Silicon Valley’s plans for a startup city are on hold.
The East Solano Plan — a proposal backed by a roster of technology billionaires to build a city of up to 400,000 people on farmland about 60 miles from San Francisco — is being delayed at least two years to study the project’s impact on the environment, the company behind the development said in a statement.
The proposed city was meant to be a walkable urban community in a rural corner of the San Francisco Bay Area that is now home to sheep farms and windmills. Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who came up with the plan and is now CEO of the company behind it, pitched it as a way to build significantly more housing, something California badly needs, in a short amount of time.
The company’s investors, a who’s who of Silicon Valley, included a number of billionaires, among them LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman and Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs.
But the proposal created tension in the area. California Forever, the company driving the development, spent years buying some $900 million of farmland without revealing anything about the identities of its backers or plans for a new city. As its land holdings grew and surrounded Travis Air Force Base on three sides, neighbors and members of Congress feared it could be linked to foreign spies.
The company further alienated neighbors by filing a $500 million antitrust lawsuit saying that a group of farmers who had refused to sell their land were colluding to raise prices. Despite being locked in an expensive legal battle, those neighbors had no idea who was behind the company until The New York Times revealed it last year, sowing fear and mistrust that only seemed to grow.
Last week, a report commissioned by Solano County estimated the full project would require tens of billions in infrastructure investment but warned that details about the development remained so vague it was hard to assess its full impact. While most large projects often go through years of study, the report noted that “this was filed with the county only a few months after the public became aware of intentions of the proponents.”
The delay announced Monday was part of a joint agreement between California Forever and Mitch Mashburn, a member of the Solano County Board of Supervisors. In a statement, Mashburn said that “while the need for more affordable housing and good-paying jobs has merit, the timing has been unrealistic.”
The agreement means that a ballot initiative, which the company had hoped to put before Solano County voters this year, will not appear on the November ballot as planned. California Forever said it would instead spend the rest of this year and next preparing an environmental impact report and trying to craft a development agreement with the county.
The project would still have to go before voters to win final approval.
In an interview, John Garamendi, a Democratic member of Congress from the area and frequent critic of the new city proposal, said, “The California Forever pipe dream is in a permanent deep freeze.”
Over the past decade, California’s Legislature and cities have passed dozens of new laws that lower the regulatory burdens on new development in hopes of making housing cheaper and easier to build. But most of those efforts focus on adding density to existing cities and neighborhoods.
Sramek’s plan was, in essence, a new twist on a planned community, but instead of cul-de-sac subdivisions, he proposed a design to evoke city neighborhoods with row houses, bike lanes and nearby retail where residents could walk to do their grocery shopping. In interviews he said that while he was in favor of the state’s efforts to build housing in urban cores, the plans were moving too slowly, and the state needed to reconsider its aversion to developments on the edges of cities where a lot of housing could be built at once — projects that were maligned as sprawl.
Solano County has a long-standing “orderly growth” ordinance that prohibits large developments outside urban areas, so the company’s plan couldn’t go forward without voters first agreeing to amend the law.
California Forever has spent the last year trying to charm Solano County residents into supporting its plan — erecting billboards, opening offices and holding town hall meetings where Sramek promised to create thousands of new jobs and make hundreds of millions in community investments.
But residents remained skeptical. A poll conducted by Solano Together, a coalition of opponents that is mostly a mix of agricultural and environmental organizations, showed that the measure was headed for defeat in November. In an interview Sramek said that if the election were to have gone forward, it would have been “a coin flip.”
He said the company would now try to go to the voters in 2026, with the hope that support would be bolstered by an environmental report and development agreement.
“This is a better process,” he said. “If this is done right, there’s a good chance it will at worst keep the timeline the same.”
David George, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz and one of California Forever’s investors, said the environmental study would give voters more information to make a decision about the plan. “This is an audacious, complex project and the leadership team has achieved an extraordinary amount over the past nine months,” he said.
Opponents seemed hopeful that the delay was the beginning of the end of the project.
In a statement, Solano Together said it was working to extend the orderly growth initiative that had so far prevented East Solano from becoming a reality. Much like their opponents, the group said it would continue to advocate for jobs and affordable homes, with the caveat that they were “in our existing communities.”
