Polls consistently show that owning a home is one of the keys to overall happiness, which no doubt explains why debates over home prices are so emotional and so dominant in the legislature and city councils. Thanks to tight supply and resulting price increases, many Californians now struggle to purchase homes. The homeownership rate nationwide is nearly 66%, but in California that figure is only about 55%.
Of course, homeownership has disadvantages. Replacing a roof or repairing a foundation is expensive. It’s harder to take a new job in another city if you have to sell your house first. But owning a home allows you to design it to your tastes. You don’t live in fear that the owner will sell it. You get tax breaks and can build equity over time. You can settle in and become part of the community. The feds have long viewed homeownership as a key to economic stability.
An ongoing battle in Northern California, 60 miles east of San Francisco in the suburban fringes of Solano County, will determine whether our state is serious about building new housing. It will also show whether YIMBYs – the Yes In My Back Yarders who promote housing construction – are true to their own rhetoric, or are just the urban version of NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yarders) who oppose any construction they don’t like .
People often mistakenly believe that home prices are so high in the Bay Area because the development has limited places to build. In fact, there is seemingly endless open space throughout the eight-county region, but government controls on growth are limiting development opportunities. For example, beyond the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, 84% of the land is off-limits to development. No wonder the population is only 260,000 and house prices are absurd.
It’s the same story throughout the area. Growth control measures in Alameda County have meant you see nothing but lovely empty hillsides on the drive to Oakland, but they have scuppered development plans and ensured average home prices by millions of dollars. Solano is home to some major suburbs, but is dominated by large tracts of ranches (and wind farms) as you head east to the Sacramento County line. I love the outdoors, but it’s the perfect location for a new city.
That’s exactly what the Bay Area’s savvy venture capitalists are planning. As of 2017, a group called Flannery Associates has been quietly purchasing 50,000 acres, in a move that echoes the Walt Disney Co.’s secret purchase of swamp land around Orlando in the 1960s as it pursued construction of Disney World and finally the Epcot Center. Big dreams require bold action, especially if you want to build an entirely new city in regulation-choked, growth-controlled California.
The project has become perhaps the biggest thing in Solano County in forever, which makes the proposal’s name, California Forever, appropriate. A New York Times an August article turned local rumors into a statewide controversy. He described the idea as follows: “Take a barren area of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert it into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation, and dense areas urban”. life.”
Representatives from California Forever held their usual series of public meetings as they prepared for a countywide ballot initiative in November needed to rezone land for agricultural uses. That’s necessary because in 2008 county voters overwhelmingly approved the Orwellian-named Orderly Growth Initiative, a common type of NIMBY open space measure that paved (actually, not paved) the way for the state’s housing crisis .
The democratic press reports that the initiative’s campaign had a “choppy start,” which is not surprising for a project of this scale. It’s also no surprise that some locals are fired up at the idea of Bay Area tech moguls helicoptering into a somewhat rural area and imposing their big ideas on them.
Fortune the magazine reported that “Silicon Valley billionaires’ Astroturf city being built from scratch is running headlong into a NIMBY backlash.” Ironically, it’s not just NIMBYs who are a problem. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the proposal divided YIMBYs. “It’s an expansion with a nicer face and a nicer name,” one YIMBY activist told the paper.
I found a lot of criticism of YIMBY on social media, which is strange given that the plan is full of the latest urban planning concepts. “All cities were once ‘new’ cities,” notes California Forever. He’s also spot on when he explains that “we will never, ever come close to solving our housing affordability challenges through infill alone.” But many YIMBYs aren’t so much about building housing as stuffing us into tiny apartments along bus routes.
The project is certainly shaking up the housing debate across the state and could determine whether new generations will be able to take part in the American dream.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.