HUDSON, FL — LGI Homes announced the expansion of its Terrata Homes with the opening of Bella Terra in Hudson.

Bella Terra is surrounded by native trees, lush greenery and a serene environment creating a sanctuary where residents can relax and recharge. Here, homeowners escape the confines of traditional neighborhoods with expansive acreage lots. From the gated entrance and the sprawling acreage homesites to the six miles of horse trails that intertwine throughout the natural landscape, Bella Terra sets the bar for a new standard of living.

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Terrata Homes at Bella Terra is offering a lineup of five new home designs from the Craftsman Collection. Constructed with attention to detail, all five home designs showcase state-of-the-art interior upgrades and functional, spacious layouts. This collection ranges in size from 2,642 square feet to 4,023 square feet.

Well-crafted floor plans with up to four bedrooms and four bathrooms feature additional spaces such as game rooms, media rooms, spacious master suites and covered outdoor living areas. Each new home comes outfitted with a host of designer upgrades including a full suite of stainless steel kitchen appliances, quartz countertops, 42-inch upper cabinets with crown molding, luxury vinyl plank flooring, light fixtures, blinds throughout, finished garages with epoxy flooring and covered outdoor kitchens.

New homes at Bella Terra start in the $670s with move-in-ready opportunities available. For additional information or to schedule a tour, interested homebuyers are encouraged to call 855-960-5061, ext 665, or click here.

Make no little plans,” goes an often-quoted cliché in city planning. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” That’s from the grandiloquent planner of Chicago, Daniel Burnham, who had a typical late-1800s propensity for wide Paris-style boulevards and white, neoclassical buildings — a prototype think-about-the-Roman-Empire guy. Even so, Burnham had a point. In citymaking, small plans are for suckers and grifters. For proof, click through the renderings for California Forever, the recently revealed proposal to turn 55,000 acres of drought-prone Northern California hillside into a glorious city of the future. It looks like a big plan. So far, it isn’t.

Right now, California Forever is just a website with some ideology and a handful of hopeful sketches with a faintly socialist-utopian flair. The money behind it, though, is real — $800 million from a conclave of tech and tech-adjacent billionaires who for years have been secretly buying rural land in Solano County, between Travis Air Force Base and the Sacramento River. And they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for the meddling kids at the New York Times unmasking last month the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Michael Moritz; philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs; the Stripe-founding Collison brothers; and others. They’ve all heaped money onto something called Flannery Associates and its leader, a Peter Thiel-quoting former Goldman high flyer named Jan Sramek. Now Sramek is making the media rounds more openly, as well as courting the political and landholding forces in Solano.

Put aside your feelings about billionaires pitching private libertarian paradises away from us hoi polloi (which: barf). What the company says it wants to build says a lot about how rich people think cities work — what cities are. They’re mostly wrong.

Cities of the future of the past

The California Forever art illustrations show at a place that’ll look startlingly familiar. “We think that there’s so much wisdom in how we built cities and towns over the last hundreds of thousands of years in some places,” Sramek said in an appearance on a Bay Area public affairs radio show earlier this week. “The plans that people put forward will be very inspired by those great old American neighborhoods that someone who was born 100 years ago will recognize.”

If you were hoping that, given a chance to design a greenfield urban enclave, a bunch of secretive billionaires might cough up a zombie- and climate-proof arcology or a neon-lit anime downtown with a space elevator station, you’re out of luck. California’s highly aggressive species of NIMBYs share with rich would-be homeowners from Silicon Valley an affinity for traditionalism — artisanal neighborhood character, but with higher R-value on the insulation. Hence the renders: Euro-style houses on a hillside angled out over the water, a bucolic row of two- and three-story rowhouses from the 19th century on a tree-lined street full of kids playing, a verdant plaza surrounded by cafes and restaurants with plenty of outdoor seating. You know: nice.

I started out by talking about Daniel Burnham, but when it comes to a pitch like California Forever, the better big name from urban planning’s deep history is Ebenezer Howard. Inspired by a utopian, socialist novel called Looking Backward, Howard in 1898 pitched a new way to build cities that would counteract the polluted, unequal, brutal places getting extruded by capitalism and the industrial revolution. His “garden city” was a self-contained town with all the amenities and light industry it’d need for economic productivity, surrounded by a “green belt” of agriculture to feed its populace, profit from the surplus, and offer natural, open space for recreation. The green belt would also constrain every city’s tendency to sprawl into a Los Angeles.

A few places actually tried to build them — England and Japan had a few, and some sprung up around New York and Philadelphia. They didn’t work at all. In reality, builders left too much room between houses. Industry moved to rural areas, and big-ticket jobs moved to urban downtowns. Commuter railways and then the automobile turned garden cities into bedroom communities, which then used zoning, banking, and a bunch of other sneaky tricks to make sure only rich, white people could afford to live in them. In other words: suburbs. Think of the hours-long commutes as cosmic justice.

In the 1990s, American architects and planners tried it again and made some of the same mistakes. A gloss on the nostalgic idea of small-townish homes centered on a shopping street and transit hub expressed itself in Seaside, Florida — best known for playing the role of the fake town in “The Truman Show.” Point is, the garden city remains a dream honored more in the breach — in pitches like the one for California Forever. It tends to turn into something else once ground gets broken.

What’s not on the map

In the images of Foreverville I see the following types of transportation: bicycles, kayaks and canoes, and a train that appears to stop next to the sidewalks of a downtown where ten- or 12-story buildings snuggle shoulder-to-shoulder.

I get that these are just renderings in a proposal, so I forgive the fact that the train arrives through some kind of tunnel and doesn’t seem to have a power source — no locomotive, no overhead power lines. I’ll tell you, in municipal politics, putting an electrified third rail through downtown is a real third rail. As far as I can tell the only rail track running through the land in question is a largely abandoned spur that the nearby Western Railway Museum sometimes runs restored cars on for visitors. (This is a goddamn delight, by the way.)

Anyway, you’ll notice something missing from the renderings: Cars. The streets in which kids play are empty of them. The plaza has no parking. A crowded street fair amid multistory buildings shows happy people walking in the middle of the street, the sidewalks full of stalls selling…well, you can’t see what they’re selling. Scented candles, is my guess.

Now, it’s not impossible to have a city that isn’t car-based. In fact, I recommend it. After all, before about 1940, none of them were. But these days it takes some planning. Gloriously car-free or car-light places like Pontevedra in Spain also have transit and services baked into the city form; Paris’ “fifteen minute city,” with jobs and shops within that striking range of homes, relies on saturation by rail transit. And right now, a big residential development called Culdesac, in Tempe, doesn’t allow cars or on-street parking. Of course, Culdesac is centered on a light rail station, and it only has 700 apartments — not tens of thousands.

The only thing that really connects Foreverville’s footprint to the rest of the world is California State Route 12, a narrow asphalt ribbon that the locals sometimes call “Blood Alley.” California Forever’s plan promises to improve and widen the 12 so that the new population doesn’t clog the thing up. (Spoiler: Widening a highway literally never reduces congestion.) So how will people get to and from Foreverville? How will people get around once there? How will the walkable neighborhoods connect to each other? Robot buses? The lack of cars seem like an implicit promise that Foreverville can’t keep.

The walk of life

The California Forever website promises “homes, shopping, dining, and schools all within walking distance.” That seems to recognize that when it comes to cities, “density” cannot simply mean “maximum people per unit space,” especially when the only thing that links them all together is car infrastructure like streets and freeways. That’s not walkable. That’s — well, that’s Los Angeles again.

No, the kind of density that makes cities walkable, lovable, and less likely to burn down the planet, requires density of use — short blocks, lots of different kinds of buildings providing lots of different kinds of service, open space, and interconnections to other uses and cities via transit. It’s not clear from the renders and statement of purpose that California Forever has any of these things other than the open-space thing.

The only job anyone seems to be doing in the California Forever renders is installing solar panels, which I fully support, but I do wonder where those hard-hatted solar installers park their F-150s, or live.

More than that, it’s not clear what the city will actually do. A functioning city provides a context for systems to allow people of different backgrounds and classes to mix, to enjoy recreation and each other, to earn money, and to make and move the things that let other people do the same. So what companies will rent the 8th, 9th, and 10th floor office space in the downtown towers? What commercial work will go on, besides latte art, yoga studios, and bike shops? Will the city have lawyers? Banks? Cabinetmakers? Welders? Hardware stores? Artist studios? Comic book stores? The only job anyone seems to be doing in the California Forever renders is installing solar panels, which I fully support, but I do wonder where those hard-hatted solar installers park their F-150s, or live. 

California Forever isn’t pitching a city. It’s pitching houses. Now, look, California needs those. The state’s housing shortage is egregious. But building new homes on greenfield land, far from jobs or services, is terrible, too. And while the website promises “new employers” and “thousands of permanent, good-paying local jobs,” it does not specify where those things will be relative to the hillside homes or the rowhouses, or if those working-class amenities will even be in the new town at all.

Main Street Electrical Parade

When a city doesn’t perform all the functions of a city — when it is merely city-esque — things get real weird, real fast. The “row house” render on the web site shows a bunch of different architectural styles, from Edwardian and Victorian to sort of arts-and-craftsy. But in real life, presumably all these houses will be built at the same time. If they’re sharing walls, they’re likely to be all one building. 

Maybe the façade won’t look variegated at all — the built version could have the shared mansards and unitary faces of Hausmannian Paris or John Nash’s London. Nothing wrong with that! But one of the keys to the success of those buildings was that once developers agreed to maintain those facades, they were allowed to do pretty much what they wanted with the building behind them.

Alternatively, the builders will add old-timey fronts to make the building look like it’s composed of multiple structures built at the turn of the century. It’ll be a condo complex hidden in a show building, like the ride part of Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. Or instead of row houses, they’ll end up building townhouses with a few feet of clearance between them, as is more and more common in typical California residential developments. None of the space- and energy-efficiency of rows, with all the lack of privacy.

This is generative placemaking, the urban design equivalent of a large language model cribbing from all the existing ideas about what cities are and running them through the tautologitron. Make a city that looks like cities look like!

The same goes for the plaza. It’s uncanny. If one of the cafes serves Italian or Korean food, it won’t be because that part of town used to be where the Italian or Korean families lived. There was no town; it has no used-to-be. Somewhere in the presumably libertarian homeowner’s agreement, the plaza is going to be listed as a Mandatory Enjoyment Zone, with rules for what kinds of signage a Starbucks is allowed to have (instead of keeping rents low enough for a local coffee entrepreneur to pull a latte). The idealized shopping districts of the mid-20th century planned communities mutated into basic malls; that’s what’s going on here, decades later. This is generative placemaking, the urban design equivalent of a large language model cribbing from all the existing ideas about cities and running them through the tautologitron. Make a city that looks like cities look like!

“Authenticity” has never meant much in a city, and it means even less in the post-postmodern era. But still, these renderings cross a border between architecture and Imagineering. It’s not an accident that one of the most famous rich people to ever want to build a city from scratch was Walt Disney. California Forever isn’t promising Main St; it’s promising “Main Street.”

The city and the city

The urbanists on California Forever’s team certainly understand these potential shortcomings. The project’s director of planning, Gabriel Metcalf, is a respected urban planner who used to run the Bay Area’s pro-housing smart growth and urban advocacy group SPUR. Also on the team is BH Bronson Johnson, the planner behind Sidewalk, the abortive attempt of Google’s holding company Alphabet to build a new city neighborhood in Toronto. That didn’t happen, but the walkability and densified city stuff was smart.

But even if they get everything right about the plans and designs for Foreverville, it still faces heavy odds. The team is already dealing with significant local resistance and the need for a whole election’s worth of new land use laws. Once they get past all that, even builders with the best of urbanist intentions often fail. Just about 60 miles southeast of the California Forever site is a residential development called Mountain House. In the planning stages, its leaders said all the right stuff — different housing forms, walkability, diverse uses, smart growth. But none of that happened. It’s just a development with boulevards.

That suburban form — single-family homes set way back from wide, curving streets that lead to eight-lane, high-speed roads, freeways, and Targets — is a default. It’s what plans like California Forever look like when brick starts getting laid. “There’s just such a momentum and it’s so much easier to deliver that,” says Dan Parolek, the architect behind Culdesac. Counties don’t have the expertise to lay out anything other than homes, boulevards, and Walmarts. Builders do urban infill or suburban planned housing. “Trying to get a builder or developer to build something more urban in a historically suburban or rural environment is really, really hard,” he says.

A survey that California Forever sent to current Solano residents asked how they’d feel about tens of millions of dollars in new tax revenue (presumably the property taxes on new homes), millions of new olive and oak trees, protection for open space, thousands of jobs, a performing arts center, minor league baseball, and other fun stuff. People like fun stuff; approvals hovered around 60% for it all. It seems like huge change. But a plan that’s really just imagineered houses is actually little, in the Burnham sense. Unambitious, unsuited for the new world. Which means it’s worth remembering the rest of what Burnham said, the part of the quote most people leave out: Little plans, he said, “probably will not themselves be realized.” They tend not to happen at all — at least, not the way their investors pitched them.

Adam Rogers is a senior tech correspondent at Insider, covering science, technology, and our weird future. He reports on online search, how technology changes the way we live, and what technology entrepreneurs’ priorities mean for society.

Photo courtesy DepositPhotos.

The first two years of the coronavirus pandemic had a profound impact on the U.S. housing market as Americans fled expensive, high-population areas to mid-sized cities or adjoining suburbs in lower-cost parts of the country. (See how the cost of housing has skyrocketed in these major U.S. cities.)

Low-mortgage rates and high demand for homes in many markets, coupled with a slowdown in new home construction due to pandemic-related disruptions in the labor force and supply chains, often led to intense bidding wars over available homes among prospective buyers.

Though prices have slowed considerably in many markets in 2023 thanks to inflation and higher mortgage rates, they remain elevated and out of reach for the typical household. Still, across the country, there are cities where housing is affordable to a broader range of budgets — at least relative to the state’s broader housing market.

Of the 18 cities in Louisiana with available data from real estate market website Realtor.com, Minden is the least expensive place for homebuyers. As of April 2023, the median list price in the city was $140,000, compared to the median list price of $289,250 across the state as a whole.

All metro area and state level listing price data in this story is from Realtor.com, a real estate market website, and is for April 2023.

CGI images of plans to build thousands of new homes and the tallest tower in the UK outside London on the site of a Salford retail park have been revealed. The proposals would see Regents Road Retail Park demolished and replaced by 10 buildings, with 3,200 new homes; a community hub; and a public park.

Most of the current stores – including Costa Coffee, TX Maxx, Home Bargains and Boots – would be knocked down. New walking and cycling routes would be built alongside the city’s first urban park in a generation, according to developers Henley Investments.

Bosses said the park will be home to ‘large lawns, play space, extensive planting, new trees, seating, and water features’. The proposals would see the creation of around five acres of public space.

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Henley Investment Management bought the shopping centre for £16m in 2020. If planning permission is approved the existing stores will remain open until 2026, when the current lease expires. Sainsbury’s supermarket, which occupies much of the site off Regent Road, is not affected.

Developers say the plans will create an ‘open, inclusive, and vibrant new neighbourhood for Salford,’ with the planned homes set to be a mix of bought and rented properties. New entrances along Oldfield Road and Ordsall Lane are expected to draw on the ‘industrial heritage’ of the area.

Warwick Hunter, Managing Director of Development and Head of ESG at Henley Investments, said they hoped to create ‘a district centre that Salford can be proud of’.

“Ultimately, the scheme will deliver a series of spaces that are connected and cohesive and completely part of the Ordsall fabric. We are now consulting on our masterplan and welcome thoughts on how this scheme can be brought forward with the local community on board.”

Previously, Henley Investments said they planned to demolish the ‘outdated’ retail park as ‘both the local area and shopping habits… are very different’ to when it was built 30 years ago. They said a rise in online shopping means ‘regeneration is needed to ensure that the site continues to meet the needs of the local community over the long-term’.

Consultation is now open for the public to give feedback on the plans. It will close on will close on October 20. You can have your say here.

PRESCOTT, AZ — Some Northern Arizona school districts are making sure teachers have better access to housing by providing it themselves.

It’s also another incentive for teachers to take jobs with the district.

Prescott Unified School District started construction earlier this year on new homes for educators. They will be available to rent out for at least a year.

Chino Valley Unified School District also planned to build more affordable homes for teachers.

Watch our previous coverage of the community in the player below:

Prescott Unified School District starts construction on homes for teachers

Prescott Unified School District started construction on homes for teachers in the spring and construction delays have pushed opening back to at least December.

According to Realtor.com data from spring 2023, the median price for a home in Prescott was about $630,000. For rent, it’s nearly $2,000, according to Zillow.

“Our starting teachers start around $51,000, with everything together. So, it’s just not enough. And they’re not able to stay here,” Prescott Unified Assistant Superintendent Clark Tenney said.

These homes for teachers are expected to be rented out for about $1,200 a month, ABC15 was previously told.

If the first community of their “teacherage” is successful, they may build more in other areas of the city, according to Tenney.

While the Prescott Unified School District is still working on their homes, their neighboring district, the Chino Valley Unified School District is just about done with their homes. Teachers are scheduled to start moving in as early as October 1.

“I’m super stoked. We got a lot to move in and a lot to move to storage,” said Jonathan Ruhlman, a first-year teacher in the district.

The homes are about 375 square feet, which the superintendent calls a studio home. There’s a full-sized bathroom, a kitchen with a burner, fridge and more amenities.

Ruhlman’s family lives in Prescott Valley, so he was able to move in with them while waiting for the district’s homes to be ready.

“It’s not something I can feasibly do on a single income on a first-year teacher right now,” he said of finding his own place.

John Scholl, the superintendent of Chino Valley Schools, says teachers who start fresh right out of college get paid $50,000 in their district.

“The cost for their mortgage is more than their take-home pay on a biweekly basis. Housing is not attainable for our staff like it was when I started here in the district 27 years ago,” he said.

Teachers living in the 10 homes will be paying $550 for rent. They will be paying for their own utilities.

“This is not going to solve the teacher shortage. This is going to make Chino Valley more attractive to teachers. I think there’s a systemic issue on teacher salary and working conditions that needs to be addressed beyond Chino Valley,” Scholl said.

The homes were built fairly quickly, with the contractors starting construction less than six months ago.

While the district still has a lot of land left, Scholl said they want to see how these 20 homes first play out before building more.

Teachers do have to apply to live in the homes, and it’s also not meant to be permanent.

“Hopefully, teachers will look at Chino Valley and say, ‘Hey, let’s go there, I can live there. Save a little bit of money.’ It’s not meant to be permanent. It’s transitional. Get them here get them in the community. Hopefully, they’ll stay and get them a leg up in coming to Chino Valley,” Scholl said.

Four of the homes are also meant to house their international teachers who are there to help fill spots as well.

It cost the district $1.5 million to build the 10 homes, of which a third of it came from grants. The other portions, Scholl said, are being financed and some will come out of the district’s capital budget.

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have released its new residential sales statistics for August 2023, finding that sales of new single‐family houses in August were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 675,000—8.7% below the revised July rate of 739,000, but 5.8% above the August 2022 estimate of 638,000.

“New single-family home sales fell by 8.7% in August to a seasonally adjusted annualized rate (SAAR) of 675,000, but this followed a meaningful upward revision for the July figure of 25,000 to 739,000 SAAR units,” said Doug Duncan, Chief Economist at Fannie Mae.

HUD and the Census Bureau reported that the median sales price of new houses sold in August 2023 was $430,300, with the average sales price at $514,000.

In terms of for sale inventory and housing supply, the seasonally‐adjusted estimate of new homes for sale at the end of August was 436,000, representing a supply of 7.8 months at the current sales rate.

“July sales were the highest since February 2022. In terms of the supply of listings, the months’ supply jumped eight-tenths to 7.8, the highest since March,” added Duncan. “The supply of new homes for sale rose 1.2% to 436,000. Of note is that the inventory of completed homes for sale continued to climb and is now at the highest level since April 2020.”

The average mortgage rate in August sat above the 7% mark, thus adding another affordability hurdle in the quest for housing for the nation’s home seekers.

“August was the first month in which sales experienced mortgage rates near or above 7% since last November, which likely explains part of the decline,” added Duncan. “The drop was consistent with the recent decline in the homebuilders’ sentiment survey, as well–although some of this month’s sales drop may be give-back from the strong July reading. The July and August numbers are in line with our current outlook for Q3, though further increases in mortgage rates point to additional softening and pose downside risk to our outlook.”

Despite jobs in the construction sector jobs in the U.S. increasing by 212,000 (2.7%) on a year-over-year basis in August, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) reports builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes in September fell five points to 45, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI).

“High mortgage rates are clearly taking a toll on builder confidence and consumer demand, as a growing number of buyers are electing to defer a home purchase until long-term rates move lower,” said NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz. “Putting into place policies that will allow builders to increase the housing supply is the best remedy to ease the nation’s housing affordability crisis and curb shelter inflation. Shelter inflation posted a 7.3% year-over-year gain in August, compared to an overall 3.7% consumer inflation reading.”

First American Deputy Chief Economist Odeta Kushi added, “According to NAHB, 32% of builders reported cutting home prices in September, the largest share of builders cutting prices since December 2022, while 59% of builders provided sales incentives of all forms in September, more than any month since April 2023. Incentives can come in the form of rate buy-downs, paying points for buyers, offering price reductions, and offering upgrades on interior quality features. As a result of these incentives, the new-home market has fared significantly better than the existing home market, which continues to suffer from the mortgage rate lock-in effect. Builders are benefitting from the lack of re-sale inventory, but the increase in mortgage rates in August proved to be a significant headwind. Higher rates price out prospective buyers and, as a result, new home sales fell.”

Despite a drop in home prices in the second half of 2022 because of a surge in mortgage rates, the value of all homes in the U.S. rose by $2.6 trillion over the past year, according to Zillow.

Metro Denver, however, remains on the negative side of the ledger, with the local market losing an estimated $5 billion in housing value over the same period, a Zillow analysis found.

That $5 billion loss the past year is minimal when compared to the 41.6% gain the market has seen since the pandemic began in early 2020 and the overall valuation of $598 billion that Zillow places on the metro Denver housing market.

Nationally, home values are up 49% over the same time, and are now worth a record $52 trillion.

Although some of the national gain comes from a 1.3% rise in average home values over the past year, the bulk is attributable to a surge in new construction, said Orphe Divounguy, a Zillow senior economist, in comments included with the report.

Metro Denver is lagging behind the nation because of a lower level of affordability combined with less robust new home construction.

“The rapid increase in home values during the pandemic combined with higher mortgage rates caused housing affordability to fall to an all-time low in the Denver metro area. Housing now takes roughly 51% of the income of a typical homebuyer and that has disqualified many prospective homebuyers,” he said in an email.

A large decline in local demand combined with higher costs for builders has caused construction to pull back, with permits in the metro area down roughly 17%, he said. Nationally, builders provided a steady flow of new homes through the spring and summer, helping ease the inventory deficit.

Looking at all of Colorado, the value of the housing market, not including apartments, peaked on May 1, 2022, at $1.33 trillion before falling to $1.2 trillion at the start of the year. Values have since recovered to $1.27 trillion.

The S&P Case Shiller Home Price Indices for July has U.S. home prices up 1% the past year, with metro Denver home prices down 2.9%. The gain between June and July in Denver was 0.47%.