[BenIndy comment: Vicki Gray’s letter sets the Flannery land-grab / fantasy-$-city into historical context. Brilliant, and reminiscent of Rachel Maddow’s way of examining history as illuminating background for current breaking news.]
Remember the Bechtel/Shell plan a decade ago to build an LNG terminal in Vallejo?
It was announced as an apparently done deal in a Times-Herald headline “Welcome to Energy Island” three days before the Vallejo City Council was to meet to give it a go-ahead.
Well here in Solano County we’re about to embark on another long, costly fight against another crop of outside investors — this time a group of young Silicon Valley billionaires intent on building a “utopian” city just east of Fairfield. They style themselves “California Forever” and are headed by venture capitalist Jan Stramek who, despite an itinerant career in London, New York, and Silicon Valley, now claims he is a Fairfield resident.
All we know so far is that the idea “tickles their fancy.” They have been secretly buying land for six years but have only now started on a Bechtel/Shell-like flim-flam game designed to convince local residents to buy their pig in a poke. A few weeks ago, we received a slick flyer with appropriately utopian images ostensibly seeking local input in an undisclosed plan in which they’ve already dumped millions of dollars, presumably to be able to say that their plan — whenever it is disclosed — reflects local desires.
And now they’ve recruited a “Community Advisory Committee” of potential cheerleaders spearheaded by the Napa Solano Labor Council’s Jon Riley, who shilled for Bechtel/Shell so long ago. Can a pliable minister or politician be far behind?
Among the many hurdles facing this project is Solano County’s long-standing slow growth regulation. Stramek’s group hopes to side-step that by gaining voter approval for its “plan” on next year’s ballot. Only problem is there is no plan, at least not one they’re willing to reveal, and there’s a January deadline for submitting a plan to include on the ballot.
Enter the United States Defense Department, which objects to a large portion of the land purchased by California Forever, land that if in private hands would endanger the security of Travis AFB. So now the young Silicon Valley tycoons have given Fairfield and County officials until Dec. 31 to agree to a land swap that would enable them to draft a concrete plan to put on the November ballot — six weeks after six years of secretive land purchases! The hubris of Mr. Stramek and his cohorts is exceeded only by their chutzpah.
I hope our local officials have the strength and wisdom to tell California Forever, “We don’t accept ultimatums. Come back a year hence after you have leveled with us about your plan and we have had ample time to exercise due diligence in considering it.”
Do we want more cars on the I-80 commute? Higher techie-driven housing costs? Environmental spoliation? Increased demand on our water supplies? If like me you think not, please contact Fairfield Mayor Moy, our county supervisors, and U.S. Reps. Thompson and Garamendi and urge them to put a stop to this ill-considered pipedream.
And thank you, Times-Herald, for your dogged, informative reporting unveiling California Forever’s machinations. Keep it up!
[From the article: “It’s not David vs. Goliath, […] [it’s] David vs. an aircraft carrier.”]
California Forever’s first foray into Solano County politics was all about water. It didn’t end well
A former beach, lower left, has washed out and been overtaken by brush and algae at the closed Brannan Island State Recreation Area near Rio Vista, Calif., in 2022. The city’s lawyers approached its council Tuesday to ask if they could also represent California Forever, a group proposing a new city near Rio Vista, in water rights issues. | Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle.
For the first time since their plan to build a city in Solano County became public, representatives of California Forever went to a local government and asked for permission to do something.
For the billionaire city-builders, it was a big-time bust.
In a unanimous decision Tuesday evening, the City Council of Rio Vista — a charming delta town of 10,000 that would be the closest city to where the new metropolis would sprout from dry farmland — rejected the idea that it would allow the city’s outside legal counsel to also represent California Forever, the developer’s parent company.
The law firm of Kronick, Moskovitz, Tiedemann & Girard, which has provided legal counsel to Rio Vista since 2011 — most small California cities hire outside firms rather than fund their own legal departments — had asked the city council for permission to also represent California Forever in its process of securing the water rights for the still unnamed, built-from-scratch city.
It was a resounding no.
While the vote was small potatoes in the context of a group that has spent $800 million on purchasing 50,000 acres and is determined to spend billions more to create America’s next great city, it demonstrated the political obstacles that California Forever will need to clear as it tries to convince the majority of Solano County of the wisdom of a project that would transform a corner of the Bay Area still mostly made up of farms and small towns like Rio Vista.
In its request, the firm, KMTG, promised it would create a separation between lawyers working for the city of Rio Vista and those helping California Forever secure water rights for a new city that could become home to 100,000 residents or more.
KMTG attorney Olivia Clark said that if any conflict arose the firm would represent the city, and not the developer. She said KMTG’s expertise in Solano County development issues, and water rights, could be a benefit to Rio Vista.
“We bring a lot of experience and institutional knowledge — that unique background will help both entities moving forward … rather than California Forever finding some hotshot L.A. firm to phone it in,” she said. “I think it’s better to know your neighbor and know they have competent legal counsel representing them. … What’s the cliche? It’s better to know your adversary than take a gamble.”
Founded in 1959, KMTG is recognized statewide for its water rights and water resources law expertise, advising clients on laws and regulations that govern water use in California. Water rights and use are key considerations in California Forever’s development plans in eastern Solano County. | Image from californiaforever.com.
In a memo on the topic, KMTG partner Mona Ebrahimi said there was “no present conflict between California Forever and Rio Vista” in terms of water rights, but she allowed that there might be down the road.
“The concern is that Rio Vista might oppose California Forever’s efforts to orchestrate water supplies for future land-use projects and might oppose California Forever’s efforts to obtain land-use approvals allowing such projects,” she wrote.
Currently, Rio Vista relies on groundwater pumped from the Solano Subbasin of the Sacramento Valley Groundwater Basin. Although, if that resource is depleted, it could put the city in conflict with the water sources California Forever is looking toward, including the Sacramento River.
But neighbors were not convinced, and neither were elected officials.
After public comment in which all of a dozen or so Rio Vista residents urged the council to reject the idea, the five member body quickly put the kibosh on the request.
Resident Kenny Paul said allowing the firm to represent both sides would “put the city in a bad position.”
“We are not going to be able to stop Flannery, ultimately, but do we extend a hand to them in welcome or do we say, ‘No thanks? ’ ” said Paul. “The fact that they would go after the same counsel we have, who are experts in water rights fights, just speaks to their continued bad faith.”
Resident Bill Mortimore said the law may be well-intentioned but that ultimately there will be conflict “when Flannery comes in and throws a half a billion on the table.”
“Our legal representatives have good intentions, but money talks. I can picture a conflict arising and them walking in with a checkbook,” he said.
Jeannie McCormack, a third generation rancher who rejected Flannery’s efforts of a buy-out of her family’s 3,700-acre ranch, warned against the firm’s request. She said California Forever’s current legal representation — Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP — would provide plenty of legal firepower without also enlisting Rio Vista’s lawyers.
“They have a very high-falutin and well-known legal firm … they don’t need anyone else,” she said. “They will try to weaken Rio Vista and we won’t know what their aims are because they are very closed-mouthed.”
Former Solano County Supervisor and project opponent Duane Kromm said the vote was significant because KMTG is one of the few firms that knows Solano County water rights issues inside and out.
“There is a limited subset of law firms highly specialized in California water rights,” he said.
He said the lopsided dynamic of the fight over the future of eastern Solano County would continue to test the small cities in the area.
“It’s not David vs. Goliath,” he said. “It’s David vs. an aircraft carrier.”
California Forever did not respond to a request for comment.
California Forever was founded in 2017 and is led by CEO Jan Sramek. Its primary investors are tech billionaires, including Marc Andreessen, Patrick and John Collison, Chris Dixon, John Doerr, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Reid Hoffman, Michael Moritz, Laurene Powell Jobs, and the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. | Image from californiaforever.com.
Yearning for a blank slate crosses the ideological spectrum—but sooner or later, new places will face the same old problems.
The first urbanists were recorded in the pages of Genesis: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” But God struck down the Tower of Babel and cursed his people to rely on Google Translate forever.
Despite this false start, the dream of building a great new city continues to this day, even in developed nations like the United States, where we already have a lot of them. We start new companies, new schools, new neighborhoods all the time. Why not a new San Francisco, Boston, or Miami? The yearning for a blank slate crosses the ideological spectrum, touching socialists, antidevelopment activists, curious policy makers, and, most recently, Silicon Valley investors attempting to build a city from scratch—among them Marc Andreessen, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Moritz, Nat Friedman, and Laurene Powell Jobs (who is also the founder of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic).
From left, Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, four prominent Silicon Valley investors, have backed Flannery Associates. | Bloomberg; The New York Times; Clara Mokri for The New York Times; Getty Images; Reuters.
And they’re not just dreaming big or tweeting. As The New York Timesreported in August, they’re backing California Forever, the parent company of Flannery Associates, which has acquired nearly 60,000 acres in Solano County, California, between San Francisco and Sacramento. That’s a lot of land—roughly twice the size of San Francisco or Boston, and slightly larger than Seattle. Housing developments crop up all the time, of course, and suburbs glom on to existing metropolitan areas. California Forever has something else in mind: a top-down community with brand-new infrastructure, where tens of thousands would live and, most important for the company’s vision, also work and play. It’s not your grandfather’s suburban development.
“We’ve gotten into a situation where it’s completely acceptable to talk about inventing general artificial intelligence, and that’s something we’ve accepted is going to happen, but it’s not possible to build a new town where people can buy homes,” Jan Sramek, the founder and CEO of California Forever, told me. (The comparison reveals more about his social environment than anything else; it is not commonly accepted that AGI is “going to happen.”)
But building a new city is hard, and this most recent push to do so—unlike with recent gains in AI—doesn’t reflect an exciting breakthrough in America’s technological, political, or financial capacity. Rather, it reflects an abiding frustration with the ridiculously sluggish process of building housing in America’s most productive cities and suburbs. The dream of a new San Francisco is, then, rooted in the nightmare that the old one may be past saving.
Details about the new proposed city in Solano County are hard to come by, but sketches on California Forever’s website portray an idyllic town, foregrounded by open space and densely built with multiple housing types. Windmills turn in the background. The website reads: “Our vision for walkable neighborhoods, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, good jobs and a healthy environment is not about reinventing the wheel, but rather going back to the basics that were once the norm across America.”
Image from californiaforever.com.
California Forever’s project has a lot going for it: The lack of urban or suburban development in the region means an absence of traditional groups that might fight against neighborhood change. Because California Forever has acquired so much acreage, local officials have a strong incentive to work with Sramek to prevent collapsing land values if his project fails. And Sramek is already considering ways to sweeten the deal for existing residents; he says one idea is “setting up a fund that would provide down-payment assistance for buying homes in the new community, which would only be accessible to current residents of Solano County.”
But financing urban infrastructure is exceedingly expensive. “Organic” cities, in which firms and workers agglomerate and then begin to demand that governments finance infrastructure, have a preassembled tax base. If you try to build the infrastructure first, paying for it becomes tricky.
Alain Bertaud, a former principal urban planner at the World Bank and an expert on urban development, told me: “A new city, especially a large one … has a problem of cash flow.” The city can’t raise taxes to build schools and hire teachers, for instance, but it needs to build schools and hire teachers before parents are willing to move—and be taxed—there. “If you look back to [recent] history … the only large new cities were new capitals like Brasilia, Chandigarh, Canberra, [where] the cash flow is not a problem [because] you have the taxpayers of the entire country paying for the cost.”
Thinking of cities as mere infrastructure is a categorical mistake. New York City is not the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge; London is not the tube; and Levittown, New York—America’s quintessential “first” suburb—is not its single-family homes. Infrastructure follows people, not the other way around. “You don’t go to a new city because the sewer system is fantastically efficient,” Bertaud said.
In general, the superstar cities we have today were not preselected from above; they were chosen by millions of workers in search of economic opportunity: Los Angeles (oil); San Francisco (gold); Boston (a port, academia); Seattle (lumber, aircraft, tech); New York City (a port, finance). Granted, workers tend to follow firms that follow transportation networks, which themselves are sometimes functions of state investments, but the principle is sound: Cities are people.
When people are choosing where to live, that decision is almost wholly dominated by job availability. What that means is people attract people. It’s a virtuous cycle in which people who move have kids and want teachers and day-care providers and taxi drivers and nurses, and those people want restaurant workers and iPhone-repair specialists, and so on. (Within a job market or when choosing between two equally promising job markets, people do of course consider the quality of life.)
But what if Sramek and his backers aren’t really building a new city after all, just a commuter suburb far away from the inner core? That’s what the pro-housing activist Jordan Grimes thinks is happening; he told the San Francisco Chronicle the project was “sprawl with a prettier face and prettier name.” Solano’s population has a lot of commuters already. Census data from 2016 to 2020 indicated that of the roughly 207,000 workers who lived in Solano, more than 40 percent commuted to another county. Compare that with San Francisco, where of its nearly 510,000 workers, a bit more than 20 percent commuted to another county.
I asked Sramek: Is he truly looking to build a city with its own job market, where residents will be responsible for policing, fire services, parks and recreation, wastewater, libraries? Or is he looking to develop housing, with some space for retail, restaurants, and other cultural amenities? “This is one of those issues that’s very open for community input,” he told me. “We do think that eventually this would become an incorporated city that does provide many of those services.”
Cows graze on land purchased by the Flannery Associates with California Forever in hopes of building a new city between Suisun City and Rio Vista. | Chris Riley / Vallejo Times-Herald.
Sramek isn’t a developer, and his investors are not the sort of people who hope that their hundreds of millions of dollars go into the construction of a few thousand single-family homes. Someone close to the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it freely, told me the aspiration is to prove to the rest of the world what’s possible in America: We can build an attractive, dense, and climate-friendly metropolis, and we can do it quickly. The source also suggested that a big Silicon Valley player might one day move its offices to the area. (Ireached out to Andreessen, Patrick Collison, Friedman, and Powell Jobs. They declined to comment.)
Either way, new city or new sprawl, this project is going to run headfirst into the politics of development. Right now, the land is zoned largely for agricultural use. The county holds that changing the current designation to accommodate high-density urban infrastructure will require a ballot measure. Sramek told me he might try to put the question to voters as early as November 2024, but victory is far from assured.
According to some local officials, Flannery Associates alienated the local community by refusing to announce its intentions before it began acquiring land. (Sramek argues that doing so would have made land values skyrocket.) Congressional representatives alerted the Treasury Department, worried that foreign investors were buying up real estate for nefarious purposes. They noted that an Air Force base is nearby. “I will tell you they have poisoned the well,” John Garamendi, who represents a large part of Solano County, told me. “There’s no goodwill. Five years of total secrecy? Five years of not communicating with [local officials]?”
The process of building a city, difficult as it is, seems remotely rational only because trying to build within cities drives people mad.
Sramek and his director of planning, Gabriel Metcalf, who once ran the influential San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, say the idea for a new city came to them after deciding that working on incremental reforms would never yield the housing needed to make a dent in the overall shortage. As of now, the country needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine, a formidable challenge even if America’s political and legal systems were focused on meeting it—which, unfortunately, most of them are not. Instead of directing a building boom, states still devolve permitting decisions down to the hyperlocal level, where the default is to ban smaller, more affordable homes and where opposition from just a few people can quash desperately needed construction.
“It’s always hard to come to an existing place and try to change it very profoundly,” Sramek told me, when I asked him why he wasn’t focused on building in established cities.
“I spent my whole career on the infill side,” Metcalf told me. (Infill development is building on underutilized land within existing development patterns, such as turning a parking lot into a few townhomes.) “I believe in that completely, but we are only delivering a small fraction of what we need … Whether it’s trying to build a high-speed rail line or renewable-energy transmission line or high-density infill housing, there is a vetocracy in place that across America makes it incredibly difficult and slow to build the things we need to build.” (Funnily enough, that vetocracy includes one of the investors in the Solano County project: Andreessen. I reported last year that he co-signed a letter with his wife opposing new development in the wealthy town of Atherton.)
The socialist writer Nathan J. Robinson has also issued a call to build new cities, and he, too, seems to have given up on the idea of reforming existing places: “The exciting thing about building new cities from scratch is that it allows you to avoid the mistakes that are made in the ‘organic’ (i.e., market-built) city … A new city can avoid all of the disastrous errors that gave us the ugly suburban wastelands that constitute so much of contemporary ‘development.’”
American cities and suburbs have earned Sramek’s fatalism. And certainly, building a walkable, thriving new town in Solano County would be positive for anyone who found a home they loved there. But Sramek and his backers want to set an example, and good examples should be replicable. This one isn’t. Sites like Solano County—near bustling job centers that lack residential development—are few and far between.
A new city, moreover, won’t necessarily escape these antidevelopment pressures in the future. It might expand for a while, but it will eventually face the same old problem: residents who don’t want change. Even in Manhattan, a place where residents are surrounded by high-density housing and cultural amenities that come from density, people regularly oppose new housing, new transit, and even new dumpsters.
Solving the housing crisis doesn’t require inventing new places for people to go; it requires big cities to embrace growth, as they did in the past, and smaller cities to accept change. Again, cities are people, and people are moving to Maricopa, Arizona, in the suburbs of Phoenix, and Santa Cruz, California, south of San Jose. These places may not feel ready to accommodate newcomers, but some will have to rise to the occasion.
What America needs isn’t proof that it can build new cities, but that it can fix its existing ones.
California Forever was founded in 2017 and is led by CEO Jan Sramek. Its primary investors are tech billionaires, including Marc Andreessen, Patrick and John Collison, Chris Dixon, John Doerr, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Reid Hoffman, Michael Moritz, Laurene Powell Jobs, and the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. | Image from californiaforever.com
Confirming fears by planning experts that the billionaire group behind an imagined, utopian city built on arid agricultural land in Solano County will be retrograde in concept, visionary developer Jan Sramek said as much in an interview with KQED today.
Sramek went on KQED’s Forum Monday along with Fairfield mayor and original critic of the project Catherine Moy, and Chronicle writer J.K. Dineen. And he spent much of the broadcast defending the idea that this new city is something that Bay Area and Solano County residents will want, and that it will be “affordable by design.” Sramek also revealed a few key bits of new information, including the fact that the group doesn’t intend to quickly try to get the city incorporated — though this could be all talk.
“This could remain in unincorporated Solano County for a long time,” Sramek said. “We think government is fine as it is in Solano County. The county does a great job of running the county … And then at some point, it would be a decision of the voters in this new community whether they want to incorporate.”
Sramek also said that the majority of the first homes built would be row houses, perhaps built by small-scale firms, and made to be affordable for middle-class families.
“We think that there’s so much wisdom in how we built cities and towns over the last hundreds of thousands of years [sic] in some places. And so from the beginning, we’ve believed that you go back to go forward… The plans that people put forward will be very inspired by those great old American neighborhoods that someone who was born 100 years ago will recognize… We want to build a city of yesterday,” Sramek says.
He suggests that row houses “are some of the most under-appreciated types of types of buildings,” and can be built “much more cheaply” than dense, mid-rise condo complexes, at least so long as the land is cheap enough. But is that really true?
Fairfield Mayor Catherine Moy said that the secretiveness with which the group behind the project, Flannery Associates — or maybe now known by the project name as California Forever — conducted themselves for years hasn’t won them any friends in local government. Moy also suggests that “there’s something else going on here,” given that the group has plans to develop 60,000 acres, or a space twice as large as Fairfield itself, which has over 120,000 residents.
And, Moy adds, “There are other areas that this group could develop in and do a lot of good for humanity, including our downtown. Putting a city in an area that is 98% [agricultural] is not a good idea. We are running out of [agricultural] land. We don’t need to develop it.”
Sramek insists that, despite so much out-migration from California in recent years, he’s “gone out and found a group of people who want to double down in California, who believe in the state, who believe in the optimism and the dynamism, and who want to use their resources to build something great in California.”
The Chronicle’s urban design critic John King has already critiqued the early rollout of the California Forever proposal, even though it contains no concrete plans.
“Besides the utter lack of specificity in terms of what the conversation will actually be about, here’s the most insulting aspect of California Forever 1.0: It claims to be the natural outgrowth of Bay Area planning tradition,” King writes. “It does this by exhuming a pair of pre-1970 government documents… and says, ‘Let’s dust off those plans, and breathe new life into them’… Or maybe not: Among other things, the 1960 plan calls for a new bridge from San Francisco to Sausalito by way of Angel Island. Plus new suburbs in West Marin and filling in up to 325 miles of the existing bay for development purposes.”
It was about unhindered sprawl, in other words, and did not focus on urban centers and existing transit corridors. “It’s so sad and disappointing,” said Greenbelt Alliance executive director Amanda Brown-Stevens, speaking to the Chronicle. “They’re looking to the past, all the failed approaches that put us in this situation, and doubling down.”
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