Irvine’s example fuels interest in building new American cities

Irvine looks like a typical American suburb on the surface, with curlicue streets and plentiful parking, but it has a dense base of employment — a university, manufacturing and high-rise offices — that makes it a true city. Almost all of Irvine was planned and built by a single private owner, the Irvine Company, which once ran a grain and citrus operation and now owns a majority of the city’s apartments, shopping centers and offices; the city’s population is about 300,000, and Donald Bren is the company’s sole owner.

That model — building new urban places on vacant land under a single, coordinated vision — has a new appeal as the country faces a deep housing shortage. Investors and business owners are backing projects that aim to seed start-up communities, from Starbase, Texas, with employee housing clustered around SpaceX facilities, to California Forever’s plan for a 400,000-person city on 70,000 acres north of San Francisco and Marc Lore’s more utopian Telosa, a proposed desert city of five million that has not yet acquired land.

United States, Irvine

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