Maybe they expect the above-average jobs to spawn enough service jobs as support?
I’m not seeing the “utopianist” angle in anything that’s been linked?
To be sure, they’re selling it as a nice place to live but so does every housing development. Other than the scale of the project, I’m not seeing anything that looks out of the ordinary. As best I can tell, they’re just saying that they’ll build some nice streets and houses, try to convince some employers to move in, and they’ll gladly sell you a place to live.
Whether the whole thing will work or not, I can’t say. It’s certainly ambitious, minus any guarantees from any particular employers. But saying that you’ll build a house and sell it to someone, near a place that will pay them, is pretty far from a utopian dreamland.
Those are service jobs created by the new city. Most residents will commute to, or work from home for, companies in the Bay Area.
I finally found a generalized land use map of the proposed development on their website. I will say that the idea seems at least a little less far-fetched than I first thought.
They seem to be planning on land swaps and conservation easements to avoid impacting the most environmentally sensitive areas (Suisun Marsh, Jepson Prairie), leaving plenty of setback from Travis, and not building in and among the wind turbines of the Montezuma hills. The urbanized area would be entirely on the north side of Highway 12, centered more or less midway between Fairfield and Rio Vista, on what is now pretty barren grazing land.
Their list of consultants involved in the project includes some names I recognize as solid firms. It’s starting to look more like a pretty standard development proposal with less pie in the sky stuff. Still, I’ll believe in when I see it.
I thought of work-from-home tech jobs after I posted that. That may indeed be what they’re thinking.
I don’t know whether they’ve got their water sorted out, though.
The fact is, there is no water to sort out. All the water available already has dibs on. The water politics of California could not be more complex and arcane and exploitative.Techies believe everything is a tech problem. Water really is not.
I hope nothing but the worst for them.
That’s pretty much what I suspected.
Actually, there is a potential tech solution to water shortage: condensation. Every once in a while I see some report of a new surface or other technique to condense water from the air for use in places that have insufficient potable water. I don’t think any of them have been commercialized, but perhaps some have.
At any rate, the question is, can they do it in sufficient volume at a low enough cost to make their town liveable?
Ayup:
It’s pretty humid up there, but I don’t think current water generation technology would be more than a [wait for it] drop in the bucket.
MIssed the edit window:
Here’s a solar-panel-like condensation product:
I also remember someone who proposed solar panels on top of roofs that generate electricity during the day and condensed water during the night. Couldn’t find a link quickly, though. I don’t think the person who proposed it had actually made such a panel.
If you can get enough people to take Soylent Green, do you even need water?
I just don’t think that these high tech gadgets are going to come up with the millions of gallons a day this city is going to immediately need – in an arid Mediterranean climate with the longest dry season on earth, where the aquifer has been steadily mined for a hundred years. Call me a pessimist.
California water is a slow moving disaster of the first magnitude. Gadgets will not save the situation, and the very very last thing California needs is an even greater unsustainable burden of humans.
California was the place where I learned without any possibility of doubt that humans are greedy blind vampires which destroy everything they touch. It was an omnipresent feature of my fifty-odd years there. It was once a paradise – I grew up in its sunset years. It’s a hellscape now.
According to this website, the county seems to get a reasonably reliable 10" of rain per year (sometimes less but you could use some sort of water reclamation system to patch over bad years).
It looks like the average person uses about 100 gallons of water per day so, over the course of a year, you’d need to collect 36,500 gallons per person. That would be 8.4 million cubic inches so if we can get 10" of rain, we’d need an area of 5855 sq feet to collect enough.
Given that the average home is probably something more like 500 sq ft per resident, that does seem like a problem (before even discussing buildings with more than one floor), if they can’t source water from a river or the aquifer.
Well, it’s not. But if that’s the kind of rhetoric that will get some people to leave and keep others away, by all means, preach it!
I was just there in November (the SF and Monterey Bay areas). From what it was in the 1950s and 60’s it is absolutely a hellscape. I found it very very close to unbearable. But then, I’m one of those weirdos who finds the natural world always beautiful and what humans have done to it almost always tragic and ugly, the more modern the more so.
I’m not the target market for this idea.
Wouldn’t the average lot area (vice the average home area) be the relevant requirement? An 80’x80’ yard would provide over 5855 sq feet. Seems reasonable, unless I’m missing something.
Yeah, that’s a perfect extrapolation of the other 99.9% of the state. /s
This whole thing in Solano County reminds me of California City out in the desert in Kern County:
California City started in the 1950s with the highest hopes. It was originally intended to rival Los Angeles in size and population, but lagging development and an unfavorable environment disappointed its developers — and left it a virtual ghost town today.
I think the project in Solano has a slightly better chance at success, being close to major population centers, and a nicer environment than the Mojave Desert, but as mentioned upthread, there is no secret sauce here - it’s just another “planned community” like dozens of others in the region. I am not understanding how this will be any different than any other new community being built in any number of other nearby cities.
I lived in California for sixty years. There’s not much of it I have not been in. There are parts that are still astonishingly beautiful, but those are generally uninhabitable, for various reasons.