In 2018, a company quietly started acquiring some companies. $900 million worth of land From farmers in California’s Solano County, just north of the Bay Area, their motives remain a mystery as the land swells to more than 60,000 acres. Promotes anxiety and speculation. Then last year, news broke that the land was set to become a new eco-friendly city, Silicon Valley BillionaireIt was built from the ground up by a company called California Forever.
The initiative was started by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader and CEO of California Forever. He said the project has three main goals: “Help solve the housing crisis in California; create a walkable metropolitan area with a high quality of life and a low carbon footprint; and build a new “economic engine” for Solano County. “There’s no playbook here,” Sramek said. “What we’re trying to do is really, really different.”
Before California Forever could break ground, their proposed East Solano Plan needed approval from people who already live in Solano County. But while Sramek anticipated growth, others irreversible ecological Damage. Despite a multi-million dollar campaign to persuade the public to vote for the proposal in the upcoming November election, elected officials Express one’s oppositionAnd a coalition formed to oppose the project. Local distrust deepened as the company continued to file lawsuits against landowners. People who rejected the offer. According to an April poll, 70 percent Seventy percent of Solano voters are likely to reject the measure.
Janie Har / AP Photo
On July 22, the day before the Solano County Board of Supervisors was scheduled to decide whether to place the initiative on the November ballot, Sramek and the board agreed to withdraw the proposal. Joint statement In announcing the decision, Sramek said California Forever would try to bring the project back to the polls in two years after a report assessing its environmental impact is completed.
Other projects with similar thinking and deep pockets are springing up around the world: Masdar, a $20 billion zero-carbon city in the United Arab Emirates; Delayed for decades and Reduce Unrecognizable. Neom, Saudi Arabia’s royal family’s futuristic $500 billion renewable energy dream, is now Not even a fifth Forest City in Malaysia, which won a design award for sustainability, is home to 1.5 million residents, originally planned for ghost town. And the billionaire behind Diapers.com has big plans. Telosa Somewhere in the western desert of the United States lies a vast green energy metropolis.
All of these projects seek to build cities from the ground up, realizing the urban dream of a better, more environmentally friendly life. But even if the buildings exist, Failing to attract residents And despite plans that emphasize sustainability, the project Think about it To gain support from environmental activists, California Forever eventually accommodate 400,000 people — Similar goals to Masdar and Neom.
“No project of this scale has ever been successful,” said Alain Bertaud, an urban planning researcher at the Marron Institute, part of New York University. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t work. There are a lot of projects in the pipeline.”
Berto is usually skeptical of such proposals for new cities, but he said California Forever’s plan seems well-designed. He said one aspect that could help the project succeed is its proximity to other Bay Area cities, where job markets could attract people to move there.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Photos
But he’s not so sure about the project’s environmental promise, because benchmarks like carbon emissions are hard to measure until a project is up and running. “I don’t doubt the commitment of people who are fighting for sustainability,” he said. “But unless you define it very clearly, ‘sustainability’ is just a self-serving slogan you can put on any idea you have.”
The question of sustainability is at the heart of California Forever’s ambitions and problems. Both supporters and skeptics want to solve the region’s housing crisis. Eye-popping rents and housing prices far exceed Nationally, the median price for a single-family home is: $1.4 million. This is one of the reasons why this area has the third largest homeless population. New York City and Los Angeles.
Instead of building a new city to solve these problems, critics of California Forever want 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 non-irrigated farmland is not,” said Sadie Wilson, director of planning and research for the Greenbelt Alliance. The nonprofit is one of 16 groups in Solano Together, a coalition opposing the project, along with the Center for Biological Diversity and the California Sierra Club.
Janie Har / AP Photo
Wilson says the development threatens the area’s potential to store carbon in the soil and local biodiversity, and also risks more pollution from people commuting to work in nearby cities. And while California Forever owns the water rights to support its first 40,000 residents, Solano Together says it reflect accurately Availability of water. They argue that ensuring a steady supply is: Challenging In an area where droughts occur frequently.
But California Forever says starting from scratch will avoid the burden of urban problems like car-centric design and gas supply, and it will be easier to support dense housing and run on renewable energy. “Our plan will have the lowest per-capita carbon emissions of any place on the planet. It’s really transformational,” says Bronson Johnson, the company’s director of infrastructure and sustainability, adding that it has struggled with barriers to retrofitting existing cities for years. “When you look at the larger benefits of this project, I think it’s much bigger than the local impact,” Johnson says.
But voters need to be persuaded. After the New York Times The names of many of the investors behind this project have been revealed. — including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and prominent venture capitalist Michael Moritz — in August 2023, California Forever began working to mobilize residents for the 2024 election. By May, the company had 2 million dollars We’ve collected enough signatures for an initiative to be campaigned on and put to a vote.
In the weeks leading up to the Solano County Board of Commissioners meeting in July, Economic Report The Bay Area Council on Business Support touted the potential jobs and housing benefits, saying the county could increase employment in high-income sectors by 53 percent. Meanwhile, the company Lay the lagoon Located in the heart of the new city, it is “open to everyone in Solano County.”
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Five days before the meeting, the county itself evaluation He said the initiative lacked details on key issues such as infrastructure funding, traffic impacts and water supply. Many of those unknowns would be clarified by an environmental impact statement required by California law, which the company said it plans to conduct after residents vote. According to county officials, these omissions and the lack of a binding development agreement ultimately led to the proposal’s demise.
“This has politicized the entire project, made it difficult for us and our staff to work with them, and has forced everyone in our community to take sides,” Solano County Board of Supervisors Chairman Mitch Mashburn said in a statement announcing the plan would be shelved. According to the statement, Sramek and Mashburn made the decision together after agreeing that the timing of the proposal had become unrealistic.
“I want to acknowledge that many Solano residents are excited by Mr. Sramek’s optimism about a rebuilding California. He is also right that we won’t solve our jobs, housing and energy problems if every project takes more than a decade to get underway,” Mashburn said in a statement.
Terry Chia/AP Photo
Solano Together Be foreshadowed The news was a triumph. Wilson said that while the environmental impact report will address many of the coalition’s concerns, particularly about water supply, the location of the development still raises what she sees as an unfixable environmental problem. “It’s a vibrant landscape that supports our food system, our environment, our water system,” she said.
Sarah Moser, an urban geography researcher at McGill University in Montreal, said it makes sense that sparsely populated farmland and desert would be attractive for mega-developments like the proposed East Solano plan because there would be less opposition. But building on undeveloped land would create a “carbon debt that, by definition, can never be repaid,” she said.
Moser believes that building a city from scratch is logistically feasible, but she says such projects are increasingly risky and have unattainable goals. “You can either build affordable housing or make money, but you can’t do both,” she says, adding that California Forever’s for-profit model fits into a broader pattern of “rich getting richer” in the urban mega-developments she has studied.
And perhaps the most important element needed to successfully build a new city is people.
Berto said the promise of a city built on ideals alone is not enough to fill the city. There has to be an existing community of people, culture, entertainment and jobs that attract people. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem that only applies to starting from scratch. “Why would you go to a city where there’s no one?” he said.
