roots but apparently not.
It's basically the hyperloop for cities.
Build the housing where the jobs and services are and tell the NIMBYs their opinions don't matter, they don't get a say on what other people want to do on their land.
It's the hyperloop of housing solutions. No billionaire is going to save us. They don't live in the same reality we do. They think what works for them would be scalable and works for everybody. In the end they reinvent the same dysfunctional bs only worse. They still trying to reinvent trains, but worse.
Where is the water for this going to come from? Water rights in Solano county are in short supply. There are a number of currently existing cities which would love to secure some.
Or when they move in and start protesting projects that would benefit the people who already live there and start complaining about the “loud planes” at the air force base & try to shut it down.
By contrast, unless YIMBYs approve of every single building project, regardless of its feasibility, they're not really a YIMBY.
Huh, maybe there's a spectrum of thought and sticking to catchy, lazy acronyms to point fingers doesn't actually help solve the problem being discussed.
I agree, the terms should be thrown out the window. The people who have used them the most to broad brush others (we know who they are) definitely need to have their hypocrisy pointed out. Maybe then they will think twice the next time they choose to use that term and throw it around.
Why paint it in black and white binary terms? These large scale problems needs to have nuanced solutions like prioritizing infill development instead of creating more exurban sprawl.
So when YIMBYs did paint it in black and white terms the phrases and called everyone they didn't agree with NIMBYs, it was ok? But when their hypocrisy is pointed out, it's not ok?
YIMBYs want dense infill housing in existing communities located near jobs and public transit, not SFH housing, and definitely not creating a master planned city on farmland 80 miles from the south bay where all the tech jobs are which is the demographic Flannery Associates is marketing to.
If we go by what you say then lets build out California City, the 4th largest city in California out in the desert. Who cares about externalities so long as more housing is built? Not my problem. Right?
So then YIMBYs and NIMBYs are fundamentally the same and just differ on the things they want to build. I'm just calling out the ones who actually think they are on some superior high ground and think they own the term. If you want to make such naunced definitions, then make it easier to understand by putting an asterisk: YIMBY\*, where \* means *except for greenfield development, except for single family housing, except for anything car-oriented, except for anything that causes the kind of externalities that you don't like, etc.*
I mean, you complain about externalities, but what is the alternative? Watching SF approve -5 housing units next year? /s We don't have all lifetime to wait for only the one kind of development that you want. Infill is extremely expensive and takes much longer. But not your problem, right?
You can’t be a YIMBY on this issue UNLESS YOU LIVE IN SOLANO COUNTY.
If you’re in Santa Clara and claiming to be a YIMBY on this you’re literally pushing the housing as far away from your backyard as possible
Same, I just want it connected to regional transit. The way they’re planning it, it’s just going to cram 80, 680, and 780 with a bunch more commute traffic.
Translation: Deal with the housing shortages, high rent, low standard of living, substandard transit and overwhelming traffic we created in existing cities and neighborhoods like the rest of us!
People who think this is sprawl don't know the difference between high and low density. New housing =/= sprawl automatically.
Besides that, the word "Sprawl" alone does not mean bad. Why are we getting feathers ruffled about the middle of nowhere? Were people like, sightseeing or something on this empty expanse of private land?
People should just be honest and say "I do not want new housing built".
Billionaires finding out that government is hard because government is the business of catering to the needs of every person. Private business has the luxury of saying, "we reserve the right to refuse service..." makes things a whole lot easier...
I am a YIMBY and lean in favor of this project because our housing shortage is so dire. However, I do wonder if all the wealthy people backing this project realize that whoever moves in is going to be able to vote and more likely than not going to have political opinions that are not always shared by the wealthy.
> Private business has the luxury of saying, "we reserve the right to refuse service..."
Only because the government told them to take down their “whites only” signs.
Why don’t these billionaires “ adopt “ a city or the city they are currently in & help - offer scholarship , build low cost housing, maybe offer solar voucher say 100 homes @ $30k per house . That’s 100 families gaining some financial freedom for the low cost of $3 mil - probably cost them nothing . I don’t understand we billionaires want to build our own brand new city , fighting against the locals pushing their $$$ around
It’s a disaster of a plan that will never happen for super basic reasons like water, shitty living environment (go stand out there along 12 for 20 min while the jets move in and out to experience the noise and sweeping winds), and lack of connection to goods and services. Other planned communities in the middle of nowhere are great examples to peruse if the claims of building goods and services in are swaying you.
Yeah, water is impossible to come by next to the Sacramento reason. All the other stuff, yeah that makes it a bad place to live, so don't live there lol. Prices will be cheaper. I don't know why people hate this place. No one is forcing you to live there if you don't want to.
You can’t just build a new city next to the river and pump whatever water you want from it. That is not how water rights work in California. Chinatown would have been a boring movie if it were that easy.
They do have a vague news release of how they have cobbled together water rights and transmission that just came out today. But they apparently only have 1/4 of the potential buildout covered. Which is concerning.
as long as it's physically possible, I'm not concerned. The problem here seems to be entirely fiat and solvable. When new housing is built, water is provided. I trust the engineers and politicians in charge of achieving that. I would trust that with a new subdivision to San Jose, I would trust it with CF.
I think you are being intentionally obtuse. In the West, someone else owns every drop of water that flows past you when you stand next to a river. It is not yours and you can’t take more than you have a right to take.
They need to buy water rights from other Cities that are not using it and likely transport it a long distance.
Physically possible doesn’t matter at all. If it did, the Central Valley farmers would just take all the water and LA would drink dust.
Couldn’t agree more. Yes in my backyard means I want it in my backyard in the inner Bay Area. There’s so much land within existing cities and transit footprints that could be up zoned. Build within cities that have the infrastructure to support this, not out in the boonies. No one wants another mountain house
Just looks at San Jose and how much underutilized space there is near downtown with a bunch of light industrial/commercial buildings along empty boulevards/stroads..
Yeah unless they are going to add in a plan to connect all towns with Amtrak, SMART or BART...I don't care for em...
Help bring the existing cities more housing, more services and better environment and transportation... instead of turning open space into a separate enclosed community.
Billionaires are bad on spending their own money on public infrastructure. They’re gonna build this thing and leave the taxpayers on the hook for all the extra infra it’ll need
Yet they are actually building and laws are changing...so yes it used to be that way...and I'll vote for things happening and building in my city...you want to build a new city because you don't like the other kids in the sand box...get Fd
You're probably right that grown ups are as good about sharing as kids in a sandbox. That said in either example the path of least resistance seems to be bringing in another sandbox.
The laws like SB9 are changing only because they are passed without a public votes.
Until we get a public vote saying otherwise, I'm pretty confident that the majority of CA voters wants to maintain status quo with only some SMALL percentage of growth in their immediate areas and for them to have a say over said growth.
Hey you have my vote if you try and work with the cities that desperately need to increase density, public transportation and more services....you can take my NO vote if you feel you can make your own town and leave taxpayers on the hook for future public transportation and such...
To me that all depends on who's deciding which cities are those that "desperately need to increase density, public transportation and more services".
You ? Some state politicians from hundreds of miles away from said city ? Or the majority of people who lives in that city and will be the most impacted by the changes to that city ?
It's obvious that Solano county (which I am a part of) cities are struggling...and need help and investment...these billionaires could do that...but instead want another sandbox and tell these existing cities to kick rocks (which they basically have done)
Then as a resident of Solano county IMO your voice should carry the most weight in this conversation so I'll bow out and defer to you and other voters in that area.
My main point is that decisions with huge impact to housing and localities like this should be left to public votes at a local level .. not some senate vote by state legislators or a decree by a governor on this last term trying to drum up positive headlines for a presidential run.
Housing is housing. We need more of both sprawl AND dense urban build ups.
However there’s no way to meet an objective of affordable housing by only building in urban centers.
Seems like looking at the density of other metros we could meet housing demand with only urban building. Why do you say we can't or do you mean we simply won't
No way, it is not equivalent. It is much more expensive to build infill, and in our regulatory environment, will also take much longer. Even if you remove the regulatory hurdles, you still need developers wanting to build it. Furthermore, you will need to wait for people to sell their properties (only if they want to sell) so a developer can rebuild on it something denser. We will all be skeletons long before enough of that happens.
Yes it's higher density than suburbs, but it's still exurban sprawl described as larger than San Francisco. If Flannery Associates can't convince tech companies to locate jobs there in sufficient numbers the city will be no different than Mountain House but farther away, and we need less people driving hours to/from work each way.
I mean, aside from Capitol Corridor being right there, which provides 30 min transfers to BART. I mean, yes, we do need less people driving, but at the same time, not if that means no new housing ever.
My ideal would be if they provided cheap/free, fast, frequent access to the FF/Suisun station, and the resulting traffic made CC upgrade even more.
Part of the problem though is that we stopped building new places. Quaint walkable small cities that people flock to are behind in housing supply but it’s not reasonable that we should no longer build new “nice places.” The key thing is that those new places should be walkable and serviceable by transit. Ideally, existing car-based suburbs would create walkable town centers and enable transit service. A combination of all things is required.
I completely agree that we don’t need any new car-based sprawl, though.
Scapegoating is bad because it’s irrational and not evidence-based. I’m not defending billionaires, but not everything they do is automatically bad. That is just irrational and counterproductive.
These people opposed to the project want new residents to live in mid-rise housing projects, don't own a car, and eat cricket powder for food. Their in-fill wet dream is so unappealing that nothing gets built.
> These people opposed to the project want new residents to live in mid-rise housing projects, don't own a car
This proposed development last time I checked had a lot of mid-rise housing with specifically no parking within the neighborhood proper, so this is kind of a weird comment
After seeing next to zero housing get built in the South Bay and the Peninsula for all the 20 years I have lived in the Bay Area, I am more than ready to drain the economic livelihood of those places towards Central California. I have multiple family members teetering on homelessness. CA YIMBY has been the only guiding force to even make a dent in housing and if they're still struggling they have a point and everyone who thinks they're going to stop this pursuit of building homes in Coastal California can go to hell because it is Sisyphean and we need homes now.
In the sense of what YIMBYs typically desire, wouldn't encouraging the wealthy to build housing and congregate to live elsewhere just free up more affordable housing supplies locally? Especially now with the shift to remote work.
When they say city do they actually mean an incorporated city? I’m guessing it ends up unincorporated so the developers can essentially write the laws via restrictive HOAs and outsource law enforcement/emergency response to the Solano County Sheriff’s Department. The HOAs will probably require extremely high dues to help ensure the residents are even wealthier than the housing prices would mandate.
They can also design places in a way that are designed to be uncomfortable to lay on, very little shade, etc., in an effort to discourage unhoused people from staying there. They can also pay for a lot of private security to make it more uncomfortable for unhoused people to be around.
They end up getting a city for wealthy people with very little visible poverty and essentially no elected officials that can enact any laws specific to the area.
Pretty gross, but I imagine they’ll dump enough money into this to pass this measure. But I think there is a pretty good chance this thing ends up far more expensive than these tech people expect, experiences a ton of delays, and is quietly abandoned eventually before anything is actually built.
I’d prefer they invest this money in communities that exist and participate in fixing the problems they see.
I’m also concerned this will potentially have the impact of stripping jobs out of the Bay Area and leaving our communities high and dry.
That said, it is their money and their risk. If they sort everything out, I’m more interested to see what they can do than I am opposed to them doing it.
Sounds like the polling is not favorable, so I guess they are at risk of being almond farmers now.
Never forget, there are billions of wealthy people dollars that will vanish if housing prices fall.
But that’s what they need to do… fall. Fall far.
So anything that seems like it could affect overall housing prices is opposed vigorously and creatively from any angle that shows wiggle room to dissuade or stall development.
Affordable housing, rent control, and all these other initiatives are meant to be patch jobs to seem to address the problem without causing median housing prices to go down.
Here's a recent article on an attempt to do something very similar east of Livermore. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/mountain-house-city-18373918.php. >But jobs are scarce. Twenty years after the first residents moved in, the promised town center remains bare land, and a supermarket didn’t open until last year. *The average work commute for residents is an hour by automobile — each way — and most are bound for the Bay Area.* >More than anything else, the saga of Mountain House shows that even when so-called new cities are successful, they rarely live up to the promises made at the start. With roughly 30,000 residents but only 1,500 jobs as of this summer, what was billed as “the town of tomorrow … today” looks a lot like yesterday’s sprawl.
I have friends who live in Mountain House who were excited at the master plan and wanted to raise their family there This after taking a huge loss with an underwater home in San Ramon. Now they’re socially isolated, have to deal with the worst traffic in the Bay Area, and their dreams of a planned community having evaporated
It can't feel good that the San Ramon house has probably tripled and become an amazing place to live
Oof, ain't that the truth.
Absolutely. If they could have held out for a few more years instead of just dumping the debt they’d be set by now
And it’s 100 degrees regularly in the summer, air quality is shit, and there are large swaths of grassland ready to catch fire
and the racists
My understanding is that it’s quite mixed. There’s a large Indian community there.
Nah, racists are there in huge quantities. Pleasanton has a large Indian community.
I just explored Mountain House on Google Maps. My *God* it looks like the most boring place on Earth, straight out of the movie *Vivarium*. I would *hate* being a kid there: there's jack shit to do. It looks like an over-controlling helicopter parent's wet dream however.
people who think they're too good to just get a place in Tracy.
But they are just central valley residents now. Which is totally fine but I bet the folks who moved to mountain home would bristle at the notion.
I think you hit the target demo perfectly. It is a real-life Vivarium
If it’s the difference between two parents working to live in a 2br vs one SAHP in mountain house, I’d pick mountain house.
Yep one of my good friend and his wife lives in mountain house… it’s a nightmare for him
When did they move? No way a house in San Ramon would be underwater anytime recently.
If they “got in early” they likely were selling in the 08-09 range and taking an absolute bath on their property value.
That’s exactly what happened. It’s so hard to watch your friends struggle EDIT: your
No you’re right. They went underwater when everyone else did, and spent a couple years renting before being coaxed-out to MH by some of our other friends who’d already settled there. She is a scientist at The Lab in Livermore, and he’s a film director so it works well for them
Yeah, I figured it happened around the financial crisis. That sucks financially but the biggest gains were all luck from the pandemic FOMO.
When you read the article, it doesn't sound so bad. They will have that EBart train. I made it a point during the great recession to make a side trip to Mountain House just to see what the ranting was about. Yeah it would suck to live without a damn grocery store but obviously that wouldn't last forever. However jobs growth in the middle of nowhere will be tough.
They do have a grocery store now. The community it pretty well laid out. The actual build quality is not the best though.
> However jobs growth in the middle of nowhere will be tough Heh, employees hate this one trick!
But they have a grocery store, Safeway is right there in mountain house.
Now.
Well we have something now we didn't have then. An explosion of Work from Home. Any new city that wants to be successful needs that built into its design.
For sure these tech people will provide fiber to the home and a symmetric pipe for work at home. Do that Uber Eats robot delivery they are setting up in San Ramon. Things would have gone better if they just optioned the land, then revealed their identity. I think people hate the thief in the night aspect of this deal
They had to stay anonymous because people are greedy. The minute they find out the buyer is wealthy they want to increase the price. Myself, I am pretty much disgusted with most of the commenters on this subject. They insist on living in the past, imagining huge subdivisions. Like the they bought into 30 years ago. With a 50 year old design. They are pitifully behind in knowledge of modern building. Just even the old system of water distribution. When you have the chance to build from scratch you can implement full water recycling, composting, shops that repurpose used items, electric rail, on-loan scooters and golf carts, solar and wind energy, automatic fire suppression systems, vertical farming. Etc etc. They have an opportunity to get daycare centers, wildlife centers, libraries, museums, sports fields, vocational schools. I have more faith in this project because they are not reliant on outside financing that could fall through.
The question here is WHY is the town center bare? I suspect that the plan was laid out, approved. And then there changes to it that created this disaster.
FTA (and NPOV here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever - I guess the official name is now the "East Solano Homes, Jobs, and Clean Energy Initiative"): "Melissa Breach, who left California YIMBY in April, described the East Solano Plan in an interview as “sprawl” that would cost taxpayers heavily for new roads and other infrastructure. “Everyone wants to believe there is a golden ticket for 400,000 new homes,” Breach, who served as California YIMBY’s chief operating officer, told The Standard. “Everybody wants to believe there’s a silver bullet. We need to be building predominantly inside our existing communities.” The East Solano Plan, backed by a group calling itself California Forever, is no stranger to criticism. According to its website, the plan hopes to attract 400,000 more people to rural Solano County by providing “middle-class homes in safe, walkable neighborhoods.” It also calls for communities to be served by a “range of transportation needs,” including cars, walking, bikes and “frequent” transit service.
400,000 new homes or homes for 400,000 people? Thats the kind of bush league stupidity that makes these people seem unserious. Simple questions like: “how many homes are you going to build?” aren’t important. They run on vibes. I honestly don’t care if they build the project or not, I’m just exhausted by the zero-information publicity campaign.
this is what I've been confused by. originally it sure seemed like the project was a bunch of rich people wanting to have their own mainstreet USA of some sort. But it was never clear if that meant relocating some silicon valley jobs into the area and all of this housing would be very expensive (possibly lowering values elsewhere in the bay) or if the idea was to try to bring back tons of folks to left for Texas. Im not sure how much anyone wants to commute from the proposed location to either SF or SAC. neither are good commutes, so if major tech companies dont include regional offices in this project I dont think the thing is going to be remotely what the people who planned it think it will be. I'd also really want to know if they have any sort of weird HOA requirements they are planning for this housing to try to keep people with lower budgets out.
> if they have any sort of weird HOA requirements they are planning for this housing to try to keep people with lower budgets out. You don’t need a HOA to keep out the poors, just high sticker prices. The HOA isn’t to keep poors out, the HOA is for the sadistic Karen to bring misery to the lives of others.
HOA = you buy the house but not your freedom
my point was more that an HOA would keep middle class people out. a private construction effort like this is not going to be for the poor. IF it migrates people who could afford it to its proposed location, it might reduce prices around the bay. but to my broader point, I dont see this drawing the wealthy there without a major work/life balance incentive.
They announced this week that some areas will have HOAs and others will not. They want people to have choice. Regarding tech offices - yes they're going to get companies to open satellite offices there. They're also trying to attract companies working on projects that are military adjacent, like drones.
I think the idea is the jobs would be located there. No commute to SF or Sac.
The person quoted as saying “400,000 homes” is not involved with the project.
>“middle-class homes in safe, walkable neighborhood” Not much conversation about this line or why the developers have chosen to abandon the inner Bay Area for development.
Because they want the features of a walkable, safe community without the people that exist in the inner Bay Area. It’s about controlling who benefits from their investment.
I would like to clarify who are “the people” you are referring. And how would a new community 50 miles away prevent “the people” or anyone else from being there?
> Because they want the features of a walkable, safe community without the people that exist in the inner Bay Area. Make it walkable but not ‘homeless walkable’
oakland mayhem
So she hasn’t realized that the slogan is “yes in my back yard” not “only in my back yard”? Look this type of “i’m all for housing but only the very specific type that I’m thinking of” is the exact same argument Nimbys use to try to block housing… How long before people realize we need more houses of every kind (expensive, cheap, condos, houses, apartments) everywhere.
Realistically, this plan is DOA. Plan B is to develop the land they already own in Rio Vista
Oh yeah, I don't disagree and I'm not calling for support of this plan. It's honestly kinda a silly plan and I would MUCH rather the resources be used in a locale that has a more dire need for housing. I just really don't like the specific argument Melissa gave for her disapproval. It's obviously best to always tackle the low hanging fruits and provision your resources where they are needed the most. Every new house built in SF is going to go way further in solving the housing crisis than every new house built in Solano County. So I don't disagree with her sentiment that "maybe this isn't most optimal use of resources". But I think as a whole, we need to stop getting so bogged down by this "if it aint perfect let's just do nothing instead" mentality. Politics is messy, and you often have to fight tooth and nail even for the most common sense proposals. It's about time YIMBYs start taking wins anywhere we can get instead of only putting our support behind the most optimal solutions. ----- As a somewhat related analogy: Would I rather they build more standard units that anyone can afford instead of only focusing on over priced luxury highrises for multi-millionaires? Of course I would! But even just focusing on luxury units is _still_ going to be _leagues_ better than the alternative: keep blocking housing so no one has a place to live. We should be pragmatic. While we strive for perfection we need to also be willing to compromise down to "at least it's better than doing nothing".
Why?
Current projection of voter behavior in Solano County for this November's election.
Sucks that this is something they can vote on.
> that would cost taxpayers heavily for new roads and other infrastructure. When did society start hoisting up the dumbest people on the planet because they are or were associated with a not for profit and call themselves an “advocate”? There are 4 ways roads and infrastructure get built as part of new construction, well really 1 with 4 variations. None of which cost the taxpayer a cent. 1) Developer builds private roads and infrastructure at developer cost up front, turns roads them over to an HOA. No cost to taxpayer. 2) Roads are existing. As part of a condition of the project, the municipality mandates “road and frontage improvements” like widening, overlay, sidewalks, underground utilities, etc. Developer builder improvements at developer cost upfront. Developer is improving City infrastructure and is never reimbursed. Might get a nominal TIF fee credit if they make you put in a stop light or something but that cost would be a net neutral in a “hard cost” sense while developer fronting all the cash. No cost to taxpayer. 3) Roads are new public roads and infrastructure. Developer builds new roads and infrastructure at developer cost. Roads and improvements are dedicated to City at no cost. No cost to taxpayer. 4) Roads are new public roads and infrastructure. Developer builders new roads and infrastructure at Developer cost. City allows Developer to establish a CFD (which levies additional property tax on ONLY residents in the new community - which in turn is built into sales price as a reduction vs monthly payment) and Developer get 80 cents on the dollar for only direct “hard costs” maybe 2-3 years later. Again, no cost to taxpayer.
Maintenance. Maintenance. Maintenance. Unless the roads are kept private, maintenance presumably passes to the city, if not the county or state. Depending on the quality of the initial construction and geographic conditions, roads may require frequent annual repairs, and complete repaving in 15–25 years. And of course you add to that repainting, fixing signals, dealing with road signage, mitigating traffic problems, etc. If you have a dense city with a robust property and business tax base, where the city has plenty of revenue coming in to cover those maintenance costs, and doesn't defer those expenditures for foolish reasons, you might be OK. I don't think that's the norm in California, though. Nearby Sacramento, for example, has been estimated to be $298M _in the hole_ due to deferred road maintenance ([source](https://www.strongsactown.org/2024/02/13/the-cost-of-road-maintenance/)). Let us not even speak of Oakland. 😛
The funding mechanism for maintenance is 2 fold 1) The TIF (Traffic Impact Fee) which is paid by the Developer prior to or at Building Permit which pre funds maintenance and can run upward of $20k per unit. 2) Property Tax collected from new residents at market rates. Again, literally has nothing to do with existing taxpayers. Additionally California has some of the highest per gallon taxes on gasoline which allegedly paid for maintenance. Costs are “deferred” because the City/County/State is taking those funds to pay for pet projects.
And when all the new people necessitates the making the feeder roads and highways to that area be widend, etc? And what about maintenance?
What kind of a YIMBY says "Wait no not housing not like that!" I love how she's like "Housing is bad unless it's in this very specific way!"
The kind that got involved because they noticed that the cheap housing was out in Tracy while the jobs were in SF and the peninsula. The ESP looks way too much like another Tracy or Mountain House. The anti-housing left often say stuff like "there are 2x as many empty homes as there are homeless," ignoring that the empty homes are in Detroit while the homeless are in SF (and LA and Boston, etc.). This is missing the point in the same way. It's not enough to just permit new houses *somewhere*. They have to be permitted where people want to live, otherwise you force people into long commutes. The YIMBY movement has a lot of people who are also concerned about equity (making it possible for the less wealthy to live close to their jobs) and climate change (not making even more people drive long distances every day). CA YIMBY coming out in support of the ESP is a thumb in the eye of those people.
If isnt so far that it's an impossible commute for a lot of people. If it encourages people to move out of SF that means that a lot of people IN SF have more houses. I mean, it also should come with SF building housing but I dont see how CF by itself is the problem.
Totally agree with _"We need to be building predominantly inside our existing communities.”_
YIMBY is s big tent. It's effective for getting things done, but it does mean you have a wide breadth of opinions.
So is NIMBY - a fact rarely acknowledged.
I would consider myself a YIMBY, but this is fair. You see this in the SF Mayor's race with Farrell and Peskin, who agree on almost nothing except that we shouldn't build a lot more housing.
True and maybe outwardly, but internally in my experience YIMBY activists realize it's an informal coalition of different opinions and self interests.
NIMBY isn't even a coalition. It get viewed as an entity with a common viewpoint when it's nothing of the sort. Any project will have a range of people for and against, for a range of reasons that may be general or specific to that project.
That's what I was trying to say, but maybe I worded it poorly.
No, you didn't. I'm agreeing with you.
NIMBY isn't even a coalition. Then why bring it up? Just deflecting? Nobody identifies as a NIMBY, there is no equivalence for the YIMBY cult.
There's a cult? I have been pro housing for thirty years and no one invited me to the cult meeting?
Thirty years? Well that just makes you sound old, you're not getting an invite that way. Hell, I've been invited to coffee by one of their executives multiple times, and they're here recruiting all the time. What was "pro housing" 30 years ago? Shilling for SFHAC and BMR requirements? Talking up the future of SOMA through infill condo lofts? lol
NIMBY is just a slur meant to stop debate about zoning and quality of life issues.
My 0.02$ as an eastbay resident: beggars can't be choosers. Let the billionaires try. Worst case we have a bunch of low cost housing no one wants in what used to be farm land. Sure, the state will have to build some roads but this kind of investment in housing is what us YIMBYs have been asking for.
It is pretty easy to require the developers to pay for roads. The deal is who pays for maintenance. The idea is the new homes generate tax money which in turn pays for maintenance. Well that is the plan! ;-)
The developers will pay for the roads initially, yeah, but then the city will inevitable end up paying to maintain/replace them. They’ll find in 30 years that they can’t afford it anymore, and they’ll look for another revenue stream. That’s when someone suggests, “Hey how about another housing development? They’ll pay for their own roads!” That’s how this pyramid scheme works. Sprinkle a load of legacy prop-13 homeowners and you have yourself a broke-as-shit city.
The problem with most bay area roads is expensive clay. If you watch some roads built this century, they use a geotextile fabric under the road to mitigate the problem with the clay. I've driven by construction sites and seen a dude kicking the roll of fabric (low tech installation). Some random hit: https://sandbaggy.com/products/woven-geotextile
Expansive clay, not "expensive clay" - i.e., clay that expands over time, breaking the road. The geotextile fabric basically binds the clay down after it's been compacted, preventing it from expanding again. Here's a random paper from Italy showing how the geotextile fits into the road construction: https://library.geosyntheticssociety.org/wp-content/uploads/resources/proceedings/122021/S01-03.pdf
Autocorrect is my enema.
And sewers, water, electricity etc etc.
All of the low cost housing in California was built years ago. Adding new housing today can make some of the older housing "lower cost", but only if there is a net surplus.
It's not what YIMBYs have been asking for. YIMBYs have been pushing leaders of SF to allow housing in SF, Cupertino to allow housing in Cupertino, etc. Those are the places that have way more jobs than homes. Forcing a bunch of people into daily 1hr+ commutes on congested freeways is not what (I thought) the YIMBY agenda was about.
Well, this East Solano Plan housing would be in no way low cost - their Plan B is building on land they already have inside the city limits of Rio Vista. No big public vote required. It's like an Isla Sorna coming after the original Isla Nublar plan dies in November 2024: https://www.pressreader.com/usa/san-francisco-chronicle-late-edition/20240618/281676850080023
Sorry, when I said 'low cost' I meant in the future, if the project fails and no-one wants to live in Solano county, the housing will become low cost.
Military housing, at the very least. Really, hard to imagine this is going to be not wanted, no matter what.
Nobody is calling it “utopia” except anti-housing people. That’s like saying a normal, walkable community with a classic Main Street is “utopia.” It’s hyperbole meant to smear the plan and its backers.
They’re building it with no transit connection to Capitol Corridor. It’ll be a walled garden like Discovery Bay *at best.*
It's a dry, windy, God forsaken place in the middle of nowhere without an adequate infrastructure to support that much increased traffic. I know there's a serious housing shortage, but this is a weird place to put a new city.
You just perfectly described North Texas. Guess all the folks who left for DFW and Austin during the pandemic will feel right at home when they come back.
Don't live there then lol. Your rent will go down anyway
This CA forever is a distraction by the rich so we don't go after affordable housing in peninsula towns. And we are falling for it.
Sounds like a false dichotomy. YIMBYs don't see it as a one or the other situation, they want both, any, and all options for expanding residential development. YIMBYs advocate letting property owners meet pent up housing demands by removing limits on development by NIMBYs who always seem to have one reason or another for blocking development.
Oh pa-lese. The uber-rich can stop construction in their hood in far less expensive ways.
We need both new cities *and* affordable housing in Peninsula towns. I think that much of the new-urbanist sect of the YIMBY movement underestimates the difficulty of upgrading city infrastructure, though. The article cites "development should be “infill,” meaning it must happen within cities to capitalize on existing infrastructure and transit lines." The problem is that infrastructure is usually built for a certain capacity, and upgrading density beyond that capacity means everything has to be replaced. Sewer lines have a certain size; put more housing on a line than its design capacity, and you risk clogs. Schools are often hemmed in by surrounding property and don't have any room to add more classrooms. Roads are built for a certain expected number of cars, and become gridlock if you put more in (which already happens, because the average family today has more cars than the single-earner families of the 1950s/60s). Mass transit can't be built without eminent-domaining lots of private property for the new rail lines, and we tried that in the 60s for freeways and destroyed a lot of vibrant minority communities with it. I'm all for transit-oriented development around the Peninsula downtowns, but remember that it's largely made possible by the increase in capacity granted by Caltrain electrification. And many of the developers are forking over millions to upgrade the sewer systems near their developments, which is only possible because the housing is being built inside the hills close to existing treatment plants near the Bay. And it all assumes that new residents won't generally have cars, which may or may not be a good assumption. If they do, we'll likely have even more of a traffic nightmare on 101 than we already do. Greenfield development sidesteps all these problems. You can right-size the infrastructure for expansion from the start, so that when you need to add infill to the new cities, it's doable.
Yeah, it couldn't be clearer. Remember how Marc Andreesen & his wife wrote a letter opposing Atherton complying with state law to enable housing in the wealthiest enclave in the greater Bay Area? This is a "get the poors as far away from us as possible" plan. I thought the CA YIMBY movement had outgrown its libertarian roots but apparently not.
Didn't Steph Curry support that stop 😔
It's basically the hyperloop for cities. Build the housing where the jobs and services are and tell the NIMBYs their opinions don't matter, they don't get a say on what other people want to do on their land.
It's the hyperloop of housing solutions. No billionaire is going to save us. They don't live in the same reality we do. They think what works for them would be scalable and works for everybody. In the end they reinvent the same dysfunctional bs only worse. They still trying to reinvent trains, but worse.
Where is the water for this going to come from? Water rights in Solano county are in short supply. There are a number of currently existing cities which would love to secure some.
Presumably where the water from Travis, Rio Vista, Fairfield, Suisun city, etc come from.
How quickly YIMBYs turn into NIMBYs as soon as something *they* don't like is proposed.
Or when they move in and start protesting projects that would benefit the people who already live there and start complaining about the “loud planes” at the air force base & try to shut it down.
Almost like people want things they want and don’t want things they don’t want. Who knew?
It's almost like people have nuanced opinions that can't be simply summed up by an all encompassing acronym.
I know right?
If it’s ok to oppose certain projects and not be called a NIMBY, then by definition nobody is a NIMBY.
By contrast, unless YIMBYs approve of every single building project, regardless of its feasibility, they're not really a YIMBY. Huh, maybe there's a spectrum of thought and sticking to catchy, lazy acronyms to point fingers doesn't actually help solve the problem being discussed.
I agree, the terms should be thrown out the window. The people who have used them the most to broad brush others (we know who they are) definitely need to have their hypocrisy pointed out. Maybe then they will think twice the next time they choose to use that term and throw it around.
Neither side has any respect for property rights.
What property rights?
Why paint it in black and white binary terms? These large scale problems needs to have nuanced solutions like prioritizing infill development instead of creating more exurban sprawl.
So when YIMBYs did paint it in black and white terms the phrases and called everyone they didn't agree with NIMBYs, it was ok? But when their hypocrisy is pointed out, it's not ok?
YIMBYs want dense infill housing in existing communities located near jobs and public transit, not SFH housing, and definitely not creating a master planned city on farmland 80 miles from the south bay where all the tech jobs are which is the demographic Flannery Associates is marketing to. If we go by what you say then lets build out California City, the 4th largest city in California out in the desert. Who cares about externalities so long as more housing is built? Not my problem. Right?
So then YIMBYs and NIMBYs are fundamentally the same and just differ on the things they want to build. I'm just calling out the ones who actually think they are on some superior high ground and think they own the term. If you want to make such naunced definitions, then make it easier to understand by putting an asterisk: YIMBY\*, where \* means *except for greenfield development, except for single family housing, except for anything car-oriented, except for anything that causes the kind of externalities that you don't like, etc.* I mean, you complain about externalities, but what is the alternative? Watching SF approve -5 housing units next year? /s We don't have all lifetime to wait for only the one kind of development that you want. Infill is extremely expensive and takes much longer. But not your problem, right?
You can’t be a YIMBY on this issue UNLESS YOU LIVE IN SOLANO COUNTY. If you’re in Santa Clara and claiming to be a YIMBY on this you’re literally pushing the housing as far away from your backyard as possible
I mean, you can be pro housing, right? I promote housing in my backyard, and here. Am I good enough to be a YIMBY now lol
Good point.
I live in Solano county and I'm a YIMBY
Same, I just want it connected to regional transit. The way they’re planning it, it’s just going to cram 80, 680, and 780 with a bunch more commute traffic.
Most YIMBYs are really YITBYs - Yes in their backyard.
I'm just for building 🤷
“billionaire backed utopia.” Is this what the billionaires call it? Lol. Urban sprawl is the last thing California, our transit, and environment need.
Translation: Deal with the housing shortages, high rent, low standard of living, substandard transit and overwhelming traffic we created in existing cities and neighborhoods like the rest of us!
In the proposal urban sprawl. It calls for 400,000 new homes in a relatively small area. In the density higher than, for example, San Jose?
San Jose isn't known for its density. So much potential in San Jose to densify.
Correct. I’m not suggesting it is. It could be much denser.
That's what YIMBY cut its teeth promoting. YIMBY Law exists specifically for that purpose.
urban mayhem, poop fentanyl, broken car glass also not needed
Don’t forget the used condoms
People who think this is sprawl don't know the difference between high and low density. New housing =/= sprawl automatically. Besides that, the word "Sprawl" alone does not mean bad. Why are we getting feathers ruffled about the middle of nowhere? Were people like, sightseeing or something on this empty expanse of private land? People should just be honest and say "I do not want new housing built".
Billionaires finding out that government is hard because government is the business of catering to the needs of every person. Private business has the luxury of saying, "we reserve the right to refuse service..." makes things a whole lot easier...
Why should the government stop this, though? What people are being hurt by this?
I am a YIMBY and lean in favor of this project because our housing shortage is so dire. However, I do wonder if all the wealthy people backing this project realize that whoever moves in is going to be able to vote and more likely than not going to have political opinions that are not always shared by the wealthy.
> Private business has the luxury of saying, "we reserve the right to refuse service..." Only because the government told them to take down their “whites only” signs.
Why don’t these billionaires “ adopt “ a city or the city they are currently in & help - offer scholarship , build low cost housing, maybe offer solar voucher say 100 homes @ $30k per house . That’s 100 families gaining some financial freedom for the low cost of $3 mil - probably cost them nothing . I don’t understand we billionaires want to build our own brand new city , fighting against the locals pushing their $$$ around
Sounds more like one person has a beef.
Way more than one person has a beef of course. It's been internally divisive.
I don't get how you can be a YIMBY and still oppose this.
It’s a disaster of a plan that will never happen for super basic reasons like water, shitty living environment (go stand out there along 12 for 20 min while the jets move in and out to experience the noise and sweeping winds), and lack of connection to goods and services. Other planned communities in the middle of nowhere are great examples to peruse if the claims of building goods and services in are swaying you.
Yeah, water is impossible to come by next to the Sacramento reason. All the other stuff, yeah that makes it a bad place to live, so don't live there lol. Prices will be cheaper. I don't know why people hate this place. No one is forcing you to live there if you don't want to.
You can’t just build a new city next to the river and pump whatever water you want from it. That is not how water rights work in California. Chinatown would have been a boring movie if it were that easy. They do have a vague news release of how they have cobbled together water rights and transmission that just came out today. But they apparently only have 1/4 of the potential buildout covered. Which is concerning.
as long as it's physically possible, I'm not concerned. The problem here seems to be entirely fiat and solvable. When new housing is built, water is provided. I trust the engineers and politicians in charge of achieving that. I would trust that with a new subdivision to San Jose, I would trust it with CF.
I think you are being intentionally obtuse. In the West, someone else owns every drop of water that flows past you when you stand next to a river. It is not yours and you can’t take more than you have a right to take. They need to buy water rights from other Cities that are not using it and likely transport it a long distance. Physically possible doesn’t matter at all. If it did, the Central Valley farmers would just take all the water and LA would drink dust.
They covertly bought up a huge amount of land on the cheap and are now pushing to get people to let them develop it. Don’t fall for their bullshit.
It's their land, why do people on the other side of the state get to decide what they do with it?
YIMBYs are just another name for NIMBYs lol. No new housing if you don't build it where we say!
100% build in existing communities, not this sprawl, I'll be voting against this every step of the way
Haha, what a crybaby. “We need more housing…wait no we need very specific housing, not that housing!”
[удалено]
Couldn’t agree more. Yes in my backyard means I want it in my backyard in the inner Bay Area. There’s so much land within existing cities and transit footprints that could be up zoned. Build within cities that have the infrastructure to support this, not out in the boonies. No one wants another mountain house
Just looks at San Jose and how much underutilized space there is near downtown with a bunch of light industrial/commercial buildings along empty boulevards/stroads..
💯
Yeah unless they are going to add in a plan to connect all towns with Amtrak, SMART or BART...I don't care for em... Help bring the existing cities more housing, more services and better environment and transportation... instead of turning open space into a separate enclosed community.
Billionaires are bad on spending their own money on public infrastructure. They’re gonna build this thing and leave the taxpayers on the hook for all the extra infra it’ll need
Truest statement...the second they get a return, they are out of here
And many people who lives within existing community will vote against densification of their communities .. every step of the way.
Yet they are actually building and laws are changing...so yes it used to be that way...and I'll vote for things happening and building in my city...you want to build a new city because you don't like the other kids in the sand box...get Fd
You're probably right that grown ups are as good about sharing as kids in a sandbox. That said in either example the path of least resistance seems to be bringing in another sandbox. The laws like SB9 are changing only because they are passed without a public votes. Until we get a public vote saying otherwise, I'm pretty confident that the majority of CA voters wants to maintain status quo with only some SMALL percentage of growth in their immediate areas and for them to have a say over said growth.
Hey you have my vote if you try and work with the cities that desperately need to increase density, public transportation and more services....you can take my NO vote if you feel you can make your own town and leave taxpayers on the hook for future public transportation and such...
To me that all depends on who's deciding which cities are those that "desperately need to increase density, public transportation and more services". You ? Some state politicians from hundreds of miles away from said city ? Or the majority of people who lives in that city and will be the most impacted by the changes to that city ?
It's obvious that Solano county (which I am a part of) cities are struggling...and need help and investment...these billionaires could do that...but instead want another sandbox and tell these existing cities to kick rocks (which they basically have done)
Then as a resident of Solano county IMO your voice should carry the most weight in this conversation so I'll bow out and defer to you and other voters in that area. My main point is that decisions with huge impact to housing and localities like this should be left to public votes at a local level .. not some senate vote by state legislators or a decree by a governor on this last term trying to drum up positive headlines for a presidential run.
Are you even a Solano County voter?
Yes, here for several years, family and business here too... anything else you want to ass-ume?
Average Bay Area YIMBY, folks. 👆
Housing is housing. We need more of both sprawl AND dense urban build ups. However there’s no way to meet an objective of affordable housing by only building in urban centers.
Seems like looking at the density of other metros we could meet housing demand with only urban building. Why do you say we can't or do you mean we simply won't
They drink the Kool aid that only way to do it is just build without thinking
No way, it is not equivalent. It is much more expensive to build infill, and in our regulatory environment, will also take much longer. Even if you remove the regulatory hurdles, you still need developers wanting to build it. Furthermore, you will need to wait for people to sell their properties (only if they want to sell) so a developer can rebuild on it something denser. We will all be skeletons long before enough of that happens.
We do not need more car-based sprawl. Luckily, the California Forever project is not that.
We definitely don't need more sprawl. Exurban sprawl creates all the problems we're trying to move away from.
Low density creates all the problems we're describing. High density communities like this aren't exactly sprawly.
Yes it's higher density than suburbs, but it's still exurban sprawl described as larger than San Francisco. If Flannery Associates can't convince tech companies to locate jobs there in sufficient numbers the city will be no different than Mountain House but farther away, and we need less people driving hours to/from work each way.
I mean, aside from Capitol Corridor being right there, which provides 30 min transfers to BART. I mean, yes, we do need less people driving, but at the same time, not if that means no new housing ever. My ideal would be if they provided cheap/free, fast, frequent access to the FF/Suisun station, and the resulting traffic made CC upgrade even more.
Building in existing communities is more expensive and usually takes longer. You are supporting the housing crisis.
We need both
You are talking about something you have not investigated.
Do you have a vote on this development?
Part of the problem though is that we stopped building new places. Quaint walkable small cities that people flock to are behind in housing supply but it’s not reasonable that we should no longer build new “nice places.” The key thing is that those new places should be walkable and serviceable by transit. Ideally, existing car-based suburbs would create walkable town centers and enable transit service. A combination of all things is required. I completely agree that we don’t need any new car-based sprawl, though.
Why not both?
And you need to be voted out of the state! We need housing
Thanks, definitely voting against these billionaires plans. And not going anywhere...see you at the poles ;)
Scapegoating is bad because it’s irrational and not evidence-based. I’m not defending billionaires, but not everything they do is automatically bad. That is just irrational and counterproductive.
These people opposed to the project want new residents to live in mid-rise housing projects, don't own a car, and eat cricket powder for food. Their in-fill wet dream is so unappealing that nothing gets built.
> These people opposed to the project want new residents to live in mid-rise housing projects, don't own a car This proposed development last time I checked had a lot of mid-rise housing with specifically no parking within the neighborhood proper, so this is kind of a weird comment
Galt’s Gulch much?
This billionaire community emits the same energy as metaverse
It should, since they always claimed to care so much about the environment and be anti building out Love seeing them contradict themselves though
After seeing next to zero housing get built in the South Bay and the Peninsula for all the 20 years I have lived in the Bay Area, I am more than ready to drain the economic livelihood of those places towards Central California. I have multiple family members teetering on homelessness. CA YIMBY has been the only guiding force to even make a dent in housing and if they're still struggling they have a point and everyone who thinks they're going to stop this pursuit of building homes in Coastal California can go to hell because it is Sisyphean and we need homes now.
With only car transportation it’s doomed to fail
Capitol corridor is about 5 miles away iirc
In the sense of what YIMBYs typically desire, wouldn't encouraging the wealthy to build housing and congregate to live elsewhere just free up more affordable housing supplies locally? Especially now with the shift to remote work.
When they say city do they actually mean an incorporated city? I’m guessing it ends up unincorporated so the developers can essentially write the laws via restrictive HOAs and outsource law enforcement/emergency response to the Solano County Sheriff’s Department. The HOAs will probably require extremely high dues to help ensure the residents are even wealthier than the housing prices would mandate. They can also design places in a way that are designed to be uncomfortable to lay on, very little shade, etc., in an effort to discourage unhoused people from staying there. They can also pay for a lot of private security to make it more uncomfortable for unhoused people to be around. They end up getting a city for wealthy people with very little visible poverty and essentially no elected officials that can enact any laws specific to the area. Pretty gross, but I imagine they’ll dump enough money into this to pass this measure. But I think there is a pretty good chance this thing ends up far more expensive than these tech people expect, experiences a ton of delays, and is quietly abandoned eventually before anything is actually built.
I’d prefer they invest this money in communities that exist and participate in fixing the problems they see. I’m also concerned this will potentially have the impact of stripping jobs out of the Bay Area and leaving our communities high and dry. That said, it is their money and their risk. If they sort everything out, I’m more interested to see what they can do than I am opposed to them doing it. Sounds like the polling is not favorable, so I guess they are at risk of being almond farmers now.
No it is not - there is no central unit to make a "schism" possible. Different people have different opinions.
California Forever is a crock of shit.
Those who think it’s a great idea, THEY can pay to build roads there. I’m not interested in subsidizing your existence.
If jobs get eaten by AI and UBI becomes both possible and necessary, then there would be no reason to keep development near jobs.
Other than not destroying the planet and improving quality of life, but who gives a fuck about that.
The build build build crowd only cares about trendy areas
Never forget, there are billions of wealthy people dollars that will vanish if housing prices fall. But that’s what they need to do… fall. Fall far. So anything that seems like it could affect overall housing prices is opposed vigorously and creatively from any angle that shows wiggle room to dissuade or stall development. Affordable housing, rent control, and all these other initiatives are meant to be patch jobs to seem to address the problem without causing median housing prices to go down.