A City From Scratch

This episode is about an ambitious project to erect an entire new city in California, from scratch, about a one-hour drive north of San Francisco.

The company that wants to build this city is called California Forever. It has bought about 70,000 acres of land in Solano County, starting in 2017. That’s about the size of two San Franciscos or one-and-a-half Miamis.

What California Forever wants the city to be is two things.

First: an urbanist, walkable city of about 400,000-500,000 people; zoned for density instead of suburban sprawl, with housing to rent or buy that’s affordable to middle income families; cool amenities; and located in a place where you would not expect to find it.

Second: a tech manufacturing center, with new factories making actual physical stuff, and a big shipbuilding operation. A place that creates new jobs and businesses and tax revenues for the people that move there and the surrounding communities.

Any project like this is immensely complicated, having to figure out transportation, engineering and logistical problems, waste disposal, how to attract people and businesses to the city, navigate local politics and how city governance is gonna work.

Above all, California Forever has to figure out how to build something new and urban in California — a state with lots of wonderful stuff but also a place that’s known for its NIMBY dynamics, high taxes, zoned for suburban sprawl and single-family homes, endless regulatory or environmental reviews, water issues, union negotiations.

The country needs more experiments like this. And many states, not just California, need to discover, or rediscover, the virtues of making it easier to create new housing and businesses, build factories, attract people, and just do stuff generally. And even if this project doesn’t work out, at least the rest of us get to learn the valuable economic and social lessons of what works and what doesn’t.

Although Cardiff is rooting for the project to succeed, he also has quite a few questions about it. And it just so happens that this episode’s guest is exactly the person who can answer those questions. Jan Sramek is the Founder and CEO of California Forever. He started the company with the backing of tech investors and founders including John and Patrick Collison, Laurene Powell, Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, and a few others.

Related links:

• California Forever website
• California Forever project overview deck
• Clear a path for sweeping urban experiments such as California Forever (LAT)
• A City Is Broke. Can Billionaires’ Urbanist Dream Offer It a Last Chance? (NYT)