Billionaires Creating A European City in the San Francisco Bay Area

[Alpha8472]

Billionaires are creating a new European style city in the San Francisco Bay Area on rural land in Solano County.

They are calling it California Forever with thousands of new homes. It looks like an Italian village in the hills.

They envision a utopia totally isolated from the rest of California.

This is going to need tons of grocery stores, restaurants, and stores to support the people. My take on it is that they will ban drive thru restaurants and chain stores. They will try to create European style cafes, bakeries, butcher shops, and create a walkable city. It will be like traveling to Italy. The only problem will be it will be very overpriced.

California is running low on housing, so there will be no shortage of rich people to buy houses here.

Can Americans go without traditional huge grocery stores or chain stores? Or will they just drive out of town for shopping?

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ ... 345527.php

[rwsandiego]

Billionaires are creating a new European style city in the San Francisco Bay Area on rural land in Solano County.

They are calling it California Forever with thousands of new homes. It looks like an Italian village in the hills.

They envision a utopia totally isolated from the rest of California.

This is going to need tons of grocery stores, restaurants, and stores to support the people. My take on it is that they will ban drive thru restaurants and chain stores. They will try to create European style cafes, bakeries, butcher shops, and create a walkable city. It will be like traveling to Italy. The only problem will be it will be very overpriced.

California is running low on housing, so there will be no shortage of rich people to buy houses here.

Can Americans go without traditional huge grocery stores or chain stores? Or will they just drive out of town for shopping?

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ ... 345527.php

I don't recall the name of the billionaire who wanted to build a city of 4 million people in the Arizona desert (it wasn't a name-brand billionaire like Elon Musk or Bill Gates) a couple of years ago. The local NPR station found the most pre-development state legislator they could find and asked him about this proposal. The legislator replied that Arizona already has a city of 4 million people called Phoenix and can't support another one. He also invited said billionaire to invest in improving Phoenix and finding new sources of water.

WTH are these people thinking?

[veteran+]

Billionaires are creating a new European style city in the San Francisco Bay Area on rural land in Solano County.

They are calling it California Forever with thousands of new homes. It looks like an Italian village in the hills.

They envision a utopia totally isolated from the rest of California.

This is going to need tons of grocery stores, restaurants, and stores to support the people. My take on it is that they will ban drive thru restaurants and chain stores. They will try to create European style cafes, bakeries, butcher shops, and create a walkable city. It will be like traveling to Italy. The only problem will be it will be very overpriced.

California is running low on housing, so there will be no shortage of rich people to buy houses here.

Can Americans go without traditional huge grocery stores or chain stores? Or will they just drive out of town for shopping?

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ ... 345527.php

The rich can continue to build these enclaves with ever increasing "wall" heights (figuratively speaking) but the exponentially increasing masses of plebeians will eventually scale those "walls".

It is inevitable.

[buckguy]

It's very difficult to build a new town and plans often change radically toward the conventional because of costs, construction practicalities and factors that affect the housing market like interest rates. Places that are too radical in their planning often falter very quickly. That's what happened with Reston, Virginia which recently has been trying to use Metro construction to revive the effort to be a real town, rather than a slightly off the norm suburb. Columbia, Maryland is arguably the only sizable intentional new town of broad appeal that has been constructed in the last century. It wasn't simply a big but conventional prefab development like the Levittowns, or a small villages like the New Deal greenbelt towns. It also was meant to be inclusive unlike retirement communities.

Columbia had the benefit of developer Rouse's experience with residential and commercial construction and made use of input from non-dogmatic urban planners like Herbert Gans. Rouse made a lot of money building conventional suburban retail developments and then shifted toward building spaces that were quite different and more likely to promote human interaction and be less dependent on cars. Columbia's more recent development is rather more conventional but the basic organization of the place with intentional neighborhoods linked to local commercial areas by bike paths remain. It probably influenced This one seems like some rich guys' idea of a community in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty much doomed and unlikely to really impact the larger real estate market.

[storewanderer]

This has been proposed before in Nevada. Smart City, whatever you want to call it. I guess European City is a little different. But same general idea. Someone with seemingly unlimited funding takes land in the middle of nowhere and wants to build their idea of a utopia.

Any examples of this ever being successful?

[Brian Lutz]

They've been trying for years to build these types of places in China, and the inevitable result is that they often end up largely vacant and eventually derelict. Right now the poster child for this is probably the Kangbashi district, built at a cost of over $160 billion as a city for a million people, and currently home to around 118.000 people (and that's after a bit of a population "boom".)