Is the brand new city in California for real?

In this episode, I’m joined by Jan Sramek to discuss California Forever, the much-debated proposal to build a brand-new, sustainably designed city in Northern California. We explore the urbanist vision at the heart of the project, including a street grid inspired by Barcelona superblocks, and address the elephant in the room — the stealthy land acquisitions and the billionaire backers. Is this an urbanist utopia in the making or a grandiose con job? (PDF transcript) (Active transcript) David Roberts Hey everybody, this is Volts for Wednesday, March 11, 2026: “Is that brand new city in California for real?” I’m your host, David Roberts. About halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento, roughly an hour’s drive on state highways from either, is the proposed site of, depending on who you ask, either a bold attempt to show that America can still do big things or an ill-fated vanity project for America’s oligarchs. Up there in Solano County, a group of billionaire financiers organized under the banner California Forever wants to construct a brand-new city that would eventually, if all goes according to (40-year) plan, host 400,000 residents, a giant advanced manufacturing park, and a fully functioning shipyard. It would be roughly half the size and have roughly half the population of San Francisco itself. Its location would be decidedly exurban, but according to the plans, the city itself would be laid out along positively dreamy urbanist lines, featuring a dense, walkable grid served by frequent transit. A third of the land would be turned over to park space and greenways. It would be heated by a district heating system. Is it real? It’s at least real enough that, last month, California Forever signed the largest construction labor agreement in history with local unions, mandating that all construction on the 70,000 acres owned by California Forever be done through individual project labor agreements. As you can imagine, the plan has attracted an enormous amount of controversy. Critics charge that the location guarantees a regional traffic nightmare, that the proposed shipyard has no chance of happening, and that businesses will have no reason to relocate themselves 50 miles away from the already existing concentration of people and talent in San Francisco. Lots of folks will tell you this is a scheme by billionaires to buy up some cheap land and flip it. Or a scheme to build a city they can control like tyrants, more of a Blade Runner scenario. Jan Sramek, the CEO, founder, and for many years sole employee of California Forever, has been stumping for this plan for a decade and has heard all the criticisms during the dozens of meetings and consultations he has conducted. In our conversation, which lasted almost two and a half hours, we covered many of those objections and, jeez, so much else. Because it went on for so long, I have decided, for the first time ever, to split this into two episodes. Today’s episode will cover the big overview questions: Why build here rather than somewhere else? Why build something new instead of doing infill? What type of city do you envision? In the second episode, which will be out on Friday, we will cover more concrete details of how everything will work in practice, including transit, walkability, governance, and permitting. It is all a lot to take in. It is quite difficult, even after going through all this, to know what to think about all of it. But this one I’ll leave up to you. I’m very curious to hear from you what you think after you’ve heard these episodes. Enjoy. With no further ado — Jan Sramek, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. Jan Sramek It’s great to be here. That was a hell of an introduction. I’m excited for this discussion. David Roberts Jan, I’m overwhelmed. The deeper I’ve gotten into this, the more I’ve realized there’s so much here, so many angles, so many different approaches. Building a big, brand new city turns out to be a very big and complicated thing. There are a million different ways I could come at this. I’ll tell you, in one of your presentations, you described the layout of the city as an American street grid plus Barcelona superblocks, plus Dutch Woonerfs. If it were up to me, in my heart, we would just sit contemplating that beautiful sentence for a whole hour. I would just talk about nothing else. That’s what I really want to get to. That’s the stuff. But there is a lot of other stuff I feel we should at least touch on first. Backing up, let’s start with why here? Why this piece of land? The biggest controversies, as far as I can tell, trace back to here — the choice of this particular spot. Why not, for instance, find a small city somewhere else and just grow it? Why not grow in an existing city? If you’re genuinely building something that’s going to be self-sufficient or close to it and not going to be a bedroom community, going to be a self-sufficient city, why not just go really far out in the middle of nowhere? Tell us why this chunk of land is the right chunk of land. Jan Sramek It’s a good way of phrasing that question, I would say. I have generally been the harshest critic of this idea. You said building a new city is a crazy endeavor that takes decades and an incredible amount of capital and perseverance. I didn’t embark on it lightly. All the criticisms that we have heard over the years were very much on my mind when I spent a year in the very beginning convincing myself that I wasn’t completely insane to want to do this. That comes to the question of location as well. You can break down your question into three components. There’s why can’t we do it all with infill — number one. Then number two, should you do a 20-acre project at the edge of an existing city or a 50-acre project? And then number three, if you’re going to build a new city, should you just do it in the middle of New Mexico? I’ll take them one by one. On the infill question, I spent about a year in 2015, 2016 working on that. I spent about a year working on a range of ideas, commercial ideas, about how do we build a lot more in existing cities. The depressing conclusion of that work was that infill would be incredibly important and hopefully the majority of the solution in California. But it couldn’t do all of it. There was just no way. When you considered the amount of land that you needed, the politics, the pricing, the complexity of permitting it. David Roberts Certainly nothing this big. You could do a little infill project. Jan Sramek You could do infill projects, absolutely. But I would say it’s been borne out in the data. I remember in 2017 when I started, Jerry Brown signed a package of 23 housing bills and all of the headlines read, “Jerry Brown signs a package of 23 housing bills to end the housing crisis.” They were all about infill. We’ve really followed this principle. Home prices in California have doubled in the last 10 years. Clearly, that alone isn’t working. Again, I think the work that we’ve done and California YIMBY has done and YIMBY Action have done and the abundance movement more broadly has been super important. Many of the laws have been passed, the landmark laws have been passed quite recently. They will only get into production later. But still, we’re missing 3 million housing units. We’re building 50,000 a year once you deduct ADUs. It’s very hard to see how we get there. The other part of it is you look at many of those 50,000 units that we built — they’re actually greenfield. There’s a lot of construction happening in the Central Valley. There’s a lot of construction happening in Solano County. There’s construction happening on all sides of our property. Rio Vista is expanding from the east side, Fairfield and Vacaville and Dixon from the west and from the north side. My insight, I think, was greenfield is happening. 86% of housing that is being built in America today is greenfield. David Roberts Yikes! Jan Sramek If it’s already happening, can we make it better? Ca…