How to design a brand-new city

I’m back with part two of my conversation with Jan Sramek, founder of California Forever, about his plan to build a brand-new city in Solano County. We get into the nuts and bolts of the urban design, discuss affordability and sustainability, get into governance issues, and look forward to what might happen next. (PDF transcript) (Active transcript) David Roberts Hey everybody. This is Volts for March 13, 2026: “How to design a brand new city.” I’m your host, David Roberts. This is part two of a conversation! I published the first part on Wednesday. I highly recommend you go back and listen to that first. Here’s the short version: Jan Sramek is the founder and CEO of California Forever, a billionaire-backed company that has spent a decade buying up 70,000 acres in Solano County — halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento — with the goal of building a brand new city from scratch. It isn’t meant to be a subdivision or a bedroom community, but a real, 400,000-person city, with jobs, manufacturing, schools, parks, the whole nine. In Part 1, we covered: why here, why now, and why Jan thinks California needs this. In Part 2, we get into some of the nuts and bolts of the urbanism and talk about the importance, for families and children especially, of being able to do mostly daily tasks without a car. We talk about transit, affordability, and whether nice things in America are doomed to be immediately priced out of reach. We talk about governance — specifically the fear that this is a billionaire techno-utopia in disguise. And we talk about sustainability: the solar strategy, district heating, and water recycling. Finally: what happens next, and whether this thing is actually going to get built. I’ll be honest with you, we talked for two and a half hours and I still feel like we barely skimmed the surface. Everything we did discuss deserved a little more pushing and we barely even mentioned the advanced manufacturing park or the shipyard. The modular housing angle alone is pod-worthy! I could do another ten episodes on this project, and maybe, if they actually start building in the next couple of years like Jan believes, I will. After this conversation, I’m not ruling it out. Let’s get into it. Jan Sramek I think the way that we thought about the urban design from the beginning is because people talk about zoning and streets and so on. We’ve thought about it from the experience backwards and saying, “What’s the experience we want people to be able to have? What’s the life that I have in this city?” For example, I think life is tremendously more fun if you wake up in the morning and you strap your toddler, if you have kids or something, on your chest and you walk out and you go five minutes to get a coffee than if you start in your kitchen and make it at your machine. I’ve lived both and one of them is more fun and it gets me out of the house and it gets my day started. We wanted a place where you could have small-scale retail — it doesn’t have to be much — coffee shop, a restaurant, maybe a pharmacy in the heart of each of these neighborhoods. We didn’t start by saying, “What’s the type of housing we want to build?” We started by saying, “If we want everyone to be able to walk to a few basic amenities — a coffee shop and a couple of restaurants — what’s the density that we need?” Once we knew how many people we needed within a 5, 10-minute radius, what product types in terms of apartment buildings and row homes would get us there? That was the retail at the heart of each neighborhood. I think for neighborhoods to feel like neighborhoods, they need to have a sense of identity. For most neighborhoods, that retail street is what gives neighborhoods at least partially a sense of identity. We can all talk about cities that we know where that’s the case. Then the school — I wanted to have an experience where I can be number one for older kids. The kids can just walk home alone. But for younger kids, if I am picking them up from childcare or from school, I want to be able to go pick them up and then go pick up some groceries. Not a massive Costco shopping thing, but pick up some fresh bread and produce and pick that up and then go home. Parents are really busy, there is a lot going on. If you can make it easier for them where they can just go pick up the kid, go to the grocery store — little kids love grocery shopping — and then you can take them home, that is a really great experience, particularly if we can also put parks next to the schools. Maybe another version is you go, you pick up your kids and then you see your friends and they go play in a park and you can sit and have coffee and have a totally different experience of your day than driving around. David Roberts That’s the difference between getting groceries being a little fun adventure where you are walking and using your body and seeing your neighbors and meeting people, versus an enervating chore that involves strapping kids into the car seats, driving, finding parking, getting out of the car seat, going in, coming back out, getting back into the car seat, driving again — absolutely draining experience of doing the exact same thing in a car. Jan Sramek I could not have put it better myself. I think part of why it has taken us so long to realize the difference as a nation is in some sense, it sounds as if those two experiences should be similar. At the end of the day, who cares how you do it? But I’ve made it a point to move around when we had a chance with our kids and just experience the contrast. It is a totally different mindset that you get home at 6 o’clock if you do one versus if you do the other. They have nothing in common together. David Roberts Also, this is one of the big problems that urbanism faces in the United States — if your sole experience is of the latter, if chores just mean driving around to you and always have, and you have never experienced anything different, you do not know. You do not know what it could be like. It is very hard to get people excited, especially in the US, for something that they just literally have zero lived experience of and no visible example of, practically in the entire country. It is a very alien concept to most Americans, I feel. Jan Sramek Exactly. There’s a thing that happens that I can’t quite figure out, why it happens, but I’ve seen it happen where people will go for a vacation in Italy or France or Greece or whatever, and they’ll spend two weeks. They’ll spend two weeks eating and drinking, and they feel great. David Roberts “Why is this so nice? Why do I feel so good?” Jan Sramek They come back and they’ve lost weight or they feel the same. They spend two weeks partying in different ways. David Roberts You can always track it on their fitness tracker because their step count quadruples. Jan Sramek 100%. But then the weird thing is some of them come back. I think increasingly a lot of them come back and they say, “You know what? It would be nice to have that in the US and maybe I don’t even want to live there, but my kids might want to live there. Or maybe I want to move there when I’m older and I can’t drive,” which is another whole thing, by the way. David Roberts Yet they still fight it. Jan Sramek But then some of them come back and they go and they don’t assume that we could build it here. We can arrange the bricks in the homes and in the streets in whatever goddamn way we please if we decide as a society. It’s not some rocket science over there — but I think it feels like it’s speeding up. I remember, I think you used to write at Vox. I’m not sure whether it was you or someone else there, but there was a big series on the loneliness epidemic in America. I feel like in 2015. David Roberts I did a piece on that. This is something I’ve loved hearing you talk about, because this is something I’ve been talking about for 10 years. It’s not really catching on. But I think, and it sounds like you agree, that a lot of the angst in America, a lot…