Since the announcement that my favorite new writer on land use, Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas, is coming to Utah in November to speak at Salt Lake County’s Regional Solutions Event, I thought I’d let you all know about her latest story, Why Don’t We Just Build New Cities?  It’s about the effort by a number of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to buy up land and plan to build a new city from scratch in Solano County, California.

A number of columnists have opined on this and raised a number of issues related to it, from whether this would be an exclusive non-diverse enclave to whether it is just another manifestation of suburban sprawl, to whether interesting urban places can just be manufactured out of whole cloth.  These are interesting reads.  Molly Turner, NY Times; The Guardian; Marc Joffe, Cato; Josh Stevens, California Planning & Development Report

Demsas chimes in with points about all these issues, but for me, it’s the politics of it all that sparks my interest, and she hits on this better than most.  Most insightfully, I think, is her closing statement to the story, which really could and should have been the lead:

What America needs isn’t proof that it can build new cities, but that it can fix its existing ones.

Demsas notes that some of what may be driving efforts to look at building new communities from scratch is this:

The process of building a city, difficult as it is, seems remotely rational only because trying to build within cities drives people mad.

And this is where even this effort will likely run smack head-on into the politics of land use:

Either way, new city or new sprawl, this project is going to run headfirst into the politics of development. Right now, the land is zoned largely for agricultural use. The county holds that changing the current designation to accommodate high-density urban infrastructure will require a ballot measure.

There’s lots of interest here, and I’m really looking forward to hearing from Demsas on November 9 in West Jordan.  And maybe there are some lessons in all this for our big new communities, Utah Cityhttps://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/2023/aug/29/vineyards-new-650-acre-development-to-be-called-utah-city/  and The Point https://www.utahbusiness.com/the-point-draper-utah-sustainable-community-prison-site/