Back urban experiments like California Forever

The state should empower an official to approve important large developments without giving counties and cities a veto

- CHRIS ELMENDORF AND ED GLAESER GUEST CONTRIBUTORS

AN ARTIST'S RENDERING of neighborhoods in a proposed new city in Solano County, a contrast with typical exurban developments.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the Silicon Valley dreamers proposing building a 400,000-person city and manufacturing hub on rangeland 50 miles northeast of San Francisco released a detailed rendition of their plan. It’s unlike anything the United States has seen before: exurban in location, intensely urban by design.

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 under-housed California could you even imagine selling Americans apartments that are considerably farther away from existing employment hubs.

Yet California Forever represents more than a bet that the Bay Area’s extreme housing shortage has created a robust market for “super-commuters” based in the Central Valley. Rather, it is an audacious effort to operationalize the last 30 years of research in urban economics.

One lesson of this research is that “building up” in existing neighborhoods is often irksome to folks living nearby. (Put your new city somewhere else, if you can.)