If Cities Can’t Build Housing Fast Enough, Should We Start Over in ‘New Towns’ Instead?

Cities and states across the country have tried almost everything to relieve housing affordability pressures, but they keep coming up short.

Today, homebuyers need a salary of close to $120,000 to buy a median priced home—well above the national median household income of $84,000. In high cost states, the barriers to entry can be much higher.

In response, municipalities have set aggressive targets to build their way out of their inventory crunch. In Massachusetts, they’re aiming for 220,000 new homes by 2035. In California, it’s 2.5 million by 2033. 

To meet those goals both states along with dozens of others have followed the traditional playbook: upzoning to allow for more density, legalizing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), encouraging infill, and fast-tracking transit-oriented development. 

But still, no one has been able to deliver a solution at scale. That’s why some planners and policymakers are starting to think more radically: If we can’t build enough housing within existing cities (or at least not fast enough) maybe the answer is to start over somewhere else. 

Once seen as impractical, the idea of building new towns is reentering the conversation as a potential release valve. It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy, but in an era of extreme housing pressure, the threshold for what counts as “possible” is shifting.

What ‘new towns’ actually mean—and why advocates say they’re different from sprawl

New towns are exactly what they sound like: communities built from scratch. 

Advocates emphasize they’re not a return to the era of cul-de-sacs and exurban subdivisions, and are instead an attempt to build the kind of housing the market desperately needs: affordable, walkable, and proximal to strong job centers.

A true “new town” is designed as a complete place, with mixed housing types, a defined town center, parks and civic amenities, and street layouts that make it easy to walk between daily needs.

The premise is that starting fresh not only makes it easier to build homes at volume, it also makes it possible to design the underlying system differently, with walkability and transit connectivity baked in from day one, rather than retrofitted onto infrastructure built for another era.

That tabula rasa is what makes the concept appealing to advocates like Justin Hollander, a professor in Tufts University’s Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning.

He points to the United Kingdom, where the Labor government has committed to building 370,000 new homes per year, with the help of a task force to create detailed plans for new towns where much of that new stock will live. 

“Infill development, building new housing units in built-up areas or increasing density, can only take the U.K. so far,” he argued in an op-ed on the subject. “Finding large sites outside urbanized areas where a real estate developer can build large projects of hundreds or thousands of homes may be the only way that the U.K. can achieve its goal, hence the new towns initiative.”

Hollander argues that the U.S. is facing similar structural challenges, and that this moment offers a chance to rethink how we build. While car-centric development once defined the American dream, shifting demographics—including a rise in aging-in-place and a decline in new driver’s licenses—point toward growing demand for communities where daily life doesn’t depend on a car.

That’s why new towns could be a ready solution: If developers aren’t restricted by copy-and-paste single-family zoning and car-first street grids, they can build places that support multiple price points and multiple ways of living.

Hollander’s broader research helps explain why that distinction matters. 

Using facial-expression analysis and eye-tracking, his work found that people show statistically higher positive emotional responses when viewing streets without cars compared with the same streets with vehicles, and that while people’s eyes are drawn to cars, their emotional reactions skew more negative when cars are present.

The takeaway, he argues, is that designing for public life can shape whether places feel welcoming enough to become communities people actually want to inhabit.

Kentlands shows what a 'new town' can look like

If it all sounds like a utopian fantasy, Kentlands offers a real-world blueprint. 

Built in the early 1990s on what was then the last large farm in Gaithersburg, MD, Kentlands was designed as an alternative to the standard suburban subdivision—one with a clearer sense of place, and a lot more places to walk to.

Instead of winding roads and cul-de-sacs that lead nowhere, the town was laid out around a street grid and a small urban-style core, with a mix of single-family homes, townhomes, and multifamily buildings. 

The design emphasized walkability and neighborhood connectivity, pairing varied architecture with parks and public gathering spaces, creating what urban planners often describe as a “there” there: not just housing, but a community with its own internal rhythm.

Hollander points to Kentlands as an example of what becomes possible when a development is planned as a cohesive place rather than a scattershot collection of lots. 

“In typical suburban subdivisions, there are meandering streets, where many end in cul-de-sacs—nowhere to walk to—versus what they've tried to accomplish in Kentlands, with grids and what they call a neo-traditional urban feel,” he told TuftsNow.

But if Kentlands is the shiny brochure, the real question is whether 2026 America can approve another one fast enough to matter.

You’re not just building housing—you’re building a city

While a promising idea, economists and market watchers also argue the real challenge for new towns isn’t the number of units they can add—it’s whether they can function as a place people actually choose, year after year, to build a life.

“We are at the stage of the housing shortage where there's no panacea for 'solving' it,” says Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com®. “Taking a yes-and approach is probably the way to go.” 

But even in a “yes-and” world, he sees new towns as a niche tool instead of a broad fix. 

“New towns might be a viable Band-Aid in some select areas, but they're not scalable in any way,” he says.

That’s because building a new town means taking on a much harder problem than construction.

“Ultimately, the housing shortage is a shortage of buildable land where people want to live,” Krimmel says—a challenge that new towns share, says Hollander.

Projects like Kentlands are “really hard to build,” he says. They can take years to assemble land, align stakeholders, secure approvals, and survive the political churn of local government. Even when the design is popular in theory, the path from concept to construction requires an unusual amount of coordination, patience, and risk tolerance.

Krimmel also points to the challenge of attracting new residents.

“Cities are job markets as much as they are housing markets,” he explains, arguing that new towns fail when they become commuter-only bedroom communities—or worse, glossy master plans that never develop real culture, commerce, or momentum. 

Commuting to an established urban center can help clear that hurdle, as in the Kentlands example, but that workaround is getting harder to find.

“The ingredients you'd need are: available cheap land, commuting distance to major metro, not already built up land,” Krimmel says. “Finding two of three is difficult; finding all three might be impossible.”

In many metro areas, the map supports his point. 

Sprawl has already pushed housing outward for decades, meaning most land within a 60- to 90-minute commute is already part of an existing town, an exurb, or a zone constrained by environmental protections or infrastructure limits.

That leaves new towns stuck in a bind: The land that’s easiest to build on is often too far from opportunity to attract residents—and the land close enough to opportunity is the land that’s hardest to assemble, approve, and transform.

California Forever shows what happens when you try anyway

Even with those challenges, one high-profile project in one of the country’s most expensive states is now testing what it means to build a new town from scratch—in real time, and in full view of the public.

Backed by deep-pocketed investors, California Forever has pitched a long-horizon plan to build what it describes as the “next great American city” on former farmland in Solano County.

It will be designed to eventually house hundreds of thousands of residents in dense, walkable neighborhoods with a mix of housing types that emphasize the “missing middle”—townhomes, duplexes, and family-sized units that sit between single-family homes and high-rise apartments.

Just as importantly, California Forever’s plan doesn’t just sell housing, but includes a full economy. 

The master plan includes mixed-use commercial districts and major job hubs, including proposals for industrial zones and even a shipyard, reflecting an awareness of the core problem skeptics flag: Without jobs, new housing risks becoming a commuter-only outpost.

But California Forever also captures the political reality of new towns in 2026. Even with money, momentum, and glossy renderings, building a city can be a legitimacy problem before it’s ever a construction problem.

The group’s early moves created lasting mistrust. It spent years buying up vast tracts of land under a different entity name, triggering backlash from locals and suspicion about its intentions.

Then came the strategic pivot that underscores how hard it is to “birth” a new town cleanly in modern America. After pulling back from a ballot initiative approach amid local skepticism, California Forever reframed the effort not as an entirely new municipality—but as an annexation and expansion of Suisun City, a smaller nearby community that would dramatically grow its footprint and tax base if the project moves forward.

Now the project enters the phase that will decide whether it becomes a case study in possibility or a cautionary tale. It lives or dies on the slow, grinding gatekeepers of real-world development: local approvals, environmental review, infrastructure planning (including water), and sustained community buy-in over years.