City Profiles / Medium Cities / Irvine, CA

Irvine, California

Irvine is a new planned city—formally incorporated in 1971—that has been almost entirely developed by the Irvine Company, which owns one-fifth of Orange County known as the Irvine Ranch. The city has its own voluntary green building program, Build Green, which is partnered with the Irvine Company and provides standards for home, apartment and commercial building. More than half of the Irvine Ranch, the Irvine Ranch Wildlands and Parks, is preserved wilderness and conservation area, and about three-quarters of that is designated a National Natural Landmark. The city itself is geographically large (65 square miles), but it has 16,000 acres of green space, 44.5 miles of off-road bicycling trails and 282 miles of on-road bicycle lanes.

Irvine has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the country (the FBI dubbed it the "Safest Big City in America" from 2005 to 2008) and one of the highest median incomes, but the cost of housing is expensive. As of January 2006, the median price for a single-family home was $800,000—higher than that of Orange County and much higher than the average for California. In 2005, the city adopted a Housing Strategy that directs that by 2025, 10 percent of all housing units be affordable. Green building techniques will be followed, though it is left to the builder to determine the extent of their use. "Affordable housing is extremely important to our vision," said Mayor Sukhee Kang. "It's for the teachers, police officers, firefighters—those who do a lot of good for this community. For them to have to drive from half an hour or an hour away—it really defeats the purpose."