Bring Colma back to life
How $28 million can turn Colma into a green city of 50,000 people
New cities are in vogue among technologists and urban thinkers -- from small-scale developments like Culdesac's walkable community in the Arizona desert to planned megacities like Neom in Saudi Arabia. I'm not really sold on either of these ideas. Tempe, Arizona is not well-suited for a walkable community due to the extreme heat and, while Saudi Arabia probably has the state capacity to deliver, Neom will still be subject to the theocratic monarchy's backwards laws.
There's another movement growing around large-scale developments called charter cities. These cities will be situated inside existing countries, but with special rules for governing themselves. China has executed this strategy extremely well (just look at Shenzhen), but there's always the risk of an authoritarian takeover (just look at Hong Kong). The Charter Cities Institute is doing critical work on how to build these new governance models.
But what about simply redeveloping existing cities, fixing the mistakes of the post-war car-centric infrastructure and eliminating governmental barriers to low cost of living and greater economic activity? Not only is this possible, it's the cheapest way forward.
Enter: Colma, California.
Colma's housing demographics
According to the 2019 ACS 5-year estimates from the US Census Bureau, Colma, CA has roughly 1,300 residents across 934 total housing units (98% of which are occupied), with an average home value of around $1 million. Most of Colma is dedicated to sprawling cemeteries with only a small portion used for residential and commercial use. Colma, famously, has more dead people than living. It got this way primarily due to San Francisco relocating its corpses when it was expanding West.
Besides cemeteries, Colma sports a dozen big-box stores and another dozen car dealerships. It's not exactly flush with what anyone would call "neighborhood character" (then again, it has both a Panda Express and a Chipotle).
Colma is ideally located in a moderate coastal climate, near highway 101 and all of its residentially-zoned land is directly next to a BART station.
According to Colma's zoning map, all of the residential structures are single-family detached homes. I think this is pretty appalling land use for a tract of land on a regional zero-emissions transit system in one of the highest cost of living and highest productivity regions in the entire country.
So… let's fix it.
Voting in new leadership
Of the 1,300 residents, only 701 people are registered to vote as of February 2019. With only 300 children in the town, that's a pretty incredible 70% voter registration rate -- and at least some of the 300 unregistered adults are surely noncitizen immigrants who are not eligible to vote. For ease of our calculations, this works out to roughly 1 adult per household.
You could try to recruit some candidates to run for office to fundamentally remake the zoning rules of the city and face an uphill battle against incumbents that oppose change. Or you could just… buy them out.
To buy 50% of the 934 homes in the city (enough to guarantee you win an election (ok, technically you need 50% +1)), you only need $467 million. But you only need to buy homes of registered voters, so you need 50% of 700 households, which is just $350 million. But you don't need to do that if two voters move into every unit -- then you only need to buy 1/3 of the 700 homes, or just $233 million.
But that also assumes you'll have zero incumbents vote for the change. Many of them will realize that upzoning will allow them to get incredibly rich by selling their existing single-family home to a high-rise developer. So let's assume you have a baseline 20% support (140 people), that leaves just 560 households you need to buy out, and using the same 2:1 replacement strategy you only need to buy 140 homes for just $140 million. (560 - x = 140 + 2x)
But you don't even NEED that much! $140 million buys those homes outright, but this is America and have the incredible technology of a 30 year mortgage. You just need access to enough credit to get mortgages and raise enough cash for the down payments. Assuming you can get the mortgages for 20% down, that's just $28 million!
So for just $28 million and 280 adults who will move to Colma and vote, you can rewrite the zoning laws to allow unlimited height and density, and then either resell parcels to high rise developers at some unbelievable markup or redevelop them yourself. It sounds a lot like a money-printing machine, to me.
Green returns and tenant protections
But beyond the obviously good investment returns, you also get to build a walkable community next to a high quality transit system in a great climate. In the span of a few years, Colma could grow from a paltry 1300 people to nearly 10,000 people at Hong Kong density (or 668,000 at Kowloon Walled City density), while preserving all of the open space.
That doesn't even include redeveloping the car dealerships and big-box stores into high density housing and commercial space. Colma could conceivably grow to 50,000 people when factoring in that space, all within a short walk or bike ride from a BART station, and all without paving over a single blade of grass.
In any redevelopment proposal, tenant protections are a main concern. The ACS data on Colma indicate 288 units are renter-occupied, with the remaining 626 owner occupied. So you could execute the first half of this strategy by only buying out owner-occupied housing. Nobody gets unwillingly displaced and the homeowners get rich. But when the remaining parcels are actually redeveloped, the tenants who live there deserve a comparable unit at the same rent in the new building.
Luckily, that's super easy to do. A few units set-aside in a brand new high rise will not meaningfully eat into the margins. The tenants will get a brand new, well-insulated, and earthquake safe unit (with stellar views), and thousands of new renters get to join them. Hell, you could even afford to just grant them a condo deed and make them rich.
Solving our climate crisis and housing shortage requires some creative solutions, but simply redeveloping poorly used land is the least creative and most obviously economical approach.
Making this happen requires more than just money, but if you've got the funding, I've got the drive. DM me on twitter and let's become billionaires.
Social media sharing image of Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, CA © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons
I suspect that raising $28M would be one of the easier tasks here; harder tasks would include:
-- Finding 280 people who are committed enough to the cause to move house for it, even if they'd get a less than ideal house to live in for awhile, and who would qualify for a mortgage.
-- Convincing 140 existing homeowners (more than 20% of all existing owner occupied housing, if I'm doing the math right) to sell in a reasonable timeframe so this project doesn't stretch out over decades. You could offer far above market value to induce them to move, as Zuckerberg famously did when he wanted a particular place in SF, but that changes the economics significantly. You'd also likely face non-economic opposition, including possible counter-campaigns, once the plan became known.
-- Fighting the inevitable lawsuits against the rezoning.
Not saying you shouldn't push ahead anyway, but these are things to consider up front how to deal with. Might be useful to look into the history of the Free State Project, which has attempted to do a somewhat analogous thing on a different scale for a different cause.