☀️ A California dream that should come true

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

Neom was meant to be Mohammed bin Salman’s glittering, steel-and-glass proof that Saudi Arabia could vault from petrostate to sci-fi superstate. The centerpiece of the desert megaproject would be The Line — a 100-mile, 1,500-foot-tall mirrored megacity designed to house 9 million residents.

But MBS’s dream is set to be erased by unyielding financial math rather than the unceasing desert winds. As a recent Financial Times piece notes, projected costs have ballooned from an official $1.6 trillion to internal estimates of $4.5 trillion, scaring off foreign investors as construction has slowed to a crawl. Today the site holds little more than some giant pilings, empty trenches, and a shrinking ambition now reduced to maybe finishing a few sections of the sideways skyscraper.

From the FT:

While Neom employees say that much of The Line might still be technically buildable, they are not convinced anyone is ready to pay for it. Construction work across Neom has slowed, with the desert ski resort Trojena, the intended venue for the 2029 Asian Winter Games, one of the few sites still moving ahead at pace. Neom says that the attention has now moved to “the complex engineering and detailed design work associated with the first phase” of The Line. But one former employee has said that everyone knows the project won’t work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently.

So Neom might endure in some more limited form, but the grandiose Line looks set to become a grand folly undone by engineering limits, money, and time. “I think as a thought experiment, great,” said one urban planning expert who works in Saudi Arabia. “But don’t build thought experiments.”

A Californian long shot — but not a fantasy

Keep Neom in mind when thinking about the critics of California Forever, the billionaire-backed effort to build an entirely new, master-planned city for up to 400,000 people on 15,000 acres of grazing land in Solano County, roughly an hour northeast of San Francisco. Granted: It’s hard not to view the project as a long-shot endeavor. Building new cities isn’t something America still does. The last major one was Irvine, California, incorporated back in 1971. And since then, California has earned its reputation as a place where it’s hard to build, except in cyberspace.

But although