A Tale of Two Cities – The Vacaville Reporter

I know a place where people live in blocks of flats. There are shops in the streets: a butcher, a baker, a grocer and a seamstress; a pharmacist, an optician, a tailor and a shoemaker. In this place, the streets are clean and covered with shady trees, children walk to school, parents take the tram or bike to work. Neighbourhoods are places to live, work and play.

This is a place that doesn’t yet exist. A place that will transform a dry agricultural area on a windswept plain between an airport and a river delta into a thriving, green place. A city unlike any other in the area. Not a Rio Vista, not a Fairfield or Vacaville. A sustainable mecca, a bastion for a wealthy working class that can live where they work, unencumbered by dependence on a car or a retail culture that is no different from anywhere else.

Didn’t cities emerge as places where our hunter-gatherer ancestors farmed and traded – not because it was easy, but because in doing so they created a permanent place? A place that had to be defended against attacks from others? A place that was supplied by a source of water and the good fortune of nature, creating a community that could be passed on to others?

In this place, a white knight appears with the promise of providing such a place because it is the right thing to do, because there is a need. A place where people can live and call it their own. Is this the place that was once called the Golden State, that promised sunshine and space to achieve the California dream? Was it a place that matched a perception but often not reality?

While we wait for approval for this shiny new city, why not try a modest experiment? What if you could build a small prototype of this planned city of eternity in Vallejo? Since you’re taking this backward-looking approach to a city of 40,000 and eventually 400,000, why not start here in Vallejo? What better place to look back to the future than downtown Vallejo?

What if you took advantage of the vacant space downtown and implemented the “affordability by design” approach you seem to be promoting? Create the 5-over-1 apartments with the vibrant street life you envision and make it a reality that once was. Surely it would be far easier to present a small project as a proof of concept than the huge scale you propose. Show us what you can do to replenish a once prosperous downtown and perhaps your 50-year vision will be more likely to be believed.

In the 1850s, Admiral Farragut didn’t join forces with his billionaire and hedge fund friends and laid the foundation for a naval base that would grow and develop into a city over the course of two world wars and a Cold War. The Navy was, and in some ways still is, Vallejo’s defining element.

Like so many naval bases, it was a city within a city. The payroll was the economic locomotive of the surrounding city. It had all the amenities one could expect:

Housing – be it naval barracks, dormitories for non-commissioned officers or villas for officers.

Businesses such as a PX, a gas station, crew and officer clubs, recreation centers and golf courses.

In many ways, a place to live, work and reside. Oddly enough, it was this city within the city that Lennar destroyed and that the Mare Island Company now wants to restore.

In this tale of two cities, one still struggles with its dependence on the Navy while emerging as a bedroom community for the rest of the Bay Area. Vallejo is the last reminder of the American dream in the Bay Area, where the American dream of a single-family home is still attainable compared to any other city, albeit at a high cost.

The promise of a “city” sprouting out of the barren ground next to a major airport in the middle of nowhere is illusory at best and delusional at worst. The government has a need to provide for national defense and build industrial communities, as the Navy did. The billionaires’ desire to meet the housing needs of those who cannot afford it serves only to assuage the guilt that comes with accumulating too much wealth.

— Chris Platzer/Dispatch from Sea