I shared this very good 2013 documentary with a potential client in Fresno, California. And he asked after watching it if I thought Fresno was better off today from the ideas and potential presented a decade ago? I know Fresno is better off today than it was 10+ years ago because of its public and private investments highlighted in the movie. And it was a real change to restart the building of urbanism in a decades long suburban culture.

Usually, this is when I self-righteously plow into the value of the New Urbanism and how 30 years ago we restarted and sustained this urban living revolution (with help from the sitcom, Friends). But it’s been 30 years, a full generation. And we should be fully building mixed-use, walkable, transit-supported urbanism at an industrial scale/speed by now, if measure by how long it took for the idea of suburbia to become reality. For example, Corbusier published the City of To-Morrow And Its Planning in 1929 and auto-oriented sprawl was in full bloom by 1959.

Calthorpe, Duany, and Katz all published their groundbreaking books on the New Urbanism in the early 1990s and here we are in 2023. Why aren’t we there yet? We’re most certainly moving in that direction, but too slowly.

That said, every city’s revitalization efforts suffered setbacks from the dramatic changes to how we work and commute due to the Covid shutdown. In California, we’re not building offices, retail is dead, and housing is king, because we’re building so little of it and we’re now working and shopping from home. I think that our Covid reset has to be overcome by all American cities, especially Fresno.

The overall development and construction industry in California appears to be in a static point between the pendulum swings of change, from suburban to urban building. And no major city in California is building enough housing to meet its market demands beyond the few thousand or so built a year on the fringes in master planned communities by the few big home building firms leftover from the 80s.

We have zero national or regional building/construction companies that build urban infill housing types at an industrial scale. We depend on 1,000 small-scale builders in every city to build enough housing to meet market demands, who are all learning and starting from scratch at the same time. Few are trained, prepared, or knows how to build urban infill housing at the scale of 2-3,000 homes annually.  Few city are able to build enough infill housing yet because:

– The Federal Government neither insures/subsidizes its loans/mortgages nor invests in our transit facilities.
– The State neither invests in transit services nor modifies building codes.
– The City neither invests in job training/education nor reforms its entitlement codes (they waive them).

All of these things were being done in the 1950/60’s as the Feds/State/Cities were in alignment to build suburban development at a massive scale. Feds changed its lending practices to subsidize single-family home mortgages. Fed and States built freeways and highways and their interchanges. States and cities built schools and colleges to educate ourselves. Cities created zoning to segregate work from home and enable master planned suburban development. America was a brave, new modern world post WW2. We were flush with cash and power and the world had changed dramatically by the mid-1940s.

Today, we’ve shoveled all of our post WW2 wealth over to the Saudi’s for cheap oil to fuel our autopian suburban landscape. And were breaking ourselves financially to maintain the out-of-date and cheap suburban infrastructure, which is a losing financial scheme. This is all explained much better by Chuck Marohn and Joe Minicozzi.

In short, we’re still not set up for building infill urbanism. And at this moment, California’s new urban infill development shift is being led by the State’s housing requirements and affordable housing incentives forcing city’s to waive their zoning (as opposed to reforming it). The Feds have started changing its policies too. But, these are just two of the six points the feds/state/cities need to be in alignment with in order to build infill housing at an industrial scale.

It’ll take time to get all three aligned, and we’ll get there as we’re well past the suburban experiment… which proved to be the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of civilization (stolen from James Howard Kunstler). Ultimately, when you tug on downtown Fresno you’ll find that it’s connected to the world (stolen from John Muir).