They Want to Build a New American City. Will California Let Them?
The "California Forever" project pits liberal aspirations against the reality of Golden State regulation.
America hasn’t built a new city from scratch in the 21st century. China has built dozens in the same timeframe. Some sit empty, monuments to central planning run amok. But the comparison is still embarrassing—not because we should emulate China’s ghost cities, but because, amid a deep housing affordability crisis, we’ve apparently lost the ability to build great new cities at all.
Enter the California Forever project, a billion-dollar bet that America—and the Golden State in particular—can still do what it once did routinely. Founded by Jan Sramek, a Czech immigrant and former Goldman Sachs banker, the company has spent eight years quietly assembling land with backing from Silicon Valley heavyweights including Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, Patrick and John Collison, and Marc Andreessen. Its plan: to build was Sramek calls “the next great American city.”
In October, the company submitted a 250-page plan to construct a city of 400,000 people on roughly 23,000 acres of mostly empty grassland in Solano County, about an hour north of San Francisco. The proposal includes more than 175,000 homes, walkable neighborhoods designed for families, vibrant public spaces, a new downtown, and an entertainment district. It also envisions a 2,100-acre advanced manufacturing park and a shipyard. These would serve as job anchors aimed at reviving Silicon Valley’s industrial capacity.
The question, though, is whether Sramek and colleagues can navigate California’s regulatory gauntlet—and whether the state’s progressive political system can reconcile its professed values with the physical infrastructure required to sustain them.
As Julia Steinberg writes in a new Arena magazine essay chronicling California Forever’s project, Sramek bought every copy of a 1959 Army Corps of Engineers report predicting someone would want to build a city in this exact location around 2020, storing them in Napa to avoid tipping off competitors.
The report forecast that the Bay Area would reach 14.4 million people by 2020, nearly double today’s population. Instead, for the first time in California’s history, the state’s population decreased in 2020. Something went profoundly wrong.
What went wrong, according to Sramek, is that California has retained its genius for innovation but lost its capacity for building. The state that pioneered venture capital and Hollywood now forces its successes to move elsewhere because it can’t produce enough housing or industrial capacity locally at scale.
“California used to do big things,” Sramek posted on X last month after filing the plans. “From rockets in the Mojave to chips in Silicon Valley, California dreamed. California designed. California built. But then we stopped.”
The political economy behind this failure is familiar to anyone following California politics. Discretionary review processes, byzantine land-use regulation, environmental litigation, and local opposition have made building anything—let alone an entire city—nearly impossible. And even as the state has taken steps to liberalize some zoning rules, it continues to pile on additional restrictions that raise development costs or create new chokepoints.
“If you tried to design a system that was going to completely break up society, make everyone fight and make everyone hate each other, you would design the California Land Use system,” Sramek told Arena.
Sramek’s plan borrows heavily from the urbanist playbook: walkable, medium-density neighborhoods; no residential parking minimums; generous height limits; maximum (instead of minimum) setbacks; and variable-rate pricing to manage demand for shared public garages and on-street parking. The manufacturing park (the Solano Foundry) would provide space for advanced transportation, robotics, energy, and defense manufacturing. The shipyard would use components produced at the foundry to build maritime vessels, creating what the California Forever project calls “a virtuous cycle of demand for precision parts and skilled labor.”
To achieve this vision, however, Sramek will have to build within the constraints California imposes. Solano County prohibits subdividing unincorporated agricultural lands for housing, so he needed voter approval, which he sought through a 2024 county ballot measure. When polling showed only 30 percent support, Sramek pivoted. Rather than fight the electorate, he abandoned the ballot measure and instead partnered with nearby Suisun City, a struggling municipality of 30,000 facing a structural budget deficit. The city is now considering whether to annex a portion of California Forever’s land, expanding the city from four square miles to over 35 square miles while gaining a massive new tax base.
This strategy—building as an extension of an existing city rather than a new municipality—sidesteps a countywide vote, though it doesn’t necessarily simplify the overall process. Building a new unincorporated community would still require environmental review and development agreements. Annexation consolidates these steps into a single large approval process—first through Suisun City, then through the Solano Local Agency Formation Commission, an independent body of elected and appointed officials.
The plans state that development would occur in two phases over 40 years. The first 20 years would focus on the area west of Highway 113, building out 65,217 homes, the Solano Foundry, and an entertainment district modeled on New York’s Meatpacking District. Construction east of the highway wouldn’t begin until 2050. The project would not be completed until 2070.
Whether this will actually happen, moreover, depends on surviving California’s environmental review process and notoriously onerous land-use regulations. A draft Environmental Impact Report—which Sramek estimates will run 12,000 pages—is expected in early 2026. Then comes approval by the Suisun City Council, followed by LAFCO review. Revenue-sharing agreements must be negotiated with county supervisors, development agreements signed with the city, and state sign-offs secured for road interchanges and highway widenings.
Each approval is discretionary. Each triggers review under the California Environmental Quality Act. And at each stage, opponents can mount legal challenges.
That uncertainty makes California Forever a perfect stress test for progressive governance. Can a state that champions sustainability, affordability, and inclusion actually build the housing and infrastructure those values require? Or will environmental review, local opposition, and regulatory complexity render even the most well-funded, thoughtfully designed projects impossible?
The stakes extend beyond one project. California has struggled to build enough new housing through infill development in existing urban areas. Despite several recent pro-housing laws, permits for new units have stayed stubbornly low, as Brad Hargreaves recently documented for City Journal. Only 38,362 multifamily permits were issued in California in 2024, down more than 24 percent from the prior year and below pre-pandemic norms. By comparison, Dallas alone issued nearly 18,000 multifamily permits over the past year despite having a fraction of California’s population.
Could bold bets like California Forever—designed to build dense new housing in greenfield areas—short-circuit the regulatory morass that has impeded infill development in this state? The answer will reveal whether California Forever represents a model for genuine renewal or just another monument to California’s inability to build.
No they are trash
Narrator: “They will not”