California Forever is next to a military base and at the interface between Sacramento and the Bay Area (which is already pretty connected) metros. UC Berkeley and UC Davis are relatively close and Bay Area real estate is already so expensive that people are already commuting from Fairfield or even Sacramento.
It's a good location to try this approach, especially if they can get the Amtrak to run more frequently. Granted, it will probably just function like an exurb instead of doing anything magical. People act like it's in the middle of nowhere but the concept is WAY more strategic than the planners get credit for.
>None of those problems are made easier by displacing them onto a remote military base with no relevant infrastructure.
The problem that this makes easier is the political one. People are a lot less upset about migrant influxes if they think the problem is contained in a box on the other side of some water. There's a reason refugees at Ceuta and Mellila have less of an effect on Spanish politics than refugees on the mainland.
A bit late here but to me the obvious answer, in a time of large-scale remote work, is federal tax incentives to municipalities and/or whole MSAs with high vacancy rates, plus lots of patience to let natural economies develop around pools of high-income workers who bring both human and financial capital with them. Some cities, like Tulsa, have been experimenting with versions of this in the form of incentive grants to relocating remote workers, but income tax credits would go much further.
I'd pair this up with similar credits for metros and localities that are building to accommodate fast growth. And I'd pay for those credits with higher taxes on everyone else. What you get left with is just a tax on NIMBYism.
(Ironically, we've seen a version of this work with great effect over the past 7 years as SALT caps have encouraged high-income relocations from coastal cities towards the sunbelt).
On many topics, including NIMBYism, Governor Newsom says the right things, but his career is devoid of high-impact success. If he wants to demonstrate otherwise, I think he should spend a few post-governor years making California Forever a reality. Then, I might take him seriously as a presidential candidate.
I like the idea about buying cities out, creating special economic zones. Could be great if say a city could get cash for permanently giving up things like zoning. Seems like a win-win. At some amount of money, both the city would be better off with the cash, and the state or federal government would enjoy enhanced tax revenue net the bounty.
There's a problem with YIMBYs and development in general in that they just want to build apartment buildings, but not neighborhoods. The focus should be on the latter, which will of course include the former.
I grew up in Princeton, and as an adult it’s always infuriated me that a place like that, with all the amenities Matt lists and more, would ever do anything other than let as many people live there as humanly possible.
I mean, double or triple the population of Princeton, and it indisputably gets less great to live there. More congestion, more crime, more class diversity and less social trust - this is why legacy occupants fight so hard to keep highly desirable smallish towns small. The prospect that the experience of living there will get better is low, but the chances of things getting worse is, comparatively speaking, high(er). Especially knowing how crummy the governance of blue cities often is, letting your great small town get bigger is just asking for homeless camps in the park, a methadone clinic, or a bunch of rowdy teenagers drag racing on Saturday night. Not saying this logic is especially communitarian or laudable, but it's part of the calculus that makes zoning reform so hard.
I’m not unaware of the valid reasons existing residents have, just that from the perspective of the whole community/town/larger unit it’s often better to scale up if there’s demand for it.
Edit: I’ll also add that I am not certain your core point that life would get worse in Princeton is a given, though I’m not saying it’s unlikely.
I find it especially interesting in light of the recent AI deal in the Middle East, which Dylan Patel likes ( https://semianalysis.com/2025/05/16/ai-arrives-in-the-middle-east-us-strikes-a-deal-with-uae-and-ksa/ ) but Zvi Mowshowitz does not ( https://thezvi.substack.com/p/america-makes-ai-chip-diffusion-deal ). Apart from the president's likely self-serving motives in this deal, the Gulf is also attractive for AI datacenters because it has abundant cheap energy. Geographically, they sit on huge reserves of oil and gas and have tremendous amount of sunlight. I think they also subsidize domestic use of fossil fuels, and they build nuclear reactors cheaply and easily with the aid of South Korean contractors. It's easier to get 5 gigawatts for a new data center in the Emirates than in the United States.
Australia has some of the advantages of the Gulf -- abundant sun, and solar panels are cheap and it's easy to get permission to install them. Australia also has huge mineral resources per capita, and they could choose (though they have not) to embrace nuclear energy. And geopolitically, Australia is unambiguously a friend (or asset) of the USA, whereas the Gulf states are nowhere near so reliable or so deeply linked by cultural similarity and historic ties.
I'd definitely prefer the world's largest AI lab to be in an abundance-pilled Australia than in the Gulf.
"But I have been genuinely surprised over the past ten years by the lack of backlash in the South Florida Cuban-American community to the Republican Party abandoning its historic commitment on this specific issue."
My in laws are South Florida hispanics and if you spend any time around hispanic South Floridians a very pervasive sentiment is: (i) contempt for those still living in failed states (whether they're Cuban or Venezuelan) and (ii) the feeling that they immigrated the "right way" and that these new immigrants are gaming the system. They genuinely don't care much for people still living in their native lands.
There's also probably just a time passing component to it. The first big wave of immigrants came here 60 years ago. Any of those who were adults then are gone now. Their children probably carried the torch for a while, but would their grandkids see Cuban immigrants as fundamentally different from any others? The other big wave was the Marielitos, which is a complicated story for everybody. I believe the number of actual wet foot/dry foot immigrants is relatively small and wouldn't make up much of a block even if they felt very strongly.
I wonder if there's a class component to this (I'm guessing richer Cubans didn't need to take advantage of wet foot/dry foot) or if people who did take advantage of that policy have kind of whitewashed their own history.
There's definitely class element to it in that many (to be clear, not all) Cubans believe that the people who stayed on the island after the revolution were the true Castro believers and not as educated as the first wave of Cubans that came through. They probably blame these people for how Cuba turned out under Castro.
I bet that you're right. There's also the point that time sort of stops for people who live in a diaspora and becomes set in amber, even if it's only ninety miles away. It can be hard to believe that conditions in the old country have changed, and could be creating new pressures.
I remember when I was a kid I learned that one of my relatives, a prominent man in a small Northeastern state, was a fundraiser for the Provisional IRA on the side. This was at the height of the Troubles, and almost no one on any side in Ireland thought that what he was doing was a good thing, but for him and a lot of my family every day was still Easter 1916, and nobody in Ireland or from Ireland was going to tell them different.
The thing is, the rest of us can't just "make" Puerto Rico a state. Congress has always, very wisely I think, insisted that Puerto Rico is welcome to become a state when a clear majority of the residents of the island vote unequivocally for it. "Wisely", because statehood is a one-way ratchet: once a polity joins the United States as a state, that status is irreversible: several court cases, not to mention a very serious Civil War, are definitive on that point.
I believe that the non-binding 2024 referendum was the first one in which statehood won a majority of the votes, but it may not have been "unequivocal" enough (turnout was not great), and it was non-binding anyway. There's no point in talking about Puerto Rican statehood under THIS Administration, but if and when we get our Republic back, I would love to see the island become a full member of the Union -- but only if they clearly want it.
One quibble, a state that sincerely wanted to leave could persuade the other states, or Congress, to amend the Constitution to let them leave. Statehood is presumed to be in perpetuity, but there's nothing to stop a Constitutional ending to it.
That's an interesting mental exercise. For all practical purposes, I feel safe in assuming that no individual State will ever be able to convince even two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and three quarters of the State legislatures to allow it to leave the Union: I can't imagine even that many Americans being willing to tear a star off the flag once it's been sewn on. But how COULD it happen?
Lincoln's reasoning in the First Inaugural is still quite persuasive. If the legitimacy of such an amendment were challenged by a dissenting State, the Supreme Court might (or might not) find it persuasive, too:
"I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak--but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."
But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity."
By that reasoning, only unanimous agreement of all the States would be enough to unmake the Union, since unanimous agreement made it and declared it "Perpetual" in the first place. The amendment process alone wouldn't be enough.
It’s ironic that the press (i.e Jake Tapper) pulling punches on President Biden resulted in the outcome many think inspired them to pull the punches. Tapper is interesting because now he wants to profit off landing those punches after the fight is over.
We need journalists to tell us the truth in the moment.
SMH at Mr. Tapper. His interview with Laura Trump has aged like ice cream on a sidewalk in Vegas. She was right. He was wrong.
One more time Matt: "Single payer healthcare is an impossible dream that will never happen, but eliminating absolutely every vestige of local country of zoning and regulation can happen tomorrow if we dream it" is a fucking bizarre set of beliefs.
California Forever is next to a military base and at the interface between Sacramento and the Bay Area (which is already pretty connected) metros. UC Berkeley and UC Davis are relatively close and Bay Area real estate is already so expensive that people are already commuting from Fairfield or even Sacramento.
It's a good location to try this approach, especially if they can get the Amtrak to run more frequently. Granted, it will probably just function like an exurb instead of doing anything magical. People act like it's in the middle of nowhere but the concept is WAY more strategic than the planners get credit for.
>None of those problems are made easier by displacing them onto a remote military base with no relevant infrastructure.
The problem that this makes easier is the political one. People are a lot less upset about migrant influxes if they think the problem is contained in a box on the other side of some water. There's a reason refugees at Ceuta and Mellila have less of an effect on Spanish politics than refugees on the mainland.
A bit late here but to me the obvious answer, in a time of large-scale remote work, is federal tax incentives to municipalities and/or whole MSAs with high vacancy rates, plus lots of patience to let natural economies develop around pools of high-income workers who bring both human and financial capital with them. Some cities, like Tulsa, have been experimenting with versions of this in the form of incentive grants to relocating remote workers, but income tax credits would go much further.
I'd pair this up with similar credits for metros and localities that are building to accommodate fast growth. And I'd pay for those credits with higher taxes on everyone else. What you get left with is just a tax on NIMBYism.
(Ironically, we've seen a version of this work with great effect over the past 7 years as SALT caps have encouraged high-income relocations from coastal cities towards the sunbelt).
On many topics, including NIMBYism, Governor Newsom says the right things, but his career is devoid of high-impact success. If he wants to demonstrate otherwise, I think he should spend a few post-governor years making California Forever a reality. Then, I might take him seriously as a presidential candidate.
And, it’s Solano county, not Solana.
I like the idea about buying cities out, creating special economic zones. Could be great if say a city could get cash for permanently giving up things like zoning. Seems like a win-win. At some amount of money, both the city would be better off with the cash, and the state or federal government would enjoy enhanced tax revenue net the bounty.
There's a problem with YIMBYs and development in general in that they just want to build apartment buildings, but not neighborhoods. The focus should be on the latter, which will of course include the former.
Isn’t “build a new neighborhood” just “build a new city” but in miniature. Every argument in the original post applies.
There is plenty of upzoning potential in New Brunswick, NJ. I think this would be great for Rutgers and great for the state as a whole
The immediate word that comes to mind is “gentrification “, which I am fine with, but will get a strong reaction from the detractors.
I grew up in Princeton, and as an adult it’s always infuriated me that a place like that, with all the amenities Matt lists and more, would ever do anything other than let as many people live there as humanly possible.
I mean, double or triple the population of Princeton, and it indisputably gets less great to live there. More congestion, more crime, more class diversity and less social trust - this is why legacy occupants fight so hard to keep highly desirable smallish towns small. The prospect that the experience of living there will get better is low, but the chances of things getting worse is, comparatively speaking, high(er). Especially knowing how crummy the governance of blue cities often is, letting your great small town get bigger is just asking for homeless camps in the park, a methadone clinic, or a bunch of rowdy teenagers drag racing on Saturday night. Not saying this logic is especially communitarian or laudable, but it's part of the calculus that makes zoning reform so hard.
I’m not unaware of the valid reasons existing residents have, just that from the perspective of the whole community/town/larger unit it’s often better to scale up if there’s demand for it.
Edit: I’ll also add that I am not certain your core point that life would get worse in Princeton is a given, though I’m not saying it’s unlikely.
In general keeping with the Abundance Agenda, I wanted to share this post I liked: https://www.kvetch.au/p/ambitious-australia
I find it especially interesting in light of the recent AI deal in the Middle East, which Dylan Patel likes ( https://semianalysis.com/2025/05/16/ai-arrives-in-the-middle-east-us-strikes-a-deal-with-uae-and-ksa/ ) but Zvi Mowshowitz does not ( https://thezvi.substack.com/p/america-makes-ai-chip-diffusion-deal ). Apart from the president's likely self-serving motives in this deal, the Gulf is also attractive for AI datacenters because it has abundant cheap energy. Geographically, they sit on huge reserves of oil and gas and have tremendous amount of sunlight. I think they also subsidize domestic use of fossil fuels, and they build nuclear reactors cheaply and easily with the aid of South Korean contractors. It's easier to get 5 gigawatts for a new data center in the Emirates than in the United States.
Australia has some of the advantages of the Gulf -- abundant sun, and solar panels are cheap and it's easy to get permission to install them. Australia also has huge mineral resources per capita, and they could choose (though they have not) to embrace nuclear energy. And geopolitically, Australia is unambiguously a friend (or asset) of the USA, whereas the Gulf states are nowhere near so reliable or so deeply linked by cultural similarity and historic ties.
I'd definitely prefer the world's largest AI lab to be in an abundance-pilled Australia than in the Gulf.
Just do the Tokyo model, please.
"But I have been genuinely surprised over the past ten years by the lack of backlash in the South Florida Cuban-American community to the Republican Party abandoning its historic commitment on this specific issue."
My in laws are South Florida hispanics and if you spend any time around hispanic South Floridians a very pervasive sentiment is: (i) contempt for those still living in failed states (whether they're Cuban or Venezuelan) and (ii) the feeling that they immigrated the "right way" and that these new immigrants are gaming the system. They genuinely don't care much for people still living in their native lands.
There's also probably just a time passing component to it. The first big wave of immigrants came here 60 years ago. Any of those who were adults then are gone now. Their children probably carried the torch for a while, but would their grandkids see Cuban immigrants as fundamentally different from any others? The other big wave was the Marielitos, which is a complicated story for everybody. I believe the number of actual wet foot/dry foot immigrants is relatively small and wouldn't make up much of a block even if they felt very strongly.
I wonder if there's a class component to this (I'm guessing richer Cubans didn't need to take advantage of wet foot/dry foot) or if people who did take advantage of that policy have kind of whitewashed their own history.
There's definitely class element to it in that many (to be clear, not all) Cubans believe that the people who stayed on the island after the revolution were the true Castro believers and not as educated as the first wave of Cubans that came through. They probably blame these people for how Cuba turned out under Castro.
That's sad because often the poorest who have the fewest resources to leave are often the ones who get stuck in communist-induced poverty.
I bet that you're right. There's also the point that time sort of stops for people who live in a diaspora and becomes set in amber, even if it's only ninety miles away. It can be hard to believe that conditions in the old country have changed, and could be creating new pressures.
I remember when I was a kid I learned that one of my relatives, a prominent man in a small Northeastern state, was a fundraiser for the Provisional IRA on the side. This was at the height of the Troubles, and almost no one on any side in Ireland thought that what he was doing was a good thing, but for him and a lot of my family every day was still Easter 1916, and nobody in Ireland or from Ireland was going to tell them different.
I feel like Puerto Rico could be booming if we made it a state. It’s got Florida’s warm weather and beaches with Trenton’s low cost existing housing.
The thing is, the rest of us can't just "make" Puerto Rico a state. Congress has always, very wisely I think, insisted that Puerto Rico is welcome to become a state when a clear majority of the residents of the island vote unequivocally for it. "Wisely", because statehood is a one-way ratchet: once a polity joins the United States as a state, that status is irreversible: several court cases, not to mention a very serious Civil War, are definitive on that point.
I believe that the non-binding 2024 referendum was the first one in which statehood won a majority of the votes, but it may not have been "unequivocal" enough (turnout was not great), and it was non-binding anyway. There's no point in talking about Puerto Rican statehood under THIS Administration, but if and when we get our Republic back, I would love to see the island become a full member of the Union -- but only if they clearly want it.
One quibble, a state that sincerely wanted to leave could persuade the other states, or Congress, to amend the Constitution to let them leave. Statehood is presumed to be in perpetuity, but there's nothing to stop a Constitutional ending to it.
That's an interesting mental exercise. For all practical purposes, I feel safe in assuming that no individual State will ever be able to convince even two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and three quarters of the State legislatures to allow it to leave the Union: I can't imagine even that many Americans being willing to tear a star off the flag once it's been sewn on. But how COULD it happen?
Lincoln's reasoning in the First Inaugural is still quite persuasive. If the legitimacy of such an amendment were challenged by a dissenting State, the Supreme Court might (or might not) find it persuasive, too:
"I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak--but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."
But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity."
By that reasoning, only unanimous agreement of all the States would be enough to unmake the Union, since unanimous agreement made it and declared it "Perpetual" in the first place. The amendment process alone wouldn't be enough.
Surprised nobody has brought up Tomas Pueyo’s series on new cities yet: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/ten-new-us-cities-satellite-cities
It’s ironic that the press (i.e Jake Tapper) pulling punches on President Biden resulted in the outcome many think inspired them to pull the punches. Tapper is interesting because now he wants to profit off landing those punches after the fight is over.
We need journalists to tell us the truth in the moment.
SMH at Mr. Tapper. His interview with Laura Trump has aged like ice cream on a sidewalk in Vegas. She was right. He was wrong.
Now I see Jake is going to talk to Sam Harris on his podcast. This should be interesting. Maybe he will change my mind?
One more time Matt: "Single payer healthcare is an impossible dream that will never happen, but eliminating absolutely every vestige of local country of zoning and regulation can happen tomorrow if we dream it" is a fucking bizarre set of beliefs.