Building the Next Great American City: Devon Zuegel’s 2050 Forecast

Devon Zuegel believes America has been building cities wrong for decades. She grew up spending summers in Chautauqua, an intellectual community in western New York where four generations of her family shared a household and she knew her neighbors better than the ones at home in California. Now she’s building a village called Esmeralda 90 minutes north of San Francisco to prove that formula can be replicated.

We sat down in San Francisco to talk about why cities are a technology, age-segregation and the impending population crisis, and what it will take to build more places worth living in by 2050.

Watch the full conversation here:

The Societal Cost of Poorly Designed Cities

The opportunity cost of building parking lots is astounding.

Most cars sit unused for 97% of the time. A single parking space occupies roughly the same footprint as a studio apartment, and minimum parking mandates add up to $25,000 per space in construction costs, a burden that gets passed directly to renters and buyers.

Urban sprawl costs the American economy over $1 trillion a year in excess infrastructure, public services, and transportation expenditures.

But there is hope, because none of this was inevitable.

The legal architecture underpinning the current state of affairs is a 1926 Supreme Court case - Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. - which gave municipalities the right to separate residential, commercial, and industrial uses into distinct zones. That ruling contributed to the car-oriented suburban sprawl that followed WWII, and its consequences are still leading us astray to this day.

A 2019 New York Times analysis found that zoning codes reserve roughly 75% of residential land in major American metropolitan areas exclusively for single-family housing. It is literally illegal to build anything else on over 75% of residential land in America.

This has resulted in nearly half of US renters spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Economists estimate that land-use restrictions have reduced US GDP by 9% every year since the 1960s.

Making matters worse is the NIMBY movement, which Devon brought up our conversation:

I think people think that they’re being very environmentalist and protecting the environment. But what they don’t realize is that if you’re not building up in San Francisco, you’re building out into the beautiful California landscape.

But it’s not just zoning that’s the primary problem. The whole system of American cities needs to be completely redesigned.

Though America’s system of specialized cities is one of its great economic strengths, it’s a huge driver of family fragmentation. Paris, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires each concentrate a huge percentage of their country’s population in a single place. If you grow up there, you’re probably going to stay.

But the United States works differently. Finance or fashion pulls you to New York, film to Los Angeles, and tech to San Francisco. We end up self-segregating in cities depending on our career choices, oftentimes far away from where we grew up. People have more independent lives, but living away from family is a giant part of the loneliness crisis.

By 2050, 70% of the world’s population are going to live in cities. We’ve previously forecasted that as the population of working-age people dwindles in the coming two and a half decades:

Young people will want to live with other young people. Rural areas will see mass closures of schools, bars, and sports facilities, forcing young families to relocate to urban centers where the working age population supports the infrastructure we have been accustomed to growing up in a majority-young society.

Things clearly cannot continue as they have been.

Devon’s Vision for Esmeralda in 2050

Devon is building a very unique solution to these problems near Cloverdale, California, 90 minutes north of San Francisco called Esmeralda.

Her inspiration is Chautauqua, a village in western New York built by American entrepreneurs during the Industrial Revolution, part family summer camp, part college campus, where Thomas Edison personally wired the hotel and four generations of the same family might share a porch in the same week. Devon spent a lot of time there with her grandmother as a kid.

The thesis behind Esmeralda is to take what made Chautauqua work - its walkability, multigenerational community, and culture of learning - and update it with Silicon Valley’s emphasis on building and creativity.

Esmeralda’s five design principles are straightforward: support a multigenerational community, prioritize pedestrians and cyclists over cars, cultivate a culture of learning and building, harmonize with nature, and promote health and wellness.

Esmeralda will combine the access to nature you get in the suburbs where you can walk and bike - the sort of place where you’d want to raise a family - with the intellectual and builder environment of America’s most vibrant cities like NYC and SF.

Devon describes a typical day in Chautauqua that she wants to emulate with Esmeralda:

At 10 a.m., they have the morning lecture that basically everyone in town goes to, and it might be Jane Goodall talking about chimpanzees, or it might be the inventor of the digital camera pulling apart a digital camera and telling you about all the pieces. And in the bleachers there’s people who are 90 years old and there’s their grandchildren and everything in between.

Doesn’t that sound like a place you’d really like to live? And have a look at where Devon plans on creating it:

Devon ☀️@devonzuegel

Esmeralda's land is so beautiful

10:05 PM · Apr 25, 2026 · 4.85K Views

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Self Driving Cars & Urban Design

If the intellectual environment of Esmeralda is the “software” of the city, its land is the “hardware.”

Devon expects autonomous vehicles to become dominant well before 2050. The reason this matters for urban design is not just about safety or convenience, though those things are obviously important! It’s fundamentally about land.

Devon envisions a future where a Waymo drops you off and parks itself remotely far outside the city center. And so the logic of storing vehicles on the most valuable land in a city collapses.

Esmeralda will eliminate street parking entirely and cluster it in dedicated parking areas outside the town, saving huge amounts of space and creating a much more pedestrian friendly environment for people lucky enough to live there.

Devon is also betting that autonomous vehicles will expand the effective radius of metropolitan regions. The WFH Era inaugurated by COVID is becoming entrenched in American society, with hybrid workplaces becoming commonplace. But people haven’t entirely fled to the burbs either.

Esmeralda 90 minute commute from SF felt impossible as a daily drive in 2019, but is totally doable when you’re sending emails in the backseat of the Waymo on the way to your meeting in SF.

Financing Esmeralda

Esmeralda is an $800 million project on a 266-acre property, backed mostly by family offices aligned with a 10-15 year timeline for returns rather than the more short-term view typical of conventional real estate investors. This long-term orientation is the only investment thesis that makes sense for a project so unique and extraordinary.

Devon is financing the infrastructure partly through an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, a mechanism that allows Esmeralda to use future property tax revenue increases to fund projects without raising new taxes. Once there are streets, buildings, cafes, and schools, the land that Esmeralda is developing will be worth much more, and a portion of that increased tax revenue can be borrowed to pay for the infrastructure that makes the land valuable.

A handful of walkable, intentional communities built in the last few decades - Seaside in Florida, Serenbe just outside Atlanta, and Las Catalinas in Costa Rica - have demonstrated that people will pay a significant premium to live in places designed around human interaction rather than car storage. As more data comes in showing that this kind of development makes money, more capital will flow towards it.

Esmeralda is Chautauqua updated for Silicon Valley: a multigenerational intellectual community that prioritizes pedestrians over parking lots, playgrounds over concrete jungles, and community over isolation. It’s a place designed to be good for business and good for children.

How we design our cities is not inevitable.

Cities are a technology, and like all technologies, they can be redesigned. And we really need more people like Devon thinking about how to redesign our cities and communities for the future that is fast approaching.

I can’t wait to visit Esmeralda in 2050!