A popular knock on Orange County, Calif., is that it is a mass of indistinguishable neighborhoods designed for the efficient placement of tract homes. But a few miles down the highway from Disneyland, smack in center of the county, lies a subtle refutation of sprawl-style growth.
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.
As the country grapples with a housing shortage, Irvine’s model has gained a new appeal. What more efficient way to produce homes and expand businesses than building new urban areas on vacant land without the complexities of an existing city?
Enticed by the potential profits and eager to have more control over their footprint, investors and businesses are backing new town and city concepts that, like Irvine, are guided by a private hand. Some of the plans are dead serious, others fanciful. Perhaps not surprisingly, their most enthusiastic proponents tend to be technology billionaires.
Take, for instance, Starbase, Texas, a newly incorporated city that has clusters of employee housing built around manufacturing and launch facilities owned by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company. Starbase, which encompasses about 1.5 square miles near the Mexican border, is one of several attempts to use Texas’ abundant land and loose development laws to seed start-up communities with names like Proto-Town and Austantinople.
Back in California, a group of Silicon Valley moguls are pursuing something much grander: a proposal to build a city of 400,000 people on top of rolling hills an hour north of San Francisco (at the moment those hills are occupied by sheep farms and wind turbines). California Forever, the company behind the project, has spent about $1 billion acquiring 70,000 acres of farmland and put forth a plan to build a walkable community with nearby manufacturing and shipbuilding facilities.
There is, of course, a big difference between declaring an intent to build a whole city and doing it. In 2021, Marc Lore, the billionaire founder of the shopping portal Jet.com, announced Telosa, which is imagined as a desert city of five million people. Lore’s aim is to upend the economics of land use: A foundation would manage development and lease land to residents and businesses (who would own the buildings).
Telosa has a small team of employees and consultants, and a website with animations of elevated trams cruising past pedestrian-friendly streets. It has also yet to acquire land, so, for now, is more utopian dream than real-life destination.
These efforts might seem kooky if the drive for new cities wasn’t also getting purchase from influential policy minds. The economists Paul M. Romer, a Nobel laureate and professor at Boston College, and Edward L. Glaeser of Harvard have boosted the new city concept in the United States and abroad. At the same time, urbanists are organizing pop-up villages and designing car-lite and even car-free neighborhoods.
About a year after the California Forever project was revealed, Devon Zuegel, a software engineer, announced a proposal for a new neighborhood in the Sonoma County city of Cloverdale. The project is called Esmeralda.
Esmeralda, which borrows heavily from the new urbanist movement, is slated for a site where the city had earlier approved a golf course neighborhood dotted with large, single-family homes and ample yards. Zuegel’s hope is to execute a kind of planning U-turn. Esmeralda’s ambition is to build 605 higher-density homes with front porches and bike-friendly streets all linked to shops, offices and hotel rooms by walkways and a community plaza.
Even the biggest of these projects is tiny compared with new city ideas in the rest of the world. There is nothing to match the scale and hubris of, say, Neom, the $500 billion city that Saudi Arabia hopes will diversify its oil-dependent economy, or the dozens of new cities in Asia whose stock of empty buildings makes them seem both impressive and like a good way to go broke.
During his 2024 campaign, President Trump announced his intent to create “Freedom Cities” that would be constructed on federal land and “reignite American imagination” by embracing innovations like flying vehicles that take off and land vertically. But as president, he has not offered much of a blueprint, and has instead mostly pushed ideas to allow prospective home buyers to take on more debt.
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.
A City Built From Scratch
The weekday drive from Los Angeles to Orange County is choked with traffic and rimmed by strip malls. On a recent morning, I made the slog to meet Michael Stockstill, a former employee of the Irvine Company and co-author (with H. Pike Oliver) of “Transforming the Irvine Ranch,” the definitive history of Irvine and its post-World War II transformation.
Over the next few hours, Stockstill drove me around while narrating the city’s history. Calling my attention to the absence of billboards and power lines (they are underground), and to the presence of a thick canopy of trees, he was in essence pointing to the benefits of corporate planning.
In 1960, when what is now Irvine was mostly farms, the sprawl of Los Angeles was seeping southward into Orange County, Stockstill said. Most of the region’s landowners sold off their land piecemeal — a couple of hundred acres here, a couple of hundred acres there. Builders then proceeded to throw up tight rows of one-story homes with minimal landscaping and nothing but a token sidewalk separating them from the street.
Irvine would get filled with homes eventually — the pressures of growth had fated it. But because the ranch’s 100,000 or so acres had been held by the same family for a century, it had the power to decide how it happened.
Early ads in newspapers touted “innovative planning” where “everything seems to fit together.” Stockstill relayed an anecdote about how Irvine’s lead architect and designer would show employees photographs of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, point to features like gaudy billboards and cinder block sound walls, and say, “It’s not going to look like this.”
Irvine was part of a new town movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which included the cities of Reston, Va., and Columbia, Md., both outside Washington, as well as The Woodlands, Texas, near Houston. Demand for housing was exploding as members of the baby boom generation moved into their home-buying years. Cookie-cutter subdivisions sprouted to meet the demand, but they were so uniform and ugly that planners and developers began seeking alternatives.
Most of the new town developments were lovingly landscaped with curved streets and trees and amenities like parks and pools. They also tried to create a degree of self-sufficiency by mixing commercial and residential development.
To jump-start its economy, Irvine donated 1,000 acres for a new University of California campus. Then it built housing for the university and other employers, creating a flywheel that attracted more businesses, more employees, more housing and so on.
“Having housing for all segments of your work force is attractive to bigger companies,” said Ann Forsyth, a professor of urban planning at Harvard and co-director of the school’s New Towns Initiative.
A developer who stays involved with a project has a greater stake in maintaining schools and public safety — which raise real estate values and attract more residents — than the typical developer, who builds a project and moves on. And the possibility to make money over decades instead of all at once is an incentive to think more holistically about what neighborhoods should look like, rather than bowing to the concerns of individual buyers.
Irvine is frequently described as a wealthy suburb, and its per capita income far outranks any other large city in the county. But contrary to the suburban stereotype, its neighborhoods are layered with a diversity of single-family homes and multiunit buildings. By building homes and apartments near each other from the outset, the Irvine Company was able to avoid, or at least tamp down, the not-in-my-backyard objections that arise anytime existing residents are asked to accept a larger building, Stockstill said.
Concentrated power does, of course, have problems. The Irvine Company owns so much of the city’s apartment stock that tenants have accused it of being a monopoly that keeps prices artificially high. During Irvine’s first City Council meeting in 1972, a clerk accidentally referred to it as a gathering of “the city of the Irvine Company,” according to Stockstill’s book. Several decades later, the company’s influence over local politics remains vast.
Despite its planning successes, Irvine remains every bit as car-centric as the sprawl its creators wanted to get away from. My tour of the city included no saunter down a main street. We walked across a parking lot to an In-N-Out Burger for lunch, but not much more.
“The car won, that’s the story of Southern California,” Stockstill said.
A Great Idea That’s Hard to Pull Off
While Irvine thrived, the movement it was a part of did not. Since 1960 there have been several dozen attempts to create new town communities, most of which have failed to attract more than a few thousand residents. In 1970, when Congress passed the Urban Growth and New Community Development Act, it included a program to give loan guarantees to developers who built “new towns” that were economically diverse and contained a mix of jobs as well as housing.
But that program was shut down in 1983 after funding 13 new communities — almost all of which were financial failures. The exception was The Woodlands.
“The idea that you can conceive of a city that addresses all the ills of the current city is philosophically a wonderful goal,” said Richard Peiser, a professor of real estate development at Harvard who co-directs the New Towns Initiative with Forsyth. “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand why most new towns are not very good.”
Every development is risky. A whole city is extraordinarily so.
To make undeveloped land livable, a developer first has to shoulder the expense of securing and building a water supply, not to mention power lines, sewer pipes and other infrastructure — a project that takes many years and consumes potentially billions of losses before the first home is built. The more daunting hurdle is attracting enough jobs to create an economic base, since people want to live within a reasonable distance of their work.
“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.
Conor Dougherty covers housing and development, focusing on the rising costs of homeownership. He is based in Los Angeles.
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