Hayden Clarkin is the CEO and founder of TransitCon and a transportation engineer who has worked on large-scale transit projects in California

“It’s been 84 years,” an older and wiser Rose says at the end of Titanic, referring to the time that elapsed between the ship’s sinking and its rediscovery. There’s no better sentiment that embodies the state of capital-transit projects in California. This Friday, the Van Ness Ave Bus Rapid Transit in San Francisco will finally see riders board after a ribbon-cutting that’s now decades in the making.

If a project to put red paint down a street was started at the same time Gmail was created, what makes anyone think that California can meet its monumental housing needs by building new cities from scratch?

Nathan J. Robinson’s recent Current Affairs article “Why Doesn’t California Solve Its Housing Crisis by Building Some New Cities?” does just that. It’s a cacophony of competing realities whose central aim is that “the people of California simply need to approve a plan to build some more cities, perhaps in the largely uninhabited northern third of the state.”

The task is anything but simple. The fatal irony in Robinson’s conclusion is that while he laments the YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) movement, he acknowledges that the state urgently needs more housing, somewhere.

I’ve visited the dense redwood forests with thousand-year-old trees some 96 feet in circumference and removing them is a non-starter in the land of CEQA and common sense. It’s probably best to build housing on the copious amounts of land already connected to the state’s transportation grid, which is primed for infill development.

Robinson’s piece reads like that of a disgruntled architectural critic, surmising that the suburban “wastelands” of many California cities can be corrected by building new ones. But while his characterizations of the suburban built environment are accurate, he doesn’t believe in actually changing them much…(more)