[Opinion] What Becomes of Irvine When the Surplus Sons Have No More West to Go?

• April 30, 2026, 7:57 am America/Los_Angeles

As much as any other place, Irvine is a project. Conceived by the Irvine Company, planned by an architect, and charted according to its much-vaunted master plan, this city has always been the product of deliberate, top-down intention rather than organic, bottom-up coincidence. But intention is always a complicated beast. It carries with it assumptions, cultural values, power dynamics, fears, hopes, and dreams. Left unexamined, that baggage can shape and warp the implementation of intention in unintended ways. The cost of making intention manifest in the world is always there under the surface, until like a magic spell gone awry or an attempt to evade prophesy, the curse of your own hubris bites back.

Such questions haunt Irvine at this juncture in its history. Many see Irvine as a bastion of privilege and welcome that fact: I worked hard to deserve to live here, they’ll say, and the quality of life that I earned and bought into needs to be maintained. This is often accompanied by a longing for a long-lost Irvine, a simpler Irvine — when there were still extensive orange groves and far fewer apartment buildings. And yet, Irvine’s affluence is in no small part tied to its explosive population growth and rise as a job center in Orange County.

So, which is it? Should Irvine be the static preserve of those who have earned their place here? Or should it be the dynamic engine of wealth required to maintain its affluence in the first place? Or, are those the wrong questions altogether— relics of a dream that has quietly outlived the land it once fed upon?

The Ethos of Surplus Sons

The power and privilege of feudal aristocracy is designed to last centuries — estates measured not only in land holdings and rents, but in unbroken chains of fathers and sons whose continuity of status is intended to serve as a bulwark against the decline and fall of entire kingdoms. Diluting this status through the equal inheritance of an estate by all the progeny of a lord — as was the practice of old Germanic tribes — therefore became untenable. The sole inheritance of an estate by the eldest son, a tradition called primogeniture, became a cornerstone of the institution.

But, though primogeniture was a legal mechanism designed to sustain power and privilege, it also created a dynamic of relentless expansionary pressure. Because if all wealth and status accrue to the eldest son, what do you do with your surplus sons? Ecclesiastical careers were part of that answer. But, as immortal aristocracy was vested in very mortal human beings, you wanted not only heirs, but spares — and celibate priests didn’t fit that bill. Military and colonial adventurers, however, did.

And so the surplus sons set out in search of fortune and glory, seeking new lands to conquer and new titles and estates to pass on to their firstborn — creating new surplus sons — each generation pushing the horizon a little farther. And eventually their ethos would become writ large. The promise of a new future just over the next horizon would motivate pilgrims, colonists, and settlers for centuries. Go west, young man, they were told. Claim the next frontier as your manifest destiny. Stake your claim.

But then we ran out of west. The claims were all staked. The forests cleared. The marshlands drained. The vast herds of bison nearly pushed to extinction. And in our wake, entire nations of people had been decimated, corralled, plundered, pushed, and penned in. But that old spirit of the surplus sons remained and demanded its due. So, the promise changed.

No longer able to conquer new worlds, the modern-day successors to the surplus sons turned to making their homes their castles. The promise of the frontier was traded for white picket fences, a detached single-family home, and 2.5 kids.  HOAs would come to guard the continuity of quality of life and the exclusivity of their subdivisions just as the old landed aristocracy guarded the continuity of their legacies and power. The American Dream became a figurative “go west”. But then that promise started to dry up, too.

Now, instead of “go west” we tell people: “drive until you qualify.”

The Faltering Paradigm of Irvine

Irvine is reaching build-out. Just as westward expansion was fated to run out of frontiers, our suburban sprawl is running out of land for greenfield development. It is perhaps not widely understood that suburbia is an almost imperialistic enterprise. Developers often fund the initial infrastructure. But low-density development rarely generates the tax base needed to maintain — let alone replace — what it builds. A Ponzi scheme of sprawl makes up the difference, using development fees from new subdivisions to pay for aging infrastructure in old ones.

“Think 10 to 20 years in the future when development starts to slow down. Where is that revenue going to come from?” then-Mayor Farrah Khan warned of broader concerns over city revenue, citing the Great Park amphitheater project as one potential future source. “We have to come up with a new revenue stream. And that revenue stream is the Great Park.” Former City Manager Oliver Chi also warned of Irvine’s impending build-out during city council meetings. Though Irvine is an affluent city, that affluence has been fueled in no small part by growth.

Growth is needed for revenue, for wealth creation, and to keep Irvine relevant and competitive. But there’s no place left to grow outward. And so we must turn inward. It is an unsettling equation for those who fear what growth demands of them, but it crystalizes a question that we have deferred answering since the city’s inception: what kind of place do we ultimately want Irvine to be — and who is it for?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Irvine Watchdog.