NYT Reporter Conor Dougherty Has Long Educated Marin & Larger Bay Area About How Best to Navigate Housing, Whether its ‘Abundance,’ Affordability, Now He Suggests ‘America Needs New Cities – a Whole City from Scratch. It’s Been Done Before & Might Solve the Housing Crisis
The city is Irvine, population 300,000 or so. On the surface it looks like a typical American suburb with curlicue streets and shopping centers abundant in parking. What makes Irvine unique is that unlike most of its neighbors, it also has a dense base of employment that includes a university, manufacturing and high-rise office buildings — in other words, it is a true city. This happened fast, and not organically. Almost all of Irvine was built by a single entity, the Irvine Company, which for most of its 160-year history was a grain and citrus farming operation. The company started developing this farmland during California’s post-World War II boom, and in the late 1970s was taken over by a group of investors that included Donald Bren. (Bren, 93, is now the sole owner and one of the country’s richest people, thanks to Irvine’s growth.)
The company planned most of Irvine’s parks, streets and structures, and it continues to own a majority of the city’s apartments, shopping centers and offices — even a local newspaper. Almost no place in America is more completely a company town.
However it happens, America needs more housing. Economists estimate the current shortage at somewhere between four million and seven million units, which would take several decades to build at the current pace of construction. The easiest way to boost those numbers is to build more housing on the urban edge, where land and construction are less expensive. The unifying thesis of projects like California Forever and Esmeralda is to use the logic of sprawl-style growth — build on undeveloped land outside city centers — to create neighborhoods that aim to minimize the use of cars.
“When I look around America and I see what’s being built, I have a hard time finding places I want to live,” said Zuegel, the chief executive of Esmeralda. “I’m not thrilled about the idea of raising kids in a city like San Francisco, where it would be hard to have independence at a young age. At the same time, I don’t want to live in a car-centric suburb where you can’t walk to a store.”
Open land represents the future in its purest form — after all, every place was no place at some point. The quest for resources, escaping bondage or seeking places to worship freely have all motivated new settlements and fresh modes of living. Buildings, sure, but also a chance to improve society in a place where the future looms larger than the past.
“We are trying to create a place that will someday have all the messiness and complexity that real cities have,” said Gabriel Metcalf, the head of planning for California Forever. “The word ‘city’ is an expression of that ambition.”
But every idea needs a model. And in the United States, it’s hard to find a more successful one than Irvine.
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“People come to a new city because of the people who are there, not because of infrastructure,” said Alain Bertaud, a senior researcher at New York University who spent much of his career advising the creation of new cities for the World Bank.
That, Bertaud said, is why America’s most successful new cities in the postwar era are on the edge of bustling places where outward growth was already underway. There is no Reston without Washington, no Woodlands without Houston and no Irvine without Los Angeles. Each of them relied on finding just the right parcel in just the right place at just the right moment. And even then it’s more alchemy than science: The staying power of old cities isn’t that they’re perfect or easy to live in, but that they have an intellectual and cultural heft that is impossible to replicate.
New ideas have to come from somewhere, though, and a blank slate is a stark way to showcase them. Their true power isn’t in finding the perfect expression — it’s in the ways they get copied.
From that angle, Irvine is much more than a midsize city in the orbit of Los Angeles. Its Mediterranean-style architecture has been cloned all across the United States. And many of its planning ideas — like targeting a range of residents, from college graduates seeking first apartments to empty nesters downsizing — are so baked into the suburban landscape that newer generations of developers consider them the standard.
Randall Lewis, a principal at the Lewis Group of Companies, a developer of master-planned communities in California and Nevada, said he visited Irvine a minimum of three times a year to get ideas. “It’s the No. 1 source by far,” he said.
Developers can be a conservative bunch, because their projects are literally set in stone (and wood and bricks and asphalt). Once a new concept is proven, the industry looks to replicate it across the country — cookie cutter, you might say. It makes sense financially but leaves minimal oxygen for new concepts and creates a logic in which suburbs look like suburbs because that’s how suburbs are built.
In the United States, where real estate is ultimately about profit and loss, the best way to bend the paradigm is to prove something different can be lucrative. But first you have to build it. From that angle, Irvine is much more than a midsize city in the orbit of Los Angeles. Its Mediterranean-style architecture has been cloned all across the United States. And many of its planning ideas — like targeting a range of residents, from college graduates seeking first apartments to empty nesters downsizing — are so baked into the suburban landscape that newer generations of developers consider them the standard.
1 Hamilton
An ‘Abundance’ reminder: For Democrats, this is a political crisis,” Klein says. “In the American system, to lose people is to lose power. If these trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right. The states that Kamala Harris won in 2024 will lose perhaps as many as a dozen House seats and Electoral College votes. The states that Trump won would gain them. In that Electoral College, a Democrat could win every state Harris won in 2024 plus Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still lose.
And here is the ultimate rub: “It is also a spiritual crisis: You cannot be the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live,” Klein writes. “You are not the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families can no longer afford to live. This is the policy failure haunting blue states. It has become too hard to build and too expensive to live in the places where Democrats govern. It is too hard to build homes. It is too hard to build clean energy. It is too hard to build mass transit. The problem isn’t technical: We know how to build apartment complexes and solar panel arrays and train lines. The problem is the rules and the laws and political cultures that govern construction in many blue states.”
Connecting the dots from 2022 to 2025 matter. The timeline between those two years matches something that Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of the New York Times editorial board, wrote: “the willingness of California’s state leaders to override the obstructionist proclivities of local governments in the service of the broader public interest is making a real difference.”
While the mountain of legislation cascading down to Mill Valley planners is often beyond their ability to control, they’re continuing to move the needle on projects that our community needs.
At the Mill Valley Chamber, we view the future of local housing through a pair of lenses: First, we live in a community that is largely dominated by large, 4-5-plus bedroom homes, and we must find ways to accommodate more housing opportunities for more people, like Home Match, which connects community members seeking housing with older adults who have extra space in their homes. Each match is personalized with the process overseen by program staff—at no cost to participants. Home Match benefits everyone. It decreases isolation, provides housing security, and above all, builds community.
Second, we desperately need, over time, as much housing stock for one- and two-bedroom units, allowing young people, many of whom live in San Francisco or elsewhere because they can’t afford what is available in the 94941, to be able to live in the town within which they were born and raised.