The New Town Movement: Three Towns that Helped Build Los Angeles, and What They Teach Us about Building Cities

New towns and master-planned communities played a major role in the growth of the Los Angeles metropolitan area throughout the 20th century. With the invention of mass-produced housing in the 1940s—a factory in the field, as exemplified by Levittown in New York—Los Angeles developed rapidly after large ranches such as Palos Verdes and Bixby Ranch were master-planned for housing and neighborhood amenities.

Soldiers returning from World War II got loan guarantees via the GI Bill that enabled them to purchase homes with low down payments, which created enormous demand for housing. Production homebuilders including Marlow-Burns (Toluca Lake, 1941), Kaiser Community Homes (Panorama City, 1948), and Weingart, Taper, and Boyar (Lakewood, 1950) laid the groundwork for Los Angeles’ dramatic growth throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century.

As the metropolitan area expanded into Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, and Ventura counties, many of the ranches were developed by major corporations such as Philip Morris, Mobil Land, and Kaiser Aluminum, as well as the families who owned them, such as the O’Neill, Moiso, and Irvine families in

Orange County

New Towns for the 21st Century, a 2021 book I coedited with Ann Forsyth, catalogs 14 new towns and master-planned communities (ones built out with 30,000 or more residents) in the Los Angeles metro area. This article focuses on three of the new towns that are among the most famous—Lakewood, Valencia, and Irvine—and that represent different eras and different parts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Each of these new towns has lessons not just for Los Angeles but also for urban growth and development throughout the United States.

Lakewood is a suburb of Los Angeles, south of its downtown and bordered by Long Beach, Bellflower, Cerritos, Cypress, and Hawaiian Gardens. With a 2020 population of 82,500, it was developed as a post-World War II new town by production homebuilders Louis Boyar, Mark Taper, and Ben Weingart.

Valencia was conceived in 1965 as a 15,000-acre (6,070 ha) new town on the Newhall Ranch, designed by Los Angeles-based urban architect Victor Gruen. Nowadays, anyone who drives north from Los Angeles on Interstate 5 will recognize Six Flags Magic Mountain, renowned for its 20 roller coasters at the top of the first mountain pass.

Irvine Ranch was assembled—by James Irvine I, in 1864 and 1866, with 110,000 acres (44,500 ha) from the coast to the Orange County mountains—out of a Mexican land grant. The future new town stemmed from the process of designating land to be placed into an agricultural preservation zone created under California’s Williamson Act in 1966. The land that remained outside the zone—in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, and Inland—became the new town.

Lakewood

Los Angeles County’s population exploded after World War II, growing from 2.78 million to 4.15 million between 1940 and 1950. Homebuilders and planners conceived of Westchester, Panorama City, and Lakewood as self-contained communities, rather than as bedroom suburbs dependent on the urban core, according to Alida Brill’s 1996 essay “Lakewood, California ‘Tomorrowland’ at 40.”

Lakewood, near the Los Angeles/Long Beach harbor, was developed in the early 1950s as the region’s first Levittown-like community. The developers created a town of “row after row of neatly sculpted individual lots, ready to become ‘front yards and backyards,’ with houses of the same shape, dimension, and scale, ” according to Brill’s essay. It was a town deeply rooted in the idealized family of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet—the perfect place to raise a family, with churches of every denomination, and neighborhood schools and parks that children could walk to safely.

Like many a graying inner-ring suburb, Lakewood goes through cycles of decline and then recovery. When the defense industry downsized in the 1980s, many of its white middle-class breadwinners, who worked in the aircraft industry (Boeing and McDonnell Douglas), at the port, and on the Naval base, lost their jobs.

Today, Lakewood is recovering and benefiting from an influx of immigrants. Median house prices are $620,000, and the demographics are 46 percent white, 34.3 percent Hispanic, 8.6 percent Black, 18.4 percent Asian, and 11.1 percent biracial, according to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2022.

The city is undergoing redevelopment and revival driven, in part, by an overhaul of the main shopping area and the industrial area around the plants, and by residential development. More than 300 ”mother-in-law” units are under construction, thanks to the state of California’s accessory dwelling unit (ADU) law that allows a second unit to be built on every single-family-zoned parcel.

Community Development Director Abel Avalos notes that Lakewood is famous for being the first contract city—where government services were contracted from the county rather than being provided directly by the municipality.

Don Waldie, who retired as Lakewood’s public information officer after 30 years, says that Lakewood was made specifically for young working-class families. “It is designed on a rectilinear grid where homes, parks, schools, and shopping are unusually well integrated.” Early residents created a plethora of community organizations—"bowling together.” The community spirit contributed to the early incorporation of the new town as a municipality. Waldie says, “This illuminates the city today. An imperative exists to bring new residents into the fold to experience the spirit that the earliest residents had in 1954.”

Valencia, California

Developed by Newhall Land and Farming Company north of the San Fernando Valley, along Interstate 5, Valencia opened in 1967. The Newhall Ranch was one of the last big parcels of undeveloped land near Los Angeles with 37,250 acres (15,070 ha).

Unlike its residential suburban precedent Levittown, where William Levitt built 17,447 nearly identical houses on Long Island, New York, Valencia had a large employment base and industrial park with more than 8,500 employees by 1988. It was incorporated into the new city of Santa Clarita, formed in 1987.By 1996, Newhall Land had developed 5,000 acres (2,000 ha) with 12,000 homes. Although most of the more recent development in Valencia is outside of the city, Santa Clarita today is one of the wealthier suburbs of Los Angeles, with 228,000 people.

Valencia exemplifies the difficulties of developing urban fringe land in highly contested, water-constrained metropolitan areas. The developers attempted to expand the new town on ranch land west of Interstate 5 in the early 2000s, and had hoped to break ground by 2012, but legal challenges by various environmental groups stopped development for another eight years.

FivePoint Communities, successor to Lennar, who had bought controlling interest in the ranch from Newhall in 2009, ultimately won the lawsuit and finally commenced development in 2017 on 18 initial neighborhoods. Emile Haddad, founder and chairman emeritus of FivePoint Holdings, states that the original new town has 20,000 homes and 20 million square feet (2 million sq m) of commercial.

The west side of Interstate 5 will have an additional 21,000 homes and 11 million square feet (1 million sq m) of commercial space. He attributes Valencia’s success to the fact that it draws people from four major employment centers—Burbank, San Fernando Valley, Downtown LA, and the local Valencia market.

Valencia remains a model of new town development. Critical to its success was offering housing simultaneously for as many different segments of the market as possible—segmented by tenure (for-sale and rental) and by density—large single-family, patio homes, duplexes, low-rise, and high-rise and multistory buildings. The neighborhood was designed to serve all age groups. Its integration into nature provides access to parks and hiking trails within a few blocks of almost every home. And the large employment base shortens commutes and serves one of the new town movement’s foremost objectives—to provide “self-contained” communities where one can live, work, and play without ever leaving the new town.

Irvine

If any new town in the United States was destined to be successful, it was Irvine Ranch, with its location along the coast of Orange County, one hour south of downtown Los Angeles. H. Pike Oliver and C. Michael Stockstill’s 2022 book, Transforming the Irvine Ranch: Joan Irvine, William Pereira, Ray Watson and the Big Plan, chronicles the history of Irvine’s development, including the fascinating story of how Joan Irvine, the “golden girl” and heir to the ranch, successfully fought against the foundation that was established to own the ranch by Joan’s grandfather to gain control of the Irvine Company.

The book includes the memoir of Ray Watson, who started with the Irvine Company in 1960 as a planner and served as president from 1973 until 1977. He oversaw the master planning of Irvine, led the creation of the new town, and is a beloved figure in the history of Irvine’s formation and success.

The Irvine Ranch was selected to be the site for the new University of California Irvine campus in 1959. It was also chosen over 21 other sites because it was the only one under single ownership, and it offered the possibility of creating a unique vision of “town and gown.” Watson, quoted in Oliver and Stockstill’s book, underscores the enormity of the decision: “In retrospect, a huge step had been taken by the Irvine Company; it was now preparing to not only aggressively attempt to attract the university, but to plan an orderly transition from ranching to urban development.”

The next battle was over cityhood. The ranch had created plans for a business and industrial park next to the Orange County Airport (now John Wayne Airport). The city of Santa Ana sought to annex a strip of land, 300 feet (90 m) wide and 8.5 miles (14 km) long, along the future route of the 405 Freeway, effectively dividing in half the ranch’s land for the new town.

The annexation ultimately failed because the city overlooked a parcel of land on the route which caused officials to not have enough votes for the annexation. Whereas many new towns do not enjoy the status of self-governance, the incorporation of the area around the new UC Irvine campus into the new city of Irvine helped to ensure the integrity of the future city plan and gave the new town control over its own destiny.

According to Oliver and Stockstill, Joan Irvine was the gadfly who forced the Irvine Company to give up control by lobbying for a change in the federal tax code within the Tax Reform Act of 1969. When the Irvine Foundation had to sell most of its Irvine Company stock, a bidding war ensued that included Mobil Oil, Cadillac Fairview, and shopping center developer Al Taubman.

Taubman invited Joan Irvine to join their consortium. She agreed. Although she would not have control, she would at least have a seat at the table. Taubman still needed more money for his bid. Donald Bren, a Southern California homebuilder, was offered 35 percent of the company for $100 million.

As the authors note, when Taubman inquired why they needed Bren, his marketing executive Robert Schout told him ”Because, Al, you and I look like a couple of gangsters from Detroit. This guy looks like he came from Hollywood.” Five years later, in 1977, Bren bought out his partners for $1 billion, after purchasing the ranch for $337 million.

Today, the new town of Irvine Ranch, largely incorporated into the city of Irvine, celebrates its 50th anniversary. It is home to 310,000 residents and approximately 130,000 workers. Irvine has become an exemplar of new town development thanks to its employment base, Asian influx, and mixed-density neighborhoods.

Like Valencia, its design provides direct access to an abundance of open space, with views from the mountains to the ocean. It pioneered higher-density mixed-use development by catering to demographic groups from young professionals to seniors, many of them working in the life-science and high-tech industries, health care, manufacturing, and import-export companies that have been drawn to Irvine. UL

RICHARD PEISER is the Michael D. Spear professor of real estate development at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.