New Cities Offer a Chance To Rethink How Local Government Works

California would benefit from building more housing and having more experimentation with how public services are delivered.

The average age of an owner-occupied house in California is 45 years, which is a reminder that your home was probably built relatively recently. I was an adult when my "historic" midcentury ranch was first sold (for around $50,000 including the lot). It was part of a futuristic neighborhood of 200-plus properties plopped in a farm field. Everything around me—including our city's Gold Rush-era downtown—was once a fallow field.

Sorry for being Captain Obvious, but many people seem to have forgotten that our cities, suburbs and small towns were the product of ingenuity, investment, creativity and construction. It's not a coincidence the American Dream of homeownership has slipped away—with home prices in California now topping $900,000—after years of no-growth rules, urban-growth boundaries and other limitations on development.

The Legislative Analyst's Office nine years ago pointed to a problem that's only gotten worse: chronic underbuilding, especially in coastal communities. Developers could easily meet the demand. But government meddling—from voter-backed slow-growth restrictions to state environmental rules—makes it inordinately costly and difficult for them to do so.

In recent years, the housing crisis has gotten so troubling that even California's progressive lawmakers have tried to address it by allowing streamlined "by right" development approvals. They've got the right idea, but they're steeped in an urbanist ideology that despises car-centered suburbia. As a result, they've only loosened rules for the high-density projects that few people prefer.

The state is at a crossroads, but fortunately some of its wealthiest and most-innovative residents are crafting plans to do what previous Americans have always done: build new cities. It's uncertain whether they can break through the Byzantine slow-growth regulatory process the state has developed in the last 50 years, but at least someone is trying to shake up the development process.

The highest-profile new-city proposal is known as California Forever. Its East Solano Plan would create a 50,000-plus population city on ranch land between the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento. The project, spearheaded by Bay Area tech moguls, envisions a new downtown with traditional walkable neighborhoods. The proposal became national news after The New York Times reported the group was quietly buying acreage.

After tepid public support, the project's backers pulled the November ballot measure. They haven't given up, but instead have agreed to delay the project and work with the county to secure rezoning through the normal, life-sucking county entitlement process.

But two other new-city projects have gained recent attention. As The Sacramento Bee reported, Sutter County supervisors gave the go-ahead on the next phase of groundwork for a portion of Sutter Pointe—a proposal that would build around 17,500 new homes north of Sacramento in what the newspaper refers to as "effectively a new city." It's not as gee-whiz as the East Solano Plan, but it's also more likely to move ahead quickly.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reports on a new project in north Sonoma County called Esmeralda—something it calls "a future tech utopia with the look of a rustic Italian village." It sounds like just another upscale pseudo-European village in wine country, but so what? California needs more housing and experimentation of all kinds. Oddly enough, the Chronicle reports a somewhat favorable reaction among many locals.

The Chronicle quoted a scoffing social-media post from a journalist who was "referencing the vision among some in tech for a decentralized digital-first community that seeks to replace existing institutions and systems of governance." I'm stunned by the degree to which critics fear efforts that might challenge encrusted local institutions. That's one of the most compelling parts of the new-city movement.

New cities offer not only more housing but the possible rethinking of local government. We've all read endless stories about homelessness run amok, urban crime, failing public schools, crumbling road infrastructure, outsized pensions that consume public budgets, lousy transit systems, and multibillion-dollar municipal governments that can barely manage to build a public toilet. Is it absurd to try better ways to provide public services?

In some developing countries, entrepreneurs have created Special Economic Zones that bypass corrupt public agencies with self-governing cities. They mostly have been successes, creating businesses and housing—and offering modern infrastructure in places where it's a rarity. Our country has had successful privatized governments.

New-city developers in California have largely been mum on their governance plans (and likely envision some traditional model), but it's still worth thinking about the possibilities. And a critic might say these new cities aren't much different than the master-planned communities that have long been part of California's landscape (although they use different buzzwords). Again, so what?

As California Forever explains, "all cities were new cities." Our country long has encouraged new developments of every type, which have provided the neighborhoods and homes we live in today. It's time to start encouraging them again.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.