Sold Out: California Forever's Uphill Battle to Build a Walkable City

In a rural corner of Solano County, a tech investor has a vision to build a walkable city atop the area’s golden rolling hills.

The proposal could help solve twin crises confronting the Bay Area: a shortage of housing and the growing threat of climate change.

As the climate crisis grows more dire, more cities are trying to build housing close to the train stations and along bus lines, add bike lanes and make their streets more walkable. The state’s department of housing is offering millions of dollars to developments that are “transit-oriented” and emphasize affordability. Even Vice President Kamala Harris has campaigned on a promise to streamline permitting to encourage more construction of transit-oriented housing.

In Season 3 of KQED’s podcast Sold Out: Rethinking Housing in America, we looked at how difficult it can be for sprawling cities like San José, which were largely built around cars, to be retrofitted for pedestrians. But what if we started from scratch? A year later, we follow California Forever’s East Solano Plan, an ambitious proposal to build a dense, walkable, transit-rich city in Solano County.

The company’s subsidiary, Flannery Associates, began in 2017 by purchasing thousands of acres of farmland in the Montezuma Hills. For years, no one knew who was behind the company or why it was purchasing land there.

But on August 25, 2023, a New York Times story revealed a cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires were behind the project. The company quickly created a website, which named Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader and education tech founder, as its CEO.

“California Forever is an attempt to make sure that the Bay Area remains the center of innovation and prosperity that it’s been for the last 50 years,” Sramek said during a summit hosted by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz. “We’re doing that by building a new city, the first new city in the Bay Area that has been proposed or built in the last 50 years.”

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A group called California Forever, backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, made national headlines last year after it came forward as the mysterious buyer of large chunks of land surrounding Travis Air Force Base. It spent some $2 million in the first three months of 2024 on a campaign to convince voters it should be allowed to build a city from scratch with as many as 400,000 residents in Eastern Solano County. But since going public, California Forever has been met with harsh criticism from several lawmakers, affordable housing advocates and residents. Even so, they've gathered enough signatures to qualify its measure for the November ballot.

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But because of a policy passed in the 1990s in Solano County, California Forever has to get voter approval before it can build on farmland.

The path to the ballot box is anything but easy as the mostly rural and suburban county comes under the national spotlight because of this controversial project. We follow along to see what it takes to build something of this scale in California.