On Satellite Cities – A Review

The ideal living space is peaceful and quiet, but close to activities and liveliness. It’s beautiful and contains tons of nature, but it’s also walkable and near amenities. It’s affordable, but spacious and modern. It’s close to work, but not deep into the city. Oh, and there’s plenty of parking.

But we can’t have that. Because the second there’s somewhere like that, people flock there (or worse, they don’t), and it becomes overpopulated and expensive to the point where the charm is unaffordable and the only places that can take root there are low overhead high profit stores, and it collapses under its own weight.

Enter: Satellite Cities. A catch all term for suburbs, edge cities, or what exists in the over generalized “metropolitan area.”

Famous Satellite cities include: Fort Worth; Long Island; Burbank; Irvine; both of my hometowns, Murrieta and Temecula; and at one point: Brooklyn.

Satellite cities exist to feed into the larger city nearby. They are meant to be affordable places for workers to move their families and commute from. The key issue with satellite cities is that their entire purpose is to leave them.

But, as time goes on, satellite cities tend to grow and leech from their orbiting city. Temecula for example was a satellite city for San Diego and Riverside. Native Americans and Mexican settlers both claimed much of the land that was once Temecula, after the Spanish-American war, American settlers claimed land and it became a stopping point for mail coaches and eventually the train that connected National City to San Francisco.

This made it a great stopping point for many travelers and a necessary stopping point for couriers. That’s essentially where Temecula gets its Western routes. Not in the gold rush, or a great battle, or as a famous cowboy town, but from the covered wagon postal service.

There’s a lot of history to gloss over, but the town held under 30,000 people up until the 1990s, once the I-15 was built in 1986 and connected San Diego with Temecula, housing developments started springing up across the small town. This prompted a wave of people to come int from the urbanizing Orange County, the smoggy Los Angeles, and San Diego, which seemed to be holding steady and nothing bad was happening there during the 90s. The City also got a push from wine country, Pechanga casino, and the Promenade Mall, which to this day offers more froyo options than anywhere else in the contiguous United States.

Temecula is an excellent case study, because it grew tremendously after that. And with massive population growth came massive job opportunities. Many businesses set up in Temecula, and it became more affordable and convenient to work there than to commute. More job opportunities meant more people moved there, and Temecula had a second population boom in 2010 after the financial crisis, jumping from 50,000 to 100,000 residents.

And due to the law of supply and demand, Temecula was stuffed! Overpopulated! So what do cities do when that happens?

Murrieta was, by all accounts, a rough place to live before the year 2000. But it experienced a surge of investment once Temecula grew. Hundreds of housing developments, dozens of schools, and at least 4 Starbucks’s were opened between 2000-2010, leaving the door open for people to move to somewhere much more affordable than Temecula.

And thus, Murrieta became a satellite to a satellite, and had its population boom to 100,000 by 2015. Which is why it’s no surprise that tons of people are now investing in Wildomar! A small town that lives next door to Murrieta. There is a lot of development happening in Wildomar… You get the point.

Satellite cities have a habit of expanding out ad infinitum, usually they hover at around 100,000 people, but they just keep multiplying out and creating developed population centers that are meant to check all the boxes.

The issue is, it usually makes the most sense to build these satellites on existing infrastructure. That way there’s a main road to drive all the lumber down. So, a lot of smaller cities get their identities practically erased by these “out-of-towners,” who are only moving because they basically got kicked out of where they lived because “out-of-towners” drove up their prices too.

This is a real shame! And it is a classic example of capitalism’s favorite second child: horizontal growth. Horizontal growth is a very successful growth pattern practiced by every culture, from oil barons to ants. It’s the spoiled sibling to vertical growth. We practice horizontal growth because it is a lot safer to fall in a puddle than it is in a skyscraper.

That being said. Horizontal growth in the form of satellite cities addresses an issue that is not necessary. The price of homes does not need to increase at the rate it does. Recent investigations into the MLS and REALTOR.com reveal that. Vertical growth means investing into the community you have, rather than creating sub-cities that are meant to feed into the larger city at great cost to themselves.

If we grew our cities vertically, we could have walkable, cute, safe neighborhoods that had access to all the amenities they could want. And we could work on making sure they’re still beautiful and spacious. We would probably just have to give up parking.

But no one wants that.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. This was originally going to be a blog about GPS, but I’ve been doomscrolling Zillow and worry I could never afford to own a home in the City I work in. So, it’s been on my mind!