This summer, I co-organized a month-long 1,300-person "popup village" in Healdsburg, CA called Edge Esmeralda. This gathering was incredibly fun and rewarding, and it was also a huge accelerant to the creation of the permanent village we are building, Esmeralda. Edge Esmeralda is happening again next year! Mark your calendar: May 24 - June 21, 2025 A huge challenge when building a town is that the feedback loops are very, very long. Instead of accepting this fact, I decided that we have to get creative to find ways to learn and adjust, because within a few years we will literally be laying our plans in concrete. Edge Esmeralda was essentially a prototype to learn about how we want to approach building the Esmeralda permanent community, both the "hardware" (urbanism, infrastructure, architecture, etc) and the "software" (events, programming, culture, etc). The Edge Esmeralda "popup village" was 30 days long, and it took place scattered throughout a charming 11,000-person town in Sonoma County called Healdsburg. This extended gathering gave us an opportunity to put our ideas into practice and learn firsthand which ones we want to incorporate as we the permanent community — more importantly, which ones we'll want to leave behind, or at least adjust. These learnings ranged widely, such as: What makes a great town square How to integrate kids while maintaining expert-level programming Where to provide the lightest amount of structure and routine for the group to allow the emergent creativity of the attendees to make awesome things happen How to approach local outreach to make existing residents feel included Which restaurant layouts and acoustics make for the best nightly community dinners How far apart is too far apart for things to feel easily accessible on foot It's hard to capture EE in a blog post — it was really more of an ecosystem like a college campus or city than a single tracked event — but these stats will give you a sense of what the month looked like: ~1,300 people joined us during the month of June 80 kids attended Edge Esmeralda 6 weeks old & 86 years old, the ages of the youngest & oldest attendees 25 expert-led program tracks 551 sessions throughout the month 93% were organized by attendees, with just 7% planned directly by the Edge Esmeralda organizing team! 167 unique session hosts 3x increase in Bird Bike usage in the town during the event – and that doesn’t even count the bikes people rented or brought, separate from Bird, which was a much larger number! 350 redwood trees funded by donations from a solar-powered night market, organized entirely by attendees Read the Edge Esmeralda 2024 recap → The coolest thing to me is that our design principles focused on emergence, so we didn’t actually know precisely what would happen. Instead, we created the container and then watched it unfold. In other words, all the cool things that happened were because the attendees saw it as an opportunity to make something awesome out of it. One of my favorite examples was the Solar A-frames project, catalyzed by Nick Foley and Anson Yu/ Over the course of a few weeks, they led a group of attendees to build an A-frame made out of solar panels up in a formerly burned redwood forest close to town, which ended up hosting the spectacular Golden Future Night Market and the memorable Closing Ceremony. I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to collaborate with Edge City to make Edge Esmeralda a reality. It's one of the most rewarding things I've ever worked on, and they were incredible partners in bringing this to life. "Edge Esmeralda was one of the weirdest, wildest, most ambitious, most unexpected — and most fun — things I’ve ever watched unfold in Healdsburg." — Simone Wilson, Healdsburg Tribune In fact we had such a good time, and so many people asked us to do it again so they could come longer next time, that we have decided to organize Edge Esmeralda again! Mark your calendars: May 24 - June 21, 2025. Hope to see you there! .post .post-content table { margin: 18px 0 18px 0; } .post .post-content tr div {padding: 6px 0 0 0 } .post-content b a, .post-content b {font-weight: 900;} @media (min-width: 1200px) { table {min-width: calc(100% + 190px) !important; margin-right: -90px !important; margin-left: -90px !important}} @media (min-width: 768px) { table { min-width: calc(100% + 140px) !important; margin-right: -70px !important; margin-left: -70px !important}} @media (max-width: 768px) { table tr > * {flex:none !important; width: calc(100% - 12px) !important}} .row hr {margin: 20px 0 !important;}

In the US, it's common for local governments to focus on tax revenue produced by a property, without considering the costs it adds to the city's budget. This is like measuring how far a car can drive without considering how much gas it uses to get there. Different properties create different long-term cost burdens for the city. One of the biggest contributors to that variance is the amount of infrastructure they require, which correlates with the amount of space they take up. For just 1 building per acre, you need far more roads/pipes/etc per building than if you build 10 buildings per acre. Lower density doesn't really increase tax revenue per building, so you're essentially taking on a lot more infrastructure liability to support the same revenue. Spreading development across a lot of land requires more infrastructure, resulting in higher costs per building. Clustering development on less land reduces per-building costs, because the cost of the infrastructure is spread over more units. Consider two properties in Asheville: a Walmart and a small downtown building. The Walmart is worth $20M and uses 34 acres, while the downtown building is worth $11M and uses 0.2 acres. At first blush, the Walmart seems better because it generates more tax revenue. But once you look at the denominator, you see that the downtown building generates 100x more tax revenue per acre! $20,000,000 / 34 acres = $588,000 / acre $11,000,000 / 0.2 acres = $55,000,000 / acre When we build sprawl without accounting for the long-term liabilities, we create unsustainable infrastructure costs that can overwhelm city budgets in the long-run. For example, Detroit's sprawling layout and declining population left it with extensive infrastructure to maintain but insufficient tax revenue, contributing to its 2013 bankruptcy. This doesn't mean we should never build low density places, but we should be aware of the tradeoffs. We have to to consider the costs and not just revenues, otherwise we will continue to build ourselves into a hole! Detroit pioneered the sprawl development pattern, which depends on perpetual growth in order to continue working. This development pattern was a major contributor to its financial troubles a few decades later when its infrastructure bills came due. Cities that emulate traditional development patterns like downtown Charleston earn more revenue in a small area while costing far less in infrastructure expenses. Thanks to Urban3 for the analysis that inspired this post. Also, Strong Towns has a bunch of great posts on this topic, including: The Question Every City Should Be Asking We Are All Detroit What Charleston Can Teach us About the Value of Place We measure car value based on miles per gallon, not miles per tank. Why don't we do the same for our cities' developments? 2022: The Year in Maps and Charts From Urban3 Mansion Blight: How the Most Expensive Homes Drain Community Wealth The Power of Information Equity .post .post-content table { margin: 12px 0 12px 0; } .container .post .post-content ul { margin-bottom: 24px !important; } .post .post-content tr div {padding: 6px 0 0 0 } @media (min-width: 1200px) { table {min-width: calc(100% + 190px) !important; margin-right: -90px !important; margin-left: -90px !important}} @media (min-width: 768px) { table { min-width: calc(100% + 140px) !important; margin-right: -70px !important; margin-left: -70px !important}} @media (max-width: 768px) { table tr > * {flex:none !important; width: calc(100% - 12px) !important}} .row hr {margin: 20px 0 !important;}

A new city has been proposed in California, and I’ve never been more captivated by a vision for the future of my home state in my lifetime. This post is part of a series I’m writing about this bold proposal. One of the biggest questions I had when I first learned about this proposal was whether it is resilient to climate. We were in a neverending drought during my childhood in California, and my parents constantly reminded me to turn off the tap while brushing my teeth and let the lawn turn brown to conserve water. I also had memories of driving through Solano County and seeing how flat the land was, wondering what would happen in a flood. So naturally, I was interested to understand the climate implications of the location that California Forever selected, given the state’s past and future challenges. Is there flood or sea level rise risk? On the topic of flooding, the answer ended up being surprisingly straightforward. In the ballot initiative, California Forever stated that they are not building on any ground that is below the projected 2150 sea level rise levels, based on one of the more conservative scenarios from the state guidelines. Here’s a map of potential water elevations from the intermediate-high 2150 sea level rise estimate superimposed over the 100-year FEMA flood level relative to the proposed site, and it turns out that the site for the new city was placed out of the way of even the most pessimistic sea level rise and flood zones. In fact the site is much more elevated than already-populated places like Oakland and Berkeley! So it seems that flooding just isn’t a problem for this project, despite my initial fears. This map shows the potential inundation from a conservative 2150 sea level rise projection for 2150 combined with the FEMA 100-year flood event. What about fire risk? The answer to this question is pretty straightforward too: the site has virtually no trees on it, so there is no risk of forest fire. The only fire risk nearby would be from grass fires, which are much easier to mitigate through good land management practices, like sheep grazing. Beyond that, California Forever plans to build several thousands of acres of agrivoltaics — basically solar farms with sheep grazing — in the surrounding greenbelt, which will not only help keep fires down, but also reduce associated smoke and air quality issues. Long story short, there’s very little mapped fire risk anywhere near the site – in fact the following map had to be zoomed pretty far out before any CalFire-mapped fire risk came into the frame: The silhouette of the proposed New Community (the small area in the middle of the map) overlaid with the Fire Hazard Severity Zones from CalFire, which is "based on fuel loading, slope, fire weather, and other relevant factors present, including areas where winds have been identified by the department as a major cause of wildfire spread." Is there enough water? When I dug into the water question, I was surprised to find that having enough water for human consumption will require work and good design, but it’s a solvable problem. I’ll dive more deeply into each of these, but long story short, California Forever has multiple routes for securing an adequate water supply: First of all, the new city will be designed to minimize per capita water usage well below that of neighboring communities. Then, their landholdings already include water rights that can supply some of the water for the new city. Finally, California has a robust market for trading water rights, and urban uses are more than capable of paying the price needed to ensure access to that water. Designed for resilience & efficiency from the ground up Water use varies dramatically across California’s cities. For example in September 2014, East Los Angeles averaged 48 gallons a day per person, while northern San Diego averaged more than 580 gallons a day per person — 12 times more per person! Water efficiency is a big focus for California Forever. The way that a community is built from the ground up can make a huge difference in how much water residents use. Through a combination of ultra-efficient appliances and fixtures, small backyards, and (most importantly!) a system for recycling and reusing water, they are targeting per capita water use levels that will be among the lowest in the state. They are also looking into using drought-resistant plants in landscaping and implementing smart irrigation systems that adjust watering based on weather conditions and soil moisture levels. In addition, California Forever will reuse the recycled water it generates from wastewater. This can offset the amount of potable water needed and be substituted for surface water currently devoted to irrigation of agriculture in the lands around the city. Their plans also include stormwater measures that would promote the recharge of the aquifer beneath the site, replenishing groundwater supply in the process. If anything, the new city may actually reduce the state’s water usage when projecting for future growth. The current pattern of development and sprawl uses way more water than the plan that California Forever has proposed, so if the state’s growth gets redirected to this new city instead of places where most growth has currently been happening, average water usage across the state might actually go down! Water usage varies dramatically across California’s cities (data source: Pacific Institute) CF’s landholdings already have extensive water rights To begin, some of the water can come directly from California Forever’s property. The project’s urban planner Gabriel Metcalf explained that a single almond orchard in their landholdings could provide enough water to support 85,000 people (conserving groundwater used on the orchard and instead using it to support household use)! There is a robust market for water rights To zoom out, the amount of water consumed by humans is tiny in California compared to agricultural and environmental uses — only about 10% goes to urban uses, while 50% is environmental and 40% is agricultural — so in times of drought, it only takes a small amount of the non-urban uses to be redirected towards humans to make up for any shortfall in conjunction with curtailment of non-essential urban uses like landscape irrigation. This redirection towards the most critical uses is able to happen because the state of California has created well-defined property rights that allows water to be bought and sold, creating a market that allows water to flow to where it’s most needed. There is a well-defined hierarchy of water rights to determine how a given water source is used, and what happens when its volume reduces during dry periods. To ensure that these property rights are respected, the State Water Resources Control Board has a monitoring regime to make sure that people take only the water they have rights to. Urban uses of water can demand the highest price, since they are for critical uses like drinking water. The higher levels of economic activity and population density also means that they generate more revenue to cover water costs compared to other activities. The combination of urban uses being able to outbid almost all other uses plus California’s robust water market means that even if California Forever did need to draw from an outside source, they would be able to get the water they need. Long story short, the way a city (or any other use) comes up with water to supplement its local supplies is to pay for it, either by purchasing the land and associated water rights or by purchasing water through California’s system of rights that has operated for a long time. Securing adequate water supply is a legal requirement Finally, California’s system for regulating development requires developers to secure adequate supply. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires developers to complete a Water Supply Assessment (WSA), which means that at each stage of development, the project sponsor has to prove that they have secured rights to water, as well as the methods of withdrawing, conveying, storing, and treating the water to ensure an adequate supply for the land use they are trying to permit. Furthermore, California Forever has explicitly added a requirement to complete a CEQA Environmental Impact Report in the language of their proposed ballot measure, further tying themselves to the mast on the requirement to guarantee an adequate supply before they are allowed to begin development. My takeaway from all of this is that adequate water access is not a major obstacle for this proposal. The new city fits nicely into the existing framework of water rights that California established a long time ago, and if anything it may reduce per capita water usage by redirecting new development to a place that is prioritizing resiliency and efficiency from the ground up. If you’re interested in understanding more about the new city that California Forever has proposed, here are the other posts in the series: Intro: The new city in California Part 1: The story of California Forever so far Part 2: Clustered development will preserve California’s landscape Part 3: The first walkable city in America in a century Part 4: Success is tied to benefiting existing Solano residents Part 5: Relationship with Travis Air Force Base Part 6: Is the proposed new city in California climate resilient? (this post!) * For a long time, the glaring exception to this rule was groundwater, and many parts of California essentially "mined" groundwater in the sense that they withdrew it faster than it could replenish. But that changed in 2014 with the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA, pronounced "sig-ma"). SGMA requires that each groundwater basin have a plan for managing it at a sustainable level, such that it is not withdrawn at a faster rate than it is replenished over time. ** For example in the 2012-2016 drought, the state reduced environmental water allocations to reserve supplies for farms and cities. h1,h2,h3,h4,h5 {margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-top: 16px !important; font-weight: 600 !important; font-size: 20px;} .post .post-content > div {padding-top: 8px; padding-bottom: 8px} img {border: 1px solid #eee; margin-top: 16px} .post h3 {font-size: 16px;} @media (min-width: 1200px) { table {min-width: calc(100% + 190px) !important; margin-right: -90px !important; margin-left: -90px !important}} @media (min-width: 768px) { table { min-width: calc(100% + 140px) !important; margin-right: -70px !important; margin-left: -70px !important}} @media (max-width: 768px) { table tr > * {flex:none !important; width: calc(100% - 12px) !important}} .row hr {margin: 20px 0 !important;}

I’ve now done two egg retrieval cycles. Given that I had a zillion questions before I started, I thought I’d share my notes for others who might have similar questions. Things I would’ve loved to know beforehand Overall the process was way easier and less intense than I expected. It was mostly annoying, because I had to go to tons of doctor’s appointments and get my blood drawn multiple times a week, but in terms of symptoms and pain it was very low key. I also had a very serious hand injury and series of three surgeries shortly before starting this process, so this may have felt minor in comparison. A lot of people report IVF being very difficult and uncomfortable, and I also may have just gotten lucky. But I wanted to share my experience so people can understand the range. Shockingly, I came to look forward to the injections each night. This was shocking because before this, I had a medium phobia of needles. Mixing the medications is a relaxing process (took ~20 mins each time), and I’d always feel really proud of myself after doing the injection. To be clear, I never enjoyed doing the injection itself, and the very first time it was really scary, but I was really proud of myself for how quickly I got used to it. Neuroplasticity for the win! Symptoms during/after the retrieval: After the first 4-5 days, I had minor discomfort in abdomen if I moved or bounced, but really almost nothing. Slightly more acne for the first round, but not the second. Maybe because I had to go off Tretinoin? Or maybe because of hormones? The day of the retrieval itself, I felt groggy and sleepy and ended up napping all afternoon. The very next day after, I was up and about and felt almost totally normal, to the point where I was already gardening and lifting heavy things (which in retrospect was probably pushing myself sooner than I should have, but I think it turned out fine!). Things to know regarding medications: Prenatal vitamins – wish I’d started sooner the first time around; the longer you do them ahead of time, the better. The second round I started them sooner. Since I am young and had a particularly large number of eggs, I’m at higher risk of OHSS (Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome), so they gave me meds to reduce that risk. I believe the category of drugs is called "GnRH antagonists". If you have a lot of follicles, make sure they give it to you. A friend of mine didn’t get it for her first round, and she got OHSS and her recovery was awful; when she did her second round, they gave it to her, and it was way better. The genetic reports (PGT-*) take a while to receive (as you can see in the calendar below). The funnel math is brutal from eggs → fertilized → frozen → genetic testing → implantation. Make sure you understand it well, otherwise you may be very disappointed and surprised by the results, even if you get a ton of eggs! Calendars One thing I was surprised to not have more information ahead of time was the scheduled of appointments and medications I would be taking. The dosage and timing of everything are determined based on your day-to-day blood test results, but I thought there would at least be some example calendars I could look at to get a sense of the rhythm to expect. Nope! So for anyone who's looking for the same thing I was, below you'll find the calendars of the two retrieval cycles I've gone through (and here's a link to the Google Doc, in case that's easier to read). Round 1 calendar: June 2023 Round 2 calendar: March 2024 table tr > * {padding: 0 8px !important} .heading {margin: 16px 0 8px 0; font-weight: 600 !important; font-size: 24px;} table .caption {line-height: 1.4} .center {text-align: center !important; text-wrap: balance} .post h3 {font-size: 18px; padding-top: 8px !important} .post .post-content table {margin-top: 12px !important; margin-bottom: 16px !important;} .grey-border{padding: 0 !important;} .grey-border img {border: 1px solid #eee; } .grey-border {padding: 0 !important;} /* Use to make the images bleed past the text */ @media (min-width: 1200px) { table {min-width: calc(100% + 190px) !important; margin-right: -90px !important; margin-left: -90px !important}} @media (min-width: 768px) { table { min-width: calc(100% + 140px) !important; margin-right: -70px !important; margin-left: -70px !important}} @media (max-width: 768px) { table tr > * {flex:none !important; width: calc(100% - 12px) !important}} .row hr {margin: 30px 0 30px 0 !important;} img {box-shadow: none !important}