A push by tech titans to create a new California city from scratch is gaining ground.
The billionaire developers behind California Forever released a highly anticipated water survey this week, which shows how the group plans to get water for their new city.
Specifically, it shows that it will not use any water from Lake Berryessa or the Solano Irrigation District and that none of the water from the 16,400 acre feet per year currently accessible to the organization will come from either of those sources.
“This water plan is based on the principle that the new community water usage should not negatively impact others in Solano County,” the release said. “This includes maintaining agricultural lands currently in production by either supplying recycled water to substitute for water transferred to the new community or converting them to less intensive agricultural uses that are more compatible with the soil.”
That’s good news for some critics of the billion-dollar plan, but there are still others who are skeptical of the entire project.
Here is a breakdown of what California Forever is, what it wants, and who wants to stop it from happening.
California Forever is a U.S.-based real estate development corporation founded by Jan Sramek, founder and CEO of Flannery Associates, with ambitions to develop a town in California’s Solano County from scratch.
Plans for the town were made public in August 2023.
Ideally, it will be a new walkable city of up to 400,000 people and have an initial 20,000 homes. It will include its own roads, parks, schools, offices, public transit, coffee shops, retail stories, as well as wind and solar farms.
“We have dug ourselves into such a deficit in terms of housing [in California],” Sramek told reporters. “We can deliver a big solution to the problem.”
So far, Sramek has spent nearly $900 million in an effort to buy thousands of acres of San Francisco Bay Area land.
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs are among the financial bigwigs throwing their weight and money in the effort to build a city from scratch.
Others include former Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz; Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison; a16z crypto founder Chris Dixon; venture capitalist John Doerr; investor and philanthropist Nat Friedman; and Daniel Gross, an entrepreneur who co-founded Cue and led the artificial intelligence team at Apple.
San Francisco has been plagued in recent years by sky-high rents, soaring crime, and a huge homelessness problem. There are also problems with long commute times and overall safety concerns that have driven frustration and prompted the proposal to create a new city.
California Forever is pushing a ballot measure that would amend a local land-use regulation.
If successful, it would greenlight the steps needed for California Forever to build a community in an area filled with farms and wind turbines.
California Forever has already spent $2 million on consulting, direct-mail marketing, and other expenses while collecting the signatures needed to put its measure on the ballot.
Critics of California Forever say just because they have billionaire investors doesn’t mean they will win over the average voter.
California Forever has spent the past five years nearly building up $1 billion in land around Travis Air Force Base under the name Flannery Associates, without revealing its true intentions, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The company sued dozens of landowners last year who refused to sell their land, claiming they worked together to drive up prices.
Benicia Mayor Steve Young has also spoken out against California Forever, specifically pointing to their November ballot measure that would rezone their land from agricultural use to urban use. Young told CBS13 that the Silicon Valley billionaires who are behind the project are unfairly trying to cut through the red tape that every other developer in the area must go through.
“They don’t want to necessarily follow the rules, which, tech guy, that’s how they roll,” Young said. He later added, “I don’t think people should be able to write their own rules simply because they have the resources to do that.”
One of the state’s largest pro-housing groups, California YIMBY, announced its support for California Forever’s East Solano Plan on Wednesday.
The group, while noting some concerns with the plan, supports the vision overall.
“The Golden State is in a rough way,” the statement said. “But we believe that our best days lie ahead. When faced with housing shortages in the past, our leaders took bold actions to increase the supply of new housing. For this reason, California YIMBY is proud to support the East Solano Plan, a project that will — at full build-out — provide homes for as many as 400,000 Californians and provide a template for sustainable growth.”
The decision marks one of the first statewide groups to support the Solano County-based initiative.
Not quite.
In 2021, Marc Lore, a billionaire and former president of Walmart eCommerce and co-founder of Jet.com and Diapers.com, pitched a utopian city in the middle of the desert called Telosa.
Telosa, a 240-square-mile metropolis, was promoted as a place that should have a reformed version of capitalism that prioritized societal inclusion over division. It would have equal access to healthcare, top-notch schooling, and be a crime-free, toxin-free place for families regardless of income. It would welcome people from various races, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and political affiliations.
In 2020, Dryden Brown, a competitive surfer from California, and Charlie Callinan, a former wide receiver on Boston College’s football team, pitched Praxis Society, a crypto commune of sorts in the Mediterranean. It has $15 million in funding from entities and people with ties to Peter Thiel and the crypto industry, including Paradigm Capital and Balaji Srinivasan.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“The core idea of our community, Praxis, is that our purpose is to pursue immortality,” Brown said.
In 2008, Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and billionaire Facebook investor, co-founded the Seasteading Institute, which attempted to build a new crypto-loving, tax-hating society on lily pad-like structures off the coast of French Polynesia.