"The new city will be laid out on a compact grid, with interlocking streets, rapid-transit routes and greenways for pedestrians and cyclists. The city's least dense residential neighborhoods will be zoned for 85-foot apartment buildings, taller than essentially every apartment building erected before 1880. House hunters will be able to purchase row houses as if they were shopping for real estate in 19th century Brooklyn, not in cookie-cutter suburban sprawl."
"This vision - so distant and so dense - represents a stark break with what has typically sold well on the exurban frontier. The Woodlands, Texas, one of the most successful exurban developments of the past 50 years, is only 30 miles from Houston and is built overwhelmingly around single-family homes. Only in radically underhoused California could you even imagine selling Americans apartments that are considerably farther away from existing employment hubs."
California Forever plans a 400,000-person, high-density city and manufacturing hub on rangeland 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. The design uses a compact grid, interlocking streets, rapid transit, and greenways, with even the least dense neighborhoods zoned for 85-foot apartment buildings and row houses akin to 19th-century Brooklyn. The project targets Bay Area housing shortages and potential super-commuters, contrasting with typical exurban single-family developments like The Woodlands. The plan draws on urban economics that suggest locating new dense settlements elsewhere can avoid local opposition and boost productivity through geographic concentration and closer interactions.
Read at The Mercury News
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