The first urbanists were recorded in the pages of Genesis: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” But God struck down the Tower of Babel and cursed his people to rely on Google Translate forever.

Despite this false start, the dream of building a great new city continues to this day, even in developed nations like the United States, where we already have a lot of them. We start new companies, new schools, new neighborhoods all the time. Why not a new San Francisco, Boston, or Miami? The yearning for a blank slate crosses the ideological spectrum, touching socialists, antidevelopment activists, curious policy makers, and, most recently, Silicon Valley investors attempting to build a city from scratch—among them Marc Andreessen, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Moritz, Nat Friedman, and Laurene Powell Jobs (who is also the founder of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic).

And they’re not just dreaming big or tweeting. As The New York Times reported in August, they’re backing California Forever, the parent company of Flannery Associates, which has acquired nearly 60,000 acres in Solano County, California, between San Francisco and Sacramento. That’s a lot of land—roughly twice the size of San Francisco or Boston, and slightly larger than Seattle. Housing developments crop up all the time, of course, and suburbs glom on to existing metropolitan areas. California Forever has something else in mind: a top-down community with brand-new infrastructure, where tens of thousands would live and, most important for the company’s vision, also work and play. It’s not your grandfather’s suburban development.  

[From the July/August 2023 Issue: Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis]

“We’ve gotten into a situation where it’s completely acceptable to talk about inventing general artificial intelligence, and that’s something we’ve accepted is going to happen, but it’s not possible to build a new town where people can buy homes,” Jan Sramek, the founder and CEO of California Forever, told me. (The comparison reveals more about his social environment than anything else; it is not commonly accepted that AGI is “going to happen.”)

But building a new city is hard, and this most recent push to do so—unlike with recent gains in AI—doesn’t reflect an exciting breakthrough in America’s technological, political, or financial capacity. Rather, it reflects an abiding frustration with the ridiculously sluggish process of building housing in America’s most productive cities and suburbs. The dream of a new San Francisco is, then, rooted in the nightmare that the old one may be past saving.

Details about the new proposed city in Solano County are hard to come by, but sketches on California Forever’s website portray an idyllic town, foregrounded by open space and densely built with multiple housing types. Windmills turn in the background. The website reads: “Our vision for walkable neighborhoods, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, good jobs and a healthy environment is not about reinventing the wheel, but rather going back to the basics that were once the norm across America.”

This project has its advantages: The lack of urban or suburban development in the region means an absence of traditional groups that might fight against neighborhood change. Because California Forever has acquired so much land, local officials have a strong incentive to work with Sramek to prevent collapsing land values if his project fails. And Sramek is already considering ways to sweeten the deal for existing residents; he says one idea is “setting up a fund that would provide down-payment assistance for buying homes in the new community, which would only be accessible to current residents of Solano County.”

But financing urban infrastructure is exceedingly expensive. “Organic” cities, in which firms and workers agglomerate and then begin to demand that governments finance infrastructure, have a preassembled tax base. If you try to build the infrastructure first, paying for it becomes tricky.

Alain Bertaud, a former principal urban planner at the World Bank and an expert on urban development, told me: “A new city, especially a large one … has a problem of cash flow.” The city can’t raise taxes to build schools and hire teachers, for instance, but it needs to build schools and hire teachers before parents are willing to move—and be taxed—there. “If you look back to [recent] history … the only large new cities were new capitals like Brasilia, Chandigarh, Canberra, [where] the cash flow is not a problem [because] you have the taxpayers of the entire country paying for the cost.”

Thinking of cities as mere infrastructure is a categorical mistake. New York City is not the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge; London is not the tube; and Levittown, New York—America’s quintessential “first” suburb—is not its single-family homes. Infrastructure follows people, not the other way around. “You don’t go to a new city because the sewer system is fantastically efficient,” Bertaud said.

In general, the superstar cities we have today were not preselected from above; they were chosen by millions of workers in search of economic opportunity: Los Angeles (oil); San Francisco (gold); Boston (a port, academia); Seattle (lumber, aircraft, tech); New York City (a port, finance). Granted, workers tend to follow firms that follow transportation networks, which themselves are sometimes functions of state investments, but the principle is sound: Cities are people.

When people are choosing where to live, that decision is almost wholly dominated by job availability. What that means is people attract people. It’s a virtuous cycle in which people who move have kids and want teachers and day-care providers and taxi drivers and nurses, and those people want restaurant workers and iPhone-repair specialists, and so on. (Within a job market or when choosing between two equally promising job markets, people regularly consider the quality of life.)

But what if Sramek and his backers aren’t really building a new city after all, just a commuter suburb far away from the inner core? That’s what the pro-housing activist Jordan Grimes thinks is happening; he told the San Francisco Chronicle the project was “sprawl with a prettier face and prettier name.” Solano’s population has a lot of commuters already. Census data from 2016 to 2020 indicated that of the roughly 207,000 workers who lived in Solano, more than 40 percent commuted to another county. Compare that with San Francisco, where of its nearly 510,000 workers, a bit more than 20 percent commuted to another county.

I asked Sramek: Is he truly looking to build a city with its own job market, where residents will be responsible for policing, fire services, parks and recreation, wastewater, libraries? Or is he looking to develop housing, with some space for retail, restaurants, and other cultural amenities? “This is one of those issues that’s very open for community input,” he told me. “We do think that eventually this would become an incorporated city that does provide many of those services.”

Sramek isn’t a developer, and his investors are not the sort of people who hope that their hundreds of millions of dollars go into the construction of a few thousand single-family homes. Someone close to the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it freely, told me the aspiration is to prove to the rest of the world what’s possible in America: We can build an attractive, dense, and climate-friendly metropolis, and we can do it quickly. The source also suggested that a big Silicon Valley player might one day move its offices to the area. (I reached out to Andreessen, Patrick Collison, Friedman, and Powell Jobs. They declined to comment.)

Either way, new city or new sprawl, this project is going to run headfirst into the politics of development. Right now, the land is zoned largely for agricultural use. The county holds that changing the current designation to accommodate high-density urban infrastructure will require a ballot measure. Sramek told me he might try to put the question to voters as early as November 2024, but victory is far from assured.

According to some local officials, Flannery Associates alienated the local community by refusing to announce its intentions before it began acquiring land. (Sramek argues that doing so would have made land values skyrocket.) Congressional representatives alerted the Treasury Department, worried that foreign investors were buying up real estate for nefarious purposes. They noted that an Air Force base is nearby. “I will tell you they have poisoned the well,” John Garamendi, who represents a large part of Solano County, told me. “There’s no goodwill. Five years of total secrecy? Five years of not communicating with [local officials]?”

The process of building a city, difficult as it is, seems remotely rational only because trying to build within cities drives people mad.  

Sramek and his director of planning, Gabriel Metcalf, who once ran the influential San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, say the idea for a new city came to them after deciding that working on incremental reforms would never yield the housing needed to make a dent in the overall housing shortage. As of now, the country needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine, a formidable challenge even if America’s political and legal systems were focused on meeting it—which, unfortunately, most of them are not. Instead of directing a building boom, states still devolve permitting decisions down to the hyperlocal level, where the default is to ban smaller, more affordable homes and where opposition from just a few people can quash desperately needed construction.

“It’s always hard to come to an existing place and try to change it very profoundly,” Sramek told me, when I asked him why he wasn’t focused on building in established cities.

“I spent my whole career on the infill side,” Metcalf told me. (Infill development is building on underutilized land within existing development patterns, such as turning a parking lot into a few townhomes.) “I believe in that completely, but we are only delivering a small fraction of what we need … Whether it’s trying to build a high-speed rail line or renewable-energy transmission line or high-density infill housing, there is a vetocracy in place that across America makes it incredibly difficult and slow to build the things we need to build.” (Funnily enough, that vetocracy includes one of the investors in the Solano County project: Andreessen. I reported last year that he co-signed a letter with his wife opposing new development in the wealthy town of Atherton.)

The socialist writer Nathan J. Robinson has also issued a call to build new cities, and he, too, seems to have given up on the idea of reforming existing places: “​​The exciting thing about building new cities from scratch is that it allows you to avoid the mistakes that are made in the ‘organic’ (i.e., market-built) city … A new city can avoid all of the disastrous errors that gave us the ugly suburban wastelands that constitute so much of contemporary ‘development.’”

American cities and suburbs have earned Sramek’s fatalism. And certainly, building a walkable, thriving new town in Solano County would be positive for anyone who found a home they loved there. But Sramek and his backers want to set an example, and good examples should be replicable. This one isn’t. Sites like Solano County—near bustling job centers that lack residential development—are few and far between.

Two types of places need a development boom: those that already have lots of people living in them, like Boston or Miami, and those that are growing quickly, like Georgetown, Texas, near Austin. To the extent they’re failing to build, it’s not because they lack inspiration. They’re failing because the politics are genuinely thorny. Many people oppose new development on ideological grounds, or because they think it’s a nuisance, or because they deny the existence of a housing shortage at all, or even because they believe it interferes with other priorities.

[Jerusalem Demsas: California isn’t special]

A new city, moreover, won’t necessarily escape these antidevelopment pressures in the future. It might expand for a while, but it will eventually face the same old problem: residents who don’t want change. Even in Manhattan, a place where residents are surrounded by high-density housing and cultural amenities that come from density, people regularly oppose new housing, new transit, and even new dumpsters.

Solving the housing crisis doesn’t require inventing new places for people to go; it requires big cities to embrace growth, as they did in the past, and smaller cities to accept change. Again, cities are people, and people are moving to Maricopa, Arizona, in the suburbs of Phoenix, and Santa Cruz, California, south of San Jose. These places may not feel ready to accommodate newcomers, but some will have to rise to the occasion.

What America needs isn’t proof that it can build new cities, but that it can fix its existing ones.

“President Joe Biden has made a statement about the situation in Bakhmut”: If anyone had said this sentence to me two years ago, I would have laughed. Back then, most Ukrainians couldn’t have found Bakhmut on a map.

Now, when I tell people that I come from Bakhmut and permanently left it in February 2022, on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, their faces change. They start talking to me as though we are standing at a graveside. The name of my home city suffices for this.

I carry my town inside me and mark it on Google Maps with a heart and the word home. Russia has physically erased it from the face of the Earth and made its name a byword for destruction, for street battles of a ferocity hardly seen since World War II.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the battle in Bakhmut has done for Ukraine]

Sometimes, I stare for hours at new photos of ruins published in local chat groups. I’m looking for the city I remember: I’ve walked this street hundreds of times on my way to school; my classmate lived in that building; my dentist worked in the neighboring one, where I had an appointment on February 24, 2022, that I never made. When I identify the neighborhood, I feel relief: I haven’t forgotten everything. My town is imprinted in me.

In peacetime, I gave tours of Bakhmut when friends visited from other cities. But I’ve never tried to do this virtually, to walk someone through a city that effectively no longer exists. Few buildings survive here, only ashes, and tons of broken concrete that people once considered their homes. No life remains, or almost none: Visible in drone footage are chestnut, apricot, and cherry trees that miraculously withstood the Russian onslaught, although Bakhmut itself did not.

Let me take you to my Bakhmut.

Bakhmut is small, roughly 40 square kilometers, and just a little more than an hour by bicycle from end to end. In the summer, the steppe gets hot, no matter the time of day. But by October, the leaves have turned and fallen in the light wind.

Stupkey, to the city’s north, sits on massive salt deposits that made Bakhmut a mining town for hundreds of years. Once, I came here with Mark van den Meizenberg, the scion of a Dutch family that established a salt mine called “Peter the Great” 140 years ago. We walked through tall grass until we came to a ravine and a salt lake, near the site of the old mine. Mark’s family lived here until the beginning of the First World War and the revolution, burying their dead in the local Dutch cemetery.

The Bolsheviks put an end to “Peter the Great,” and salt extraction soon moved to richer deposits in Soledar, just 10 kilometers away. I’ve ventured into those industrial salt mines about a dozen times, always finding new marvels: a subterranean church; intricate salt sculptures; galleries with ceilings soaring up to 30 meters, where symphony orchestras have played; a grand tree festooned with garlands; a therapeutic sanatorium; even a football pitch. I brought my friends to see these things—and to feel beneath our feet a seabed from 250 million years ago, whose salts have seasoned the meals of every Ukrainian household.

Once I went with a group that included a local artist, Masha Vyshedska, who brought her ukulele. We nestled into a secluded corner of an expansive gallery, under the soft glow of the lights we’d carried. Masha strummed, and I captured the moment on video. The salt walls reflected her towering shadow and returned echoes of her ukulele as the sound traveled through the underground caverns. So engrossed were we in the moment that we lost track of our group and nearly found ourselves stranded in the mine overnight. Now that enchanted space has slipped behind the front line, inaccessible.

Starting in April 2014, when Russia made its earlier play for eastern Ukraine, militants stormed a military base near Tsvetmet, an industrial area just south of Stupkey, five times, hoping to capture the 280 Ukrainian tanks there. The Russian-backed militants brought guns, grenade launchers, and tanks. Local activists smuggled supplies and essentials over the fence to the Ukrainian soldiers. The militants occupied parts of Bakhmut that spring, but by July, our special forces had repelled them.

I lived near the base at the time. Tsvetmet is mostly factories and private houses, but not long before the war, a much-loved recreational area had sprung up here, called the Alley of Roses for the hundreds of different-colored rose varieties that bloomed from spring to late fall. The park bordered on a lake where we picnicked and fed the ducks and swans.

I remember sitting in the hallway of my apartment building, listening to the rumble of tanks on the asphalt under my window and waiting for the sound of automatic fire to subside. My husband and I were expecting a child. When the streets quieted, I ventured out, just to make sure that the Ukrainian flag still flew over the base. It did, though the base lay in ruins, and when the sun rose, we took our cameras and set out to report. A Ukrainian soldier defending the post saw my look of despair and embraced me, assuring me that, thank God, everyone was alive and everything would be okay.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

My son, Tymofiy, was born in February 2015. The very next day, we felt the vibrations of Russian shells exploding on the outskirts of Bakhmut. A nurse told me to take the baby to the maternity hospital’s basement: “They’re going to shell again,” she said. There we huddled, seven frightened mothers and their infants, as well as silent men and staff members. A girl who had just given birth a few hours earlier was brought down on a stretcher. I started to panic, calling relatives and friends to say that we were being evacuated. I imagined fleeing with my son in my arms. But the rumor of renewed shelling was false, and soon we returned to our rooms.

Being afraid eventually becomes tiring. You start to respond skeptically to warnings of possible shelling, but the tension doesn’t dissipate, even when weeks go by without the sound of cannons and without new rumors that feed on your fear. The Ukrainian flag flying over the tank base always comforted me.  

Yan Dobronosov / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

When Tymofiy was small, we would take him to the local supermarket for ice cream before riding our bikes to the promenade along the Bakhmutka River. The park was another new one: Before the riverbed was cleaned and its banks strengthened, this place was neglected, overgrown with reeds. Now local fishermen climbed over the fence and sat by the water waiting for a catch, and children gathered on playgrounds with swings and basketball courts. Adults hid in the shade of young trees and took photos with green sculptures of dinosaurs, elephants, and bears.

The Bakhmutka gave its name to our city. Around it, in the wild fields, a fortification against Tatar raids from Crimea appeared first, and later, the Cossack saltworks. The fortress of Bakhmut shows up on maps starting in 1701. It sat behind a wooden wall, with straight streets leading to gates, a church, houses, and the saltworks.

In our local museum, a model of the fortress had pride of place. I liked to look at it as a child: The houses were made of matches, and you could see the river that divided the fortress in half. After 500 years, speeches and songs in Ukrainian once again refer to Bakhmut as a fortress—a place whose function is to stop the enemy and to protect.

Bakhmut’s central square has the usual things: a town hall, a fountain, shops and restaurants. But I can’t help lingering on the empty pedestals—granite podiums of history on which no one stands.

One plinth used to hold a statue of Lenin, typical for any Ukrainian city: tall, gray, ugly, constantly soiled by pigeons that left their white traces. Under that statue in 2014, a crowd gathered with Russian flags, agitating against the Revolution of Dignity that had just driven Viktor Yanukovych’s Russian-backed government from Kyiv.

I was an editor for a local website at the time, and I brought my camera to the square. I saw buses parked nearby with Russian plates; they had carried demonstrators over the border. But many in the crowd were also locals, and their presence pained me. One protester told me I was forbidden to film, but I kept on. Little did my colleagues and I know that our fellow journalists in an occupied city nearby would be abducted and held hostage for doing the same.

Just 100 meters away from Lenin, on another granite pedestal, stood Artem, a Bolshevik revolutionary who did nothing especially beneficial for Bakhmut, yet for some reason, the town bore his name during the Soviet era. Only in 2016 did Artemivsk become Bakhmut again. That year, cranes lifted the stone replicas of Artem and Lenin and transported them to an industrial zone for storage. But the residents of our town couldn’t agree on who or what should replace them, so the spots remained vacant.

Tymofiy, 4 years old, posed on Artem’s pedestal for a photo in 2019. I compared him to the project “Inhabiting Shadows,” by the artist Cynthia Gutierrez: She installed stairs that allowed anyone to climb the pedestal of a toppled Lenin in Kyiv. There, one could experience the flux of historical symbols, from ascension to decline, and then oblivion.

On summer evenings, my family liked to gather for dinner on my parents’ veranda, at their house not far from the city center. My parents had come to Ukraine as refugees from Armenia in 1989, fleeing the Nagorno-Karabakh war to start anew in Donbas. In the 1990s, the four of us lived in a single room, my parents working tirelessly to raise my sister and me. Thirty years on, they envisioned spending their twilight years in the modest house with the veranda. Their grandson came to see them there and played in the yard, under a large cherry tree.

That house and its veranda are gone. Missile strikes first obliterated the roof, then the courtyard. We learned this from satellite images. Our family had taken nothing from the house except documents. Everything my parents had built was destroyed.

South of the city, past the landfill where the city failed to build its waste-recycling plant, are the gypsum mines that, along with salt, made Bakhmut attractive to industrialists. Mikhail Kulishov, a local historian, used to give tours here even for children, taking care to hand out yellow helmets in case the rock crumbled.

[From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending values Americans claim to hold]

The gypsum galleries are alive with bats, which are a protected species in Ukraine. Parts are flooded and attract extreme cave divers. The story of the mines begins at the end of the 19th century, when a German engineer named Edmund Farke contracted with the government of Bakhmut to extract gypsum for alabaster factories. His gypsum works created an extensive cave system, part of which was later used to mature the local sparkling wine. Tourists would go there for tastings.

But for me, the gypsum caves were more of a place for mourning. During World War II, the Nazis used the mines to wall up 3,000 Bakhmut Jews alive. People gathered there yearly to remember the victims. During the Russian occupation of Bakhmut in 2023, the Wagner Group set up its headquarters in the tunnels of the winery.

On the southern edge of Bakhmut, in the year 2023, you'll see nothing but the ruins of my city, the skeletal remains of its burned-out buildings and bombarded streets. There are no longer any people here. For my part, I began our tour with insomnia, nights in Kyiv punctured by air-raid sirens announcing Russian drone and missile attacks. My work for the Ukrainian press brought me to Sloviansk, just 20 kilometers away from Bakhmut, but I could get no closer: Artillery was (and is) still booming there.

Mostly, I offered you this tour from a fortress on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Portugal. I came here with Tymofiy, now 8 years old, for a retreat so that we could get some sleep—yes, Ukrainians travel now for sleep. The place is ideal, I think, because it is as far away from Russia as you can get in Europe. I climbed the walls of this ancient Portuguese fortress and raised my Ukrainian flag, with the name of my hometown, Bakhmut, written on it.

We are returning to Ukraine, my son and I. Our Bakhmut no longer exists, but one way or another, we’re still there.