In 2018, a company quietly began buying up some $900 million worth of land from farmers in Solano County, California, an area just north of the Bay Area. While the parcel ballooned to more than 60,000 acres, their motivations remained a mystery – fueling unrest and speculation. Then, last year, the news broke: The country was to become a brand new eco-friendly city, backed by a list of Silicon Valley billionairesand built from the ground up by a company called California Forever.
The plan was launched by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader and California Forever’s CEO. He said the project has three main goals: “Help solve the California housing crisis”; create a walkable metropolitan area with a high quality of life and low carbon footprint; and build a new “economic engine” for Solano County. “There is no playbook here,” Sramek said. “What we’re trying to do is really, really different.”
Before California Forever could break ground, their proposal, the East Solano Plan, needed approval from the people who already live in Solano County. Where Sramek envisioned growth, however, others cautioned irreversible ecological damage. Despite launching a multimillion-dollar campaign to persuade the public to vote for the proposal in the upcoming November election, concerns continued to grow as elected officials began speak out in opposition, and formed a coalition against the project. Local mistrust was further deepened by the company’s ongoing lawsuit against landowners who resisted their offers. In April, a poll showed this 70 percent of Solano’s constituents are likely to reject the measure.
Janie Har / AP Photo
On July 22, the day before the Solano County Board of Supervisors had to decide whether to place the initiative on the November ballot, Sramek and the board agreed to withdraw the proposal. According to a joint statement In announcing the decision, Sramek said that California Forever will try to get it back on the ballot in two years, after a report evaluating the project’s environmental impacts is completed.
Other projects with similar meaning and deep pockets have sprung up around the world. Masdar, a planned $20 billion zero-carbon city in the United Arab Emirates, is delayed for decades and scaled back unrecognizable. Neom, the futuristic $500 billion renewable energy dream of Saudi Arabian royals, now expects less than a fifth of the 1.5 million inhabitants they originally planned for. Malaysia’s Forest City, which has won design awards for sustainability, has been named a ghost town. And the billionaire behind Diapers.com has big plans for Telosa somewhere in the deserts of the American West, a sprawling green energy metropolis.
These projects all seek to realize urban dreams of a better, environmentally friendly life by building a city from scratch. But even when the buildings exist, they failure to attract residents and, despite plans emphasizing sustainability, projects struggle to win the support of environmentalists. California Forever hopes to eventually houses 400,000 people – goals comparable to those of Masdar or Neom.
“I haven’t seen one of this size that has been successful so far,” said Alain Bertaud, an urban planning researcher at the Marron Institute, part of New York University. “But that doesn’t mean they won’t be – there are so many in the pipeline now.”
Although Bertaud said he is usually skeptical of proposals for these new cities, he thought California Forever’s plans seemed well designed. One aspect that could help the project succeed is its proximity to other Bay Area cities, he said, as the lure of the region’s job market could encourage people to move there.
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But when it comes to the project’s environmental promises, he’s not convinced—if only because it’s difficult to measure metrics, such as carbon emissions, until a project is underway. “I don’t doubt the commitment of people fighting for sustainability,” he said, “but unless you define it in a very clear way, I’m afraid that ‘sustainability’ is a self-indulgent slogan to put on whatever to post. idea you have.”
The issue of sustainability is at the heart of California Forever’s ambition and problems. Both supporters and skeptics want to tackle the area’s housing crisis. Striking rents and house prices far surpassed national averages, with single-family homes at a median price of $1.4 million. That’s one reason why the region has the third-highest homeless population New York City and Los Angeles.
Instead of solving these problems with a new city, California Forever’s critics would like to see more housing built in the seven cities that already exist in Solano County. “Building housing in existing communities is one of our best climate solutions, and paving over 17,000 acres of unirrigated farmland is not,” said Sadie Wilson, director of planning and research at the Greenbelt Alliance. The nonprofit, along with the Center for Biological Diversity and the California Sierra Club, is one of 16 groups in Solano Together, the coalition opposing the project.
Janie Har / AP Photo
Wilson says that the development threatens both the area’s potential for storing carbon in the soil and local biodiversity, and also risks leading to more pollution from people driving to work in nearby cities. And while California Forever has water rights that could support the first 40,000 residents, Solano Together says it doesn’t accurately reflected water availability. To ensure a reliable supply, they argue, would be challenging in a region so prone to drought.
However, by starting from scratch, California Forever says their plans can avoid the baggage of urban problems like car-centric design and gas utilities, making it easier to support dense housing and run on renewable energy. “Our plan will be the lowest per capita carbon emissions anywhere on the planet. It’s going to be pretty transformative,” said Bronson Johnson, the company’s head of infrastructure and sustainability, who added that he has struggled for years with barriers to restoring existing cities. “I think when we look at the larger benefit of this project, it far outweighs the local impact,” Johnson said.
But the voters must be convinced. To the New York Times named many of the investors behind the project — including Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder, and Michael Moritz, a prominent venture capitalist — in August 2023, California Forever began working to bring residents to their side in time for the 2024 election. By May, the company was spending a little $2 million on his campaign and collected enough signatures to qualify their initiative for the ballot.
In weeks leading up to the July Solano County Board meeting, a economic report by the business-backed Bay Area Council touted the potential job and housing benefits, saying the county could increase employment in high-earning sectors by 53 percent. Meanwhile, the company proposed placing a lagoon right in the middle of the new town, “open to all of Solano County.”
Five days before the meeting, the province released its own assessment which said the initiative lacked detail on key issues such as infrastructure funding, traffic impacts and water supply. Many of these unknowns will be cleared up through an environmental impact report required under California law, which the company said it plans to do after residents vote. According to provincial officials, it was this omission, and the lack of a binding development agreement, that ultimately scuttled the proposal.
“It has politicized the entire project, made it difficult for us and our staff to work with them, and forced everyone in our community to take sides,” Solano County Board of Supervisors Chairman Mitch Mashburn said in the statement announcing that the plan would be put on hold. According to the statement, Sramek and Mashburn came to the decision together after agreeing that the timing of the proposal had become unrealistic.
“I want to admit that many Solano residents are excited about Mr. Sramek’s optimism about a rebuilding California. He is also right that we cannot solve our jobs, housing and energy challenges if each project takes a decade or more to break ground,” Mashburn said in the statement.
Terry Chea/AP Photo
Solano Together announced the news as a win. Wilson said that while an environmental impact report would clear up many of the coalition’s questions, particularly about water supply, the location of the development still poses what she sees as an intractable environmental problem. “It’s a vibrant landscape that supports our food systems, our environment, our water systems,” she said.
Sarah Moser, an urban geography researcher at McGill University in Montreal, said it makes sense that sparsely populated farmland and deserts would appeal to mega-developments like the proposed East Solano plan because they would face less opposition. But by building on undeveloped land, “by definition, you’re going to incur a carbon debt that you may never be able to pay off,” she said.
Although Moser thinks it is logistically possible to build a city from scratch, she says such projects are increasingly high risk, with unattainable goals. “You can make affordable housing, or you can make money, but you can’t do both,” Moser said, adding that California Forever’s for-profit model fits into a broader pattern of “rich people getting richer” in the urban mega-developments she studied.
And perhaps the most important ingredient needed to successfully build a new city is the very thing that stands in the way: people.
The promise of a city built on ideals is not enough to fill it with people, Bertaud said. There must be an existing community of people, culture, entertainment and work that draw people there. It’s a chicken-or-egg problem unique to starting from scratch. “Why would you go to a city where there is no one?” he said.
