‘We’ve lost the art of city building’: can the planner behind a tech-funded metropolis win over the skeptics?

It's mentioned in other threads that fixing existing areas is politically impossible. In San Francisco, landowning interests and activists vigorously block development, which is why the city appears virtually unchanged since the 90s.

Should we only be able to have reasonable cities at the behest of billionaires and multimillionaires?

No other entities have the resources and coordination to pull it off.

Non-profits?

Non-profits don't have the resources or expertise. They often misallocate resources. As an extreme example: the non-profit Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, in its mission for "housing justice", is building an affordable housing complex that will cost an avg of $1.17 million per unit at a total of $166 million.

The TNDC could realistically put all that money into index funds with annualized 10.7% return rates and give those low-income households $125,190 of free money annually to go enjoy work-free upper-middle class lifestyles in a LCOL area forever and ever. No one at TNDC seems to recognize how extremely perverse this misallocation is.

Anyway, the average cost to build a below market rate housing unit in SF is $737,417 (2019 stats). One could put that money in index funds and give those low-income families $78,900 of free money every year forever and ever to do whatever with.

In brief mentioning, activists and community organizers are too busy blocking individual development projects. They have nowhere near the organizational capacity to pull off a major urban project.

The state?

The state shown shown itself to be completely incapable of producing and executing on vision.

The California High Speed Rail project has shown how bureaucracy and corruption can disrupt and distort large state projects. The NYT did a good exposé on how politics derailed the project.

The aim of the rail is to lower carbon emissions caused by people flying between SF and LA by offering a fast, direct train connection between these two major hubs. Political compromises meant that the project started in the middle of the agricultural heartland working outwards, resulting in a weird suboptimal route.

The rail authority said it has accelerated the pace of construction on the starter system, but at the current spending rate of $1.8 million a day, according to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century.

The goal in California in 2008 was to carry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours 40 minutes, putting it among the fastest trains in the world in average speed.

The desert route “sacrificed travel time and increased the costs,” and opened the door to “a whole series of problems” that have become only clearer as time has gone on, he said. “They betrayed the public with this project.”

The rail route “was not based on technical and financial criteria,” Mr. Ikhrata said.

Proponents of running the rail through the booming cities of Bakersfield, Fresno and Merced cited a lot of arguments: The Central Valley needed jobs. It would be an ideal location to test equipment. It would be the easiest place to build, because it was mostly open farmland.

State senators were under pressure to endorse the Central Valley plan, not only from Gov. Jerry Brown but also from President Barack Obama’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, who came to the state Capitol to lobby the vote.

The Central Valley quickly became a quagmire. The need for land has quadrupled to more than 2,000 parcels, the largest land take in modern state history, and is still not complete. In many cases, the seizures have involved bitter litigation against well-resourced farmers, whose fields were being split diagonally.

There are no other entities that can pull this off besides the wealthy and powerful, who historically have always been the instigators of grand urban projects.

They actually are setting aside $200 million to revitalize the downtowns of the existing cities in Solano County initially. If the new city grows, they will invest more money into existing downtowns in the county. They are also 100% funding the construction of new schools to educate the new residents and integrating the new schools into the greater school district so anyone can attend.

I never understood the argument about cities using too much water. Urban water use accounts for only 10% of the water used in California. New cities do not cause droughts. With the construction of a brand new city, they can create a community that is more water efficient than existing cities. Las Vegas recycles 99.9% of water that is used indoors back into Lake Mead. The new city can at least match that and filter all waste water before releasing it back into the Sacramento River.

Maybe this experiment may turn out to be a mistake, but we have been doing the same thing for 80 years in California. If this works, it can be a model for new development in the state, or even a model to strive for when rebuilding existing communities.