Devon Zuegel graduated from Stanford and moved to San Francisco in 2016 for her software engineering career. Then, the pandemic hit.
Zuegel and her husband temporarily relocated to Chautauqua, the New York lake resort town where her grandmother lived, and Zuegel visited as a child.
In the summer, the tiny village blossoms into a kind of utopia — walkable, family-friendly, and brimming with culture. Up to 7,500 people flock to spend their days hopping between plays, symphony performances, and lectures.
One night, Zuegel’s husband wondered aloud: “Why aren’t there more places like this?” That moment is “burned into my retinas,” Zuegel told Business Insider.
That was the start of Esmeralda, a small town Zuegel is building in the Sonoma Wine Country, about 90 minutes north of San Francisco. Zuegel drew inspiration from Chautauqua and similar walkable communities, such as Vail in Colorado, Charleston in South Carolina, and Arizona’s new car-free neighborhood.
The goal, Zuegel told BI, is to build a primarily walkable and bikeable town within the city of Cloverdale, revitalizing an existing community rather than building one from scratch. At the same time, Esmeralda would offer something new: regular opportunities for residents to connect.
Esmeralda speaks to a larger trend of millennials seeking more variety in where they live, whether they’releaving larger cities — or building their own.
Esmeralda is the latest American experiment in intentional living
Zuegel wants to build Esmeralda incrementally, inviting prospective town members to come together to share their visions and hopes for a new way of life.
A key lesson she learned from Chautauqua’s town archivist was its slow-growth model. The summer camp, founded in 1874 as a retreat for teachers, took time to grow into a full-fledged town. After several years of people pitching up tents, participants started to bring their families and upgraded to more permanent shacks.
America has a long history of intentional communities, where like-minded individuals band together, believing they’ve cracked the code for a better life. In most cases, the community grows organically, shaped by the people who join.
In the 18th century, the Shakers, a Christian sect dedicated to pacifism and celibacy, established “utopias” throughout New England, emphasizing shared property. In the 19th century, the Transcendentalists, a philosophical movement, flocked to Brook Farm in Massachusetts, where famous writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller dabbled in “plain living.”
Intentional communities surged in the 1960s and 1970s as counterculture movements fueled new communes of young people intent on “dropping out” of traditional society. Vermont, in particular, saw over 75 new communes, expert Yvonne Daley told Forbes, which changed the political spirit of the state.
Today, an estimated 3,500 intentional communities dot the US, according to the nonprofit Foundation for Intentional Community, with a broad definition spanning student co-ops, eco-living communities, and religious groups.
To shape her new town, Zuegel launched Edge Esmeralda, a monthlong pop-up event designed to give attendees a taste of what the real Esmeralda could be. In 2024, the retreat hosted over 1,300 people through 25 different program tracks on topics like AI and longevity. Attendees, who could stay for a day, a week, or a whole month, enjoyed various activities such as building a solar-powered A-frame house, joining a “neurotech” workshop, a hackathon, or taking in an art exhibit. Zuegel plans to host another Edge Esmeralda in 2025.
Canadian college student Anson Yu, who attended Edge Esmeralda as an energy fellow, told BI that the experience gave her hope that Zuegel’s team could deliver on their vision. Days spent building the A-frame house, followed by nights of swing-dancing in the town square, made her feel like a special community was coming together.
“I felt like there could be spaces that exist like this, outside of the couple of city centers that already exist, and outside of college campuses,” Yu said.
A millennial shift in priorities
Edge Esmeralda attendees represent many millennials who yearn for a greater sense of community.
In many ways, a community like Esmerelda is a natural response from members of the “job-hopping generation” who pioneered remote work. What if that dream of flexible living could include a stronger sense of community?
When millennials came into the workforce around the 2008 recession, we saw a shift in how young people viewed life and work, Dr. Katherine Loflin, a sociologist known as “The City Doctor,” told Business Insider.
Appetite for jobs in manufacturing and utilities — ones that required a worker to live nearby — declined significantly between 1990 and 2015, according to the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, demand for desk jobs swung up.
Loflin, who studies the characteristics that draw people to different places, said job seekers told her they craved flexibility and work-life balance. They didn’t want to follow the conveyor belt into an industry that could crumble at any minute. They were more interested in developing transferable “soft skills” that could lead to bigger salary jumps and the option of remote work.
The pandemic turbocharged that trend: Suddenly, the fantasy of working from anywhere became a reality. But there was something missing. Big city life often felt lonely, with fewer opportunities to make easy connections, especially aswork became more remote. Some missed campus life, when they could easily befriend people they saw in class or on the quad.
“So many people refer to college as the best years of their lives,” Zuegel said.
Because of the more effortless sense of community, Loflin said campus-like towns “harken back to a time where people felt alive, they felt in it together.”
The isolation of the pandemic prompted Zuegel to think about cities and the ways they create or restrict access to community. “The pandemic kept people apart, but that actually showed us how much we need friends and family,” she said.
Beta-testing a community
So far, some fellow tech workers are excited about Esmeralda and even see themselves living there. However, some online commenters have expressed skepticism toward Esmeralda, particularly concerning affordable housing, transportation, or if locals really want to share a home with wealthy VCs.
Loflin said it’s common for city developers to overly focus on aesthetics, forgetting to consider other logistics, like long-term community building or accessible infrastructure.
Zuegel is aware of the issues that may come up, hence the slower timeline. “A lot of real estate developers’ approach is they build it and then hope people will be a part of it,” Zuegel said. “We want to take a much more incremental and gradual path.”
She said the project is still in “phase 0,” with hopes of involving the local Cloverdale community as much as possible.
Local residents are excited about the project, Cloverdale city manager Kevin Thompson told BI. For two decades, real estate developers have swept in and out of town with big ideas for the plot of land that Zuegel’s team has contracted, only to burn out quickly.
Thompson said no group in recent years has gone this far in the due diligence process as Esmeralda’s, which gives the locals hope that progress is happening.
“There’s been a lot of tire kickers over the years,” Thompson said. “We’ve never gotten to this point of anyone actually submitting any paperwork to change it.”
Zuegel said the exact logistics of Esmeralda are subject to change as she continues to learn from Edge Esmeralda. Her vision involves a pedestrian-friendly community, safe for young kids to play outside on their own, and accessible enough for older adults. She also wants a mix of locals and visitors, as full-time residents will be the soul of Esmeralda.
Ultimately, the guiding light is for her to feel as she did in all her Chautauqua summers as a child. “The idea is the culture from a big city, but with sort of the small town charm.”
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