NYT Guest Essay by Edward L. Glaeser and Carlo Ratti, December 26, 2023
A company backed by Silicon Valley’s most powerful investors, including the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, assembled a land empire outside San Francisco and announced a bold vision to build a brand-new city — and was immediately castigated by the world’s urbanists.
Critics describe the effort by the company, Flannery Associates, as greed in urbanism’s clothing that would create an environmental disaster in the form of a mere commuter suburb. As more details emerge about the ugly tactics used against local landowners, the project appears increasingly likely to drown in its creators’ hubris. But beneath Flannery Associates’ accumulating mistakes remains an important idea: The Bay Area needs a lot more housing, and we may need privately built cities to get there….
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