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A group of tech billionaires has a bold plan to overcome San Francisco’s cost-of-living crisis: build an entirely new city from the ground up. But this November, the group will face an uphill battle convincing locals that the time has come to build San Francisco 2.0.
The plan is the brainchild of Jan Sramek, a tech entrepreneur and former Wall Street trader who, growing up in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s, saw America as a place of hope: His country was just beginning to define a new post-Communist era, and America was a vision of what the future held.
“To me, the United States has always been a place of optimism and opportunity,” Sramek told The Independent. “We had just beaten the Soviet Union and the economy was booming.”
This made Northern California, which was becoming the epicenter of the nascent dot-com world, “the most optimistic place in the most optimistic country in the world,” he added.
By the time Sramek moved to the Bay Area in the 2010s, things had changed considerably. Though the tech economy was still thriving, San Francisco was becoming one of the worst places to live in the country and was struggling with a growing homeless population. Bay Area residents had started throwing rocks at buses transporting Googlers. The social fabric was visibly starting to crumble.
Something needed to change if the Bay Area was to maintain its diversity, cultural openness, and economic vitality, and Sramek saw he held a key part of the solution: reverse decades of stagnant construction in the Bay Area and build a new city from the ground up.
Since 2017, Sramek and a group of top Silicon Valley investors operating under the name California Forever have been pursuing plans to build a new city on farmland in Solano County, between San Francisco and Sacramento.
The San Francisco Bay Area has some of the least affordable housing in the country (Getty)
Their goal: to create a community of more than 50,000 people with safe, densely populated neighborhoods, good-paying jobs, and affordable housing. On a deeper level, they want the new city to show that great things, including community, can still be built in America. It’s part of a renewed civic focus in Silicon Valley that has taken many forms, from San Francisco’s liberal YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) movement calling for more housing to tech leaders’ growing support for Donald Trump.
But all the optimism, money, and momentum in the world won’t be enough to make California Forever’s vision a reality. It’ll depend on Solano County residents, who will vote in November on key land-use rules that will determine the success or failure of the group’s big plans. More than just a local initiative, the vote will be a litmus test of where Bay Area voters see their community going in the future, and how much they want the tech capital to get there.
Since the project was proposed in 2017, California Forever has spent nearly $1 billion to acquire the Solano County pasture land, with investors including Silicon Valley heavyweights such as venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs, philanthropist at Emerson Collective and widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.
California Forever says it will build “the most sustainable city on Earth.” (Courtesy of California Forever)
Despite its tech pedigree, the development plans are retro: California Forever describes its vision as “yesterday’s city.” Rather than suburban sprawl, it wants to build a green, dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhood akin to historic gems like New York City’s West Village and Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown.
“It sounds simple, and it is, but it’s an approach that was largely abandoned in the 20th century,” says Gabriel Metcalf, planning director at California Forever, a longtime Bay Area urban planning expert.
Instead, he said, most of California’s new construction is in so-called “greenfield” developments, where neighborhoods are often not connected to urban centers, big businesses or public transportation, resulting in long commutes for residents and hollowing out communities. San Francisco, on the other hand, has almost completely avoided large-scale construction since the 1970s, he added.
In Sramek’s view, California Forever would help address these trends and reverse California’s much-publicized population loss in 2020, the first time in the state’s history. Fighting to protect the diverse, affordable and vibrant Bay Area of the past decades — a globally influential place of the kind that comes along only a few times a century — is a “moral imperative,” Sramek said.
California Forever has sparked debate over whether parts of Solano County should remain farmland or be converted to development (AFP via Getty)
“When something like this happens, miracles happen overnight and these places exist for 50 or 100 years and then they’re gone,” he said. “People are trying to create the next New York or the next Silicon Valley all over the world, and it’s not happening.”
While some have described California Forever’s vision as “utopian,” he added that it’s a reflection of the current “depressing state of low expectations” and is actually an extension of what energized the region in the first place.
California Forever wants to combine this old-fashioned urbanism with new technology, like planned agricultural solar arrays and high-tech water recycling infrastructure, as well as economic incentives, like $500 million in down payment assistance, 12 anchor business tenants and a promise to create 15,000 jobs paying 125% of the county median wage by the time the city’s population exceeds 50,000.
Given the significant funding and upbeat atmosphere California Forever hopes to spread, one would think that the existing community in Solano County would be thrilled.
But the reality on the ground is much more complicated than the idyllic town square the company envisioned.
California Forever calls the planned city “yesterday’s city.” Its dense neighborhoods and walkable urban planning are based on 19th-century urban planning. (Courtesy of California Forever)
Trouble began early on, when local residents learned that a shadowy company called Flannery Associates was buying up nearly $1 billion in farmland around Travis Air Force Base, and raised alarms about the company’s shadowy identity, huge funding, and apparent rush to acquire the land.
To make matters worse, these purchases included the purchase of multi-generational farm holdings, in some cases split up by members of the same family.
In the summer of 2023, a New York Times exposé revealed Flannery as part of California Forever, introducing the plan to the wider community for the first time.
Sramek said the story put California Forever at a “disadvantage” as the company was preparing to introduce itself publicly, but he maintained that confidentiality was always a necessary step at the start of any ambitious development project.
California Forever founder Jan Sramek wants to bring back California’s dynamism. (Courtesy of California Forever)
But even since going public, California Forever has been battling perceptions that it’s an unwanted presence. Flannery is facing multiple lawsuits from local landowners, including a $510 million antitrust suit filed in May that accused some opponents of conspiring to inflate prices. Rep. John Garamendi, a Democrat who represents a nearby district, has denounced the group for its “strong-arm gangster tactics.”
“Good neighbors don’t sue their neighbors!” a local man shouted at a recent City Hall meeting, drawing cheers of applause.
The group has also faced intense scrutiny over the reality of its plans not matching its claims to build “the most sustainable city on Earth.”
Solano County and Rio Vista residents Kathleen Threlfall, left, and Bill Mortimore protest outside the press conference. (AP)
California Forever argues that the proposed settlement, a proposed urban site on about 17,500 acres of a larger 60,000-acre site, is on “subprime agricultural land” and in an area it describes as “devoid of ecological habitat.”
When The Independent confronted Solano Land Trust executive director Nicole Braddock with these allegations, she laughed out loud.
She said the land is home to rare vernal pool habitat and a sustainable farm that uses natural rainwater irrigation.
“Farms and ranches not only produce food, but they also support habitat and water replenishment at the same time,” she said. “That’s what makes them so valuable to us.”
“It’s ridiculous to think that habitat ends at the property line,” she added.
“I would never say that,” Metcalf said when asked about California Forever’s statement in June that the land had “no ecological habitat.” He argued that California Forever had found the ideal site to meet the state’s housing needs, make efficient use of resources and space, and avoid the risks of wildfire and sea-level rise.
“Compared to the sprawling development in the Central Valley, which is much larger than what we’re planning, the decision to build on non-prime farmland seems very responsible,” he said.
Environmentalists say California Forever’s proposed urban land would be important for sustainable agriculture, wildlife habitat and the region’s water supply (Getty Images)
A poll of Solano County voters conducted in April found they were about 70% likely to vote against the measure in November’s ballot.
If the poll is accurate, it could be a sign of just how deeply rooted the region’s agricultural identity is — a community that has been voting to protect open space and agricultural land since the 1980s and may not care about anything else.
Meanwhile, Sramek said he hopes the community sees California Forever the same way he does: as Silicon Valley leaders putting their influence and money into the region’s long-term interest, not just a “crappy messaging app.” Real estate investors typically expect to see profits within seven years. He and his backers are in for the long haul.
“Banks would never have financed this. Insurance companies or other types of investors would never have invested in this,” he said. “This is a venture, and it’s the best form of risky long-term investment.”
We’ll know in November whether that gamble has started to pay off.
