As of 2017, just 90 minutes northeast of San Francisco, something mysterious was happening: A secretive group was buying up farmland — a large chunk of it, some 60,000 acres — in rural Solano County. Many feared it might be a plot by the Chinese government to try to set up shop near Travis Air Force Base.
But as Conor Dougherty of The New York Times (who helped break the story) discovered, the truth was even stranger than the rumors.
“Like a lot of people, I was chasing it and running into the usual closed doors,” Dougherty said. “I got a tip from someone that behind the closed doors were the richest people in the world quietly buying up all this farmland: Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a venture capitalist; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective and the widow of Steve Jobs; Marc Andreessen of Andreesen Horowitz, venture capital firm, just a who’s-who of Silicon Valley, was involved.”
Silicon Valley’s elite who want to build a city from scratch (New York Times)
Another surprising thing: Within hours of Dougherty’s big scoop, this mysterious company launched a website and publicly identified itself as California Forever, an ambitious plan to build a brand new kind of city for as many as 400,000 residents.
Jan Sramek, a 37-year-old Czech-born former Goldman Sachs trader turned aspiring city planner, is trying to convince the public that the project is not just an oasis for billionaires or a high-tech city in the world. future. His vision: Turn all this farmland into a walkable city in the mold of Savannah, Philadelphia or New York City’s West Village.
“Instead of sending all these good-paying jobs that are being created in Northern California to Texas or Florida, we need to create a place where we can send them to Solano County,” he said.
How, then, can such a city remain a place that middle-class people can even afford? “By continuing to build for a long time,” says Sramek. “When we look at why places have become unaffordable, it’s because they just stopped building.”
The project’s fate will ultimately be decided in November by Solano County voters, who will decide whether or not to overturn a 30-year-old law that limits space for new development. Sremek’s charm offensive was met with, shall we say, a healthy dose of skepticism by many locals.
“We’re going to have total gridlock,” one man said at a public meeting about the proposal.
California Forever says Solano’s new city plan has enough signatures for the November ballot
Locals Al Medvitz and Jeannie McCormack are two of the last remaining here. Most of their neighbors sold it to California Forever (at far more than market value), but they turned down millions to continue operating the 3,700-acre ranch that has been in Jeannie’s family for more than a century. “It was always a fear to have developers come [throughout] my entire childhood,” McCormack said, “because California was changing so quickly with the development of agricultural areas.”
Many of their neighbors who didn’t sell have been sued by California Forever, which has accused them of conspiring to raise land prices in the area (a charge they deny).
“The housing is important, there’s no question about that,” Medvitz said. “But there are appropriate ways to do it.”
California Forever is sparing no effort to win over county residents in what could be the most expensive political campaign in Solano County history, according to Conor Dougherty of The New York Times.
Burbank asked, “The idea that this technology money is being diverted as an investment into these kinds of physical things seems a little crazy to me. Is it just that there is so much money potentially to be made?”
“Everyone thinks I’m crazy when I say this, but I just don’t think it’s mainly about money,” Dougherty said. “I think many of the people involved are extremely frustrated that the pace of change in the physical world is so far behind the pace of change in the digital world.” He believes California Forever’s motivation is, “If we could redesign everything and not have to deal with all the hereditary problems that come with cities, it would make everything so much easier.”
California Forever still has many hurdles to overcome, some of which may prove impossible.
But Sramek insists that this idea of designing and building a relatively affordable, walkable city in the country’s most unaffordable and car-centric state is indeed possible. He says his company has the know-how, patience and (critically) deep pockets to make this happen.
“To me, success is that 10 or 15 years from now, Solano County is an incredible economic success story that people across America are looking at and saying, can we repeat that here?” Sramek said.
And does he see himself living there? “Yes, I’m going to live in the first house!” he replied.
For more information:
California Forever: East Solano Plan “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America” by Conor Dougherty (Penguin Press), in hardcover, trade paperback, eBook and audio formats, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene slams a colleague’s appearance on the House floor
How Wordle predicts success
Stroller design: not a child’s play
