By Steve Sailer
01/20/2024
Earlier: Is An American Singapore Going To Be Built In Northern California?
As I mentioned back in September, various tech billionaires like the Widow Jobs and Marc Andreessen have been buying up empty land in Solano County northeast of the San Francisco Bay to build a new city. Now more info is available. They are apparently going to call it California Forever, which sounds awkward: Get your forever home in California Forever, California. I’d say that Forever, California would be better.
The idea is to max out at around 400,000 people using medium density buildings about five stories high, like downtown Pasadena. The street corridors would tend to be really wide to accommodate cars, buses, and bicycles all in their own protected lanes, along with sidewalks. Might work. They’re trying something like this in Culver City, CA,
With a population of 400,000, presumably they could attract jobs as well as just commuters.
They’ll need to because the commute of 62 miles to San Francisco is a bear:
California Forever is not close to anywhere else, either: 45 miles to Walnut Creek, 42 miles to Sacramento (but I’m guessing that there are pleasant, and 93-99 miles to Palo Alto. It’s 24 miles to the end-of-the-line BART station in Antioch, followed by a 70-minute train ride to the San Francisco financial district.
The San Joaquin River/Estuary to the south of California Forever is a major impediment, with the wetlands being two or three miles wide. There are no bridges or tunnels between Benicia and Rio Vista, which are 37 miles apart by road. A tunnel connecting under the river to Pittsburgh, CA could save maybe 20 minutes, but would cost many billions. And a BART connection all the way to the new city would raise concerns about homeless, drug addicts, and muggers getting access. If it remains car only, it should be fine on those grounds, but then it’s in the middle of nowhere.
The ideal would be to run express trains from California Forever under the river to San Francisco in 45 minutes. Commuter rail where everybody gets a seat is the best.
Of course, that raises the question of whether anybody will still want to go to San Francisco because somebody someday summons the political will to save San Francisco from its current downward spiral, the way New York City was saved a generation ago.
My guess is that San Francisco will eventually be saved. It’s too unique a location to be allowed to go the way of Detroit.
Then again, maybe Work from Home will remain massively common and old-fashioned skyscraper downtowns are obsolete. Then it would be interesting to see what a new city built from scratch in the 21st century will turn out to look like.
Earlier, from Astral Codex Ten: Model City Monday 9/4/23: California Dreamin’:
Steve Sailer
Sep 4, 2023
The car commute from Montezuma Hills in roughly the geographic-weighted center of the land purchases to San Francisco looks like roughly 3 hours and ten minutes round trip on the average working day.
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Deiseach
Sep 5, 2023
So about an hour and a quarter in and then the same back? That’s not *terrible* (there’s people in my town do that to the city where they have their pharma, etc., job) but of course the longest part of the trip will be getting into the city. Unless they set up some kind of rail service/commuter bus service, and I doubt that is going to happen. So the “dense, walkable city” idea is knocked on the head from the get-go, as you are going to need a car to get to your tech job.
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Steve Sailer
Sep 5, 2023
A couple would definitely need two cars. And over three hours of commuting per day to San Francisco would mean it’s not that much more desirable a location than existing downscale exurbs like Stockton, which could depress the quality of residents who’d be attracted by it.
It would be nice to have a rail commute: commuting by passenger rail, like in Mad Men, is the most pleasant way to get to work during rush hour. In the Chicago suburbs, for example, the most desirable suburban locations are within reasonable walks of train stations: 15-minute suburbs.
There’s a train track between Sacramento and San Francisco that’s about 10 or 20 miles away, but most railroads in the U.S., other than specifically commuter railways in places like NYC and Chicago, prioritize freight over passengers, so schedules for passenger trains are often fictional, with passenger trains being sidetracked to let freight roar by. (America, by the way, has very efficient freight trains in return for having terrible intercity passenger rail.)
An alternative would be to extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail line from Antioch under or over the river/estuary to this new city. But that would cost many, many billions and would probably require the new city to have a population of, say, a half million. Also, BART raises fears of Oaklanders or some of the exurban slum dwellers (e.g., Pittsburg) riding mass transit out to the new city to raise havoc. If you can only get to this new city by a long car trip, it will have low crime rates.
In sum, there are good reasons of geography why this piece of land is so empty. On the other hand, this coalition of billionaires is not unimpressive. I wish them well.
This billionaire’s coalition is pretty ideologically diverse, but they seem like people who might unironically approve of flying the American flag.
They are probably influenced by Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso’s highly popular Americana outdoor shopping mall in Glendale, CA, which looks like a prosperous small city in Ohio in 1910. Caruso’s immensely popular Grove mall looks like an Italian hill city. People in L.A. will drive long distances and pay to park to walk around a walkable simulacrum of a city from before cars.
Steve Sailer
Sep 4, 2023
Thanks.
I think if they want to use the land they’ve bought in the south part of the Solana peninsula they’ll need a big bridge over or tunnel under the river. Otherwise you’d have to drive 10 miles north to get off the peninsula, which means 10 miles south to get back to the latitude where you started, so that adds 40 miles to your daily commute versus as-the-crow-flies to get to Walnut Creek, Berkeley, or San Francisco.
Assume that the location on Google Maps called “Montezuma Hills” is about the center of the Flannery land purchases. Well, it’s 30.6 miles by road to the Pittsburg BART station due to first having to drive 9 miles toward Sacramento to cross the Sacramento River at Rio Vista. This city would really need another bridge or tunnel to open up a more direct route across the Sacramento River.
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Steve Sailer
Sep 5, 2023
BART goes all the way to Antioch out past Pittsburg, so the shuttle to BART would be less than 31 miles, but still a big number. In summary, the reason this place has virtually nobody living on it is that it is way out in the boonies.
Unless you work for the state government in Sacramento, all the jobs are to the southwest. But there’s a big river/estuary between there and the jobs, with a limited number of bridges inconveniently located for this planned metropolis. If you could build a bridge to the end of the BART line in Antioch, you could get commutes down to something reasonable, but this looks pretty nightmarish for commuters otherwise.
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