It is beige, perfectly planned, not a leaf or succulent out of place. I used to complain about how deadening it is to live in a billionaire’s vision of perfection: Donald Bren’s, not Donald Trump’s — but my complaints have grown complaints. I don’t want to hear them any more.
Every other place in the world seems seductive dirty and uncomfortable after Irvine. If you are going to be a tech hub, don’t try for bohemianism like Seattle or San Francisco. I wonder how people fall in love here. I remember being in love in different cities. You’re in a state of sensuous transport when you’re in love. The unevenness of the ground underfoot can feel like the slope of your lover’s shoulder. What can you do with love in Irvine? OK…I’m being stupid agian.
The weather in Irvine is incredible, all year round. June gloom is romantic. But we get more sunshine than Newport Beach, our whiter, and slightly wealthier neighbor that is still run by the Irvine Company’s architects and designers.
When two concrete plates on the sidewalk become uneven, some one comes to spray paint the edges a bright red so that you are aware of the gap and won’t trip or knock your baby in its $1000 stroller on your way to one of the hundreds of pocket parks that are tucked into the carefully manicured underarms of the dozens of planned communities in America’s safest city. Every square inch of the city is managed and controlled for your comfort and pleasure and for Donald Bren’s profit.
Nick Land should live in Irvine. It’s pitiless with regard to its less fortunate neighbors. The housing costs are prohibitive. They’re inhuman. Invisible walls keep less fortunate people out. Hardworking immigrants with a lot of money now dominate Irvine’s population. The white people are fleeing to less competitive school districts, which only makes the schools even more desirable.
Irvine is technocratically efficient. The Santa Ana river runs through Irvine to the Pacific. Somehow, they have tamed the river to be Irvine’s exclusive water source. The Irvine Water District is a model of urban water infrastructure. The IRWD recycles sewer water for irrigation.So that people don’t drink this reclaimed water, all the irrigation pipes in Irvine are purple. Irvine purple — an internationally known shade among water managers. Of course Irvine homeowners and renters wouldn’t be at risk of imbibing such ambiguously sourced H2O. The Latin American and Mexican gardeners who are constantly at work trimming the decorative palms, manzanitas and Tuscan cypresses would be most at risk, but they are experienced with Irvine. They bring Igloo coolers of waters strapped by bungee cords to the backs of their trucks. Their trucks stand out from the fleets of Lexuses, Teslas and Porsche Cayennes that dot our landscape, but we don’t see the trucks anymore. They’re invisible. Nick Land would like this. We only see shiny things.
Irvine has a lot of planned open space. You can reach the Pacific Northwest trail along the veterbrae of hills that the Irvine Company preserved in order to make its most exclusive neighborhoods even more expensive and desirable. Allegedly Saudi Princes have bought homes in the most expensive gated communities. Their children and wives summer there in perfect safety and cool ocean breezes.
Many planned communities want to be Irvine, but they cannot match its geographical good fortune.
But beige Spanish hacienda style architecture signals luxury and taste for Donald Bren and his imitators. The colors you can paint your house in my community are carefully controlled. Any color that cannot be found in human excretions is not permitted: poopy browns, urine yellows, all shades of mucous beige tending toward green, milky spermy whites, these are permitted and even welcomed.
This beauty is priced at a cool $3 million. Don’t worry, I live in a planned community for professors, so even though the houses near me look exactly like the one above, they fetch maybe 50% on a closed market to other UC Irvine employees.
I’m leaning into Irvine these days. What do I want? Rich parents who could have put a down payment on a house in Los Angeles for me twenty years? A job in a walkable city that is equally unaffordable without neighborhoods that offer country club level amenities? More money to move out of my gilded cage? Isn’t everyone trapped? I just happen to be trapped in the future.
I am its product now. My nostalgia for something else is the nostalgia of a temporally displaced person, a silly bohemian who couldn’t afford bohemia and fell into the lap of every Chinese immigrant’s dream place. Irvine keeps getting better because better and better Chinese restaurants keep opening up in this city. The Boba shops keep getting cuter and cuter because East Asian immigrants need good milk tea.
There is no public transportation to speak of, and none that is usable coming very soon, thank Odin. Who wouldn’t want to live in a place where the temperature is perfectly attuned to the human body?
Palo Alto with its fake downtown cannot match Irvine’s lack of a center, lack of pretension, lack of reference to any other urban agglomeration that ever existed: it has no relationship to Rome, Pompei, Xian, Chicago or even Los Angeles, which sprawled out of control and in waves of booms and busts.
Irvine is completely its own thing: its ‘villages’ only refer to other ‘villages’ in Irvine. Its neighborhoods are compromises between an urban planner and a real estate speculator. Its houses are not well built or well designed, but they are so utterly comfortable. Irvine is completely and utterly anonymous, prosperous, rich, decentered. It is the inhuman future of a frictionless Internet made flesh. It is Artificial Intelligence embodied. It has crunched all domestic architectural styles of 20th century America and remade them in the most profitable, most efficient, least offensive style possible. It is a city designed for the future of the end of history: even if history passes it by, it will continue to shine like a beacon indicating what the United States could be if it could be designed for a happy population of philistine millionaires, serviced by low wage workers. Every wealthy neighborhood in America just wants to be managed by the Irvine Company. Every bohemian neighborhood wants to refute it. Irvine is more than a city: it is anti-humanist, anti-liberal and so low key futuristic you don’t even notice its accelerationist reality.
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Irvine is like going to a wedding and finding out the bride and groom are second cousins.
This reads like Joan Didion, I deeply enjoyed. The fact that you can post a photo of a random house and it’s not a privacy issue because there are probably 100 houses that look just like this 😭