{"id":311160,"date":"2026-05-12T00:49:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T00:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/311160\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T00:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T00:49:08","slug":"opinion-katie-porter-on-the-california-forever-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/311160\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Katie Porter on the California Forever Project"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"css-8hvvyd\">Ms. Porter, you and I both lived a couple blocks away from each other in Irvine, California. Irvine is an unusual city, a master planned community. The Irvine Company assembled the land in the 19th century and held it and then shaped it in this way that would be almost impossible today. And I say almost because somebody is trying to do something similar right now, which is a California Forever project. This tech-billionaire-backed effort to build a new master planned city of 400,000, in Solano County, on land assembled somewhat like Irvine was. There\u2019s been a lot of local opposition. The way that land was acquired was unusual and secretive. I have two questions for you here. As governor, what would you think of California Forever? What would be your relationship to that project? And more broadly, what do you think of the kind of master planning projects that led to Irvine? Yeah, so I\u2019ve actually asked to meet with the California Forever people because the first thing is you got to listen. You got to find out. You got to dig in the details, you got to read the study, you got to ask the hard questions. And I think they might be scared I\u2019m bringing a whiteboard. And so they keep not responding. But I\u2019m really coming in in a place of wanting to understand it. So look, I think some of that is NIMBYism. And I would just say to those on the stage who don\u2019t think there\u2019s very much NIMBYism, I invite you to visit Huntington Beach for yourself because I used to represent Huntington Beach, and a lot of those cities in Orange County, as you know, are very anti-housing. Now, Irvine, interestingly, is not one of them. They are still building. We are adding people. From when you live there to when I live there the population has doubled or tripled. And that is because they control enough of the factors that they don\u2019t get gobsmacked with all of these additive things. And so there is something to having that kind of bigger reach around all of the factors. But let me give you another example of where this doesn\u2019t work. And this is where I thought you were going with California Forever, which is Tejon Ranch. Now, this is a really interesting \u2014 Are you familiar? This is a really interesting example. This was one of the largest, I think it\u2019s still today the largest contiguous private landholding in California. Pretty, pretty amazing. And it\u2019s outside of Los Angeles. They have been trying to develop. And I went and I visited and I saw it. They have been trying to develop housing there, work-force-priced housing, for 30-some years. And they own the land, like there\u2019s not anybody to permit them. They just keep getting sued. They got sued on CEQA. They resolved 30, 29 of the 33 objections, and then they went to court and they lost on one of them. And do you know what happened? Back to zero on all 33 objections. One thing I do think about master planning is that Irvine, as you know, in any given strip mall in Irvine, if you\u2019re standing there and you\u2019ve just walked into one store and you walk out and you think, Shoot, I need to go get that other thing, Irvine Company Big Brother will have put that thing across the parking lot in the strip mall. It\u2019s like actually scary. And it\u2019s not for everybody. It is really not for everybody. But I think the fact that I live in and am raising my family in a very different model of housing and living in a place like Orange County, which has got everything from the worst NIMBY in the state to some of the fastest- growing pro-housing cities in the state, is a really good perspective as governor. And at its core, if you take them at their word, which is where I would start \u2014 might not be where I\u2019d end, but it\u2019s where I\u2019d start the conversation with California Forever \u2014 what they\u2019re saying is: Let us innovate. Let us show people what a different model of living and working and recreating can look like. And I think we need imagination about what housing could be so that we\u2019re not just fighting about 40-story apartment buildings and single-family. There are so many other permutations of housing. We need more housing innovation. And at its heart, that\u2019s what I think some of these projects offer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ms. Porter, you and I both lived a couple blocks away from each other in Irvine, California. Irvine&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,5961,9,8,4594,146],"class_list":["post-311160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-forever","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-governors","tag-katie-porter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}