Table of Contents
What if the solution to California's housing crisis wasn't more subsidies or regulations, but simply building an entirely new city from scratch? Jan Sramek thinks he's found the answer.
Key Takeaways
- California Forever plans to build a brand-new walkable city in Solano County, with first residents moving in by 2028
- The project sits on 17,500 acres of marginal farmland, turning 600 landowners into millionaires while displacing virtually no one
- Unlike typical affordable housing approaches, this focuses on increasing supply rather than subsidizing demand
- The new city will create over 15,000 jobs and includes a $400 million down payment assistance program
- Historical precedents like Columbia, Maryland and Irvine, California prove new cities can succeed in America
- The project goes to Solano County voters in November 2024, making it a truly democratic decision
- Sustainability features include negative carbon footprint through integrated solar, wind, and innovative heat recycling systems
- Construction alone represents a $30 billion investment creating 10,000+ local jobs over 15 years
From European Streets to Silicon Valley's Housing Nightmare
Jan Sramek's story starts in a tiny Czech Republic town of just 1,000 people. For the first 16 years of his life, he experienced the magic of truly walkable communities where you could stroll to school and bump into neighbors on every corner. But here's what shaped his vision even more - the next decade living car-free across Europe's most beloved cities.
"I lived in old York, Cambridge, London, then Zurich," Sramek recalls. "From age 16 to 26, I didn't own a car and didn't drive once in that whole 10-year period. It was this completely bizarre experience now that I think about it, but it was really magical - this sense of freedom and not having to depend on the car."
That European foundation collided head-on with Bay Area reality when Sramek arrived in 2013. Here was this legendary place of innovation and opportunity, the global center of technological progress. Yet the whole system seemed designed to squander its own potential through an artificial housing shortage.
The absurdity hit him immediately. "The whole world was trying to build its own version of Silicon Valley, and all Silicon Valley had to do to capture that opportunity was build more housing and real estate," he explains. "Instead of new jobs being celebrated, they were ripping communities apart because they were pushing higher the cost of housing."
What started as idle curiosity evolved into something approaching an obsession. The more Sramek learned about California's housing dynamics, the clearer it became that the state was engaged in what he calls "the greatest squandering of economic opportunity in the history of mankind." That's not hyperbole when you consider the trillions of dollars in value creation happening in this tiny geographic area.
Why Building New Beats Fixing Old
Most housing advocates focus on familiar solutions - more subsidies, relaxed zoning, affordable housing programs. It's the standard playbook that artificial intelligence would probably recommend too. But Sramek discovered something counterintuitive through his year working on infill development: even if you perfect every existing approach, California's missing millions of housing units means it still won't be enough.
The math is actually pretty straightforward, though painful to accept. "We're missing three million homes in California," Sramek notes. "Working on infill was going to be part of the solution, maybe the main part, but because of the scale of what we're missing, it wasn't going to be enough."
This gets to the heart of why California Forever takes such a different approach than typical affordable housing initiatives. Instead of fighting over the same limited housing stock through subsidies and assistance programs, they're dramatically expanding supply. Think about it this way - if California only produced 5 million iPhones total and everyone wanted one, you could subsidize them all you want but most people still wouldn't get one.
Tokyo provides the perfect real-world example of this supply-focused strategy. Despite Japan's overall population decline, Tokyo keeps growing. But because they actually build housing to meet demand, you can still get a decent apartment in this world-class global city for about $1,000 per month. They just build a lot, and housing stays affordable as a result.
Even Texas, for all its other issues, demonstrates this principle. "Houston has actually done a really good job, and if you look at places where the American dream is alive for immigrants, particularly first-generation Americans, Houston has achieved that by building," Sramek points out. The difference in approach is stark - California talks about progressive values while Texas actually delivers affordable housing by letting people build.
The Most Democratic City Planning Process You've Ever Seen
Here's where California Forever gets really interesting from a governance perspective. Rather than the typical process of developers negotiating behind closed doors with planning commissions, this entire project goes directly to Solano County voters in November 2024. Every single one of the roughly 450,000 county residents gets a say in whether they want this new city built.
"This is as democratic as it gets," Sramek emphasizes. "If half the county says we want it here, then the path forward is really clear." It's hard to argue with that logic, especially when you consider how most large development projects typically unfold through bureaucratic processes that give residents little direct input.
The community response has been remarkable. Over 20,000 Solano County residents signed the petition to put the measure on the ballot. More than 70 local businesses have publicly endorsed the initiative. Hundreds of residents have created testimonial videos explaining how the project will benefit their kids and grandkids.
But what's really shifted the conversation is California Forever's track record of actually delivering on promises rather than just making them. "Unlike many politicians, we don't just talk - we actually get stuff done and get stuff built or funded," Sramek says. They've brought employers to the county, backed local nonprofits, launched training programs, and committed to building a badly needed sports complex for regional youth tournaments.
The displacement concerns that initially worried some residents have largely evaporated once people understood the reality. Of the 17,500 acres where the new city will be built, only 21 people currently live there. All of them have long-term leasebacks allowing them to stay as long as they want, or they can relocate to other properties California Forever owns, or move into the new community itself.
Meanwhile, the 600+ landowners who sold their property generally received three to four times market value. Most who wanted to continue farming used those proceeds to buy better agricultural land elsewhere in the region. "We've turned 600 people into millionaires," Sramek notes, "and what they've generally done if they wanted to stay in farming was go buy better land 20 miles north or 10 miles east."
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs - And Why This Isn't Your Typical New Town
Most new city projects fail because of the jobs problem - how do you create economic activity in a place where none previously existed? California Forever sidesteps this challenge entirely by building just 45 miles north of San Francisco, positioning itself to capture the massive job growth that the Bay Area keeps shipping to Texas and Florida.
"We're kind of playing the game on easy mode," Sramek admits. "California and Northern California in particular has spent the last five years shipping tens of thousands of good-paying jobs to Texas and Florida because these companies can't put them here. All we have to do is build more housing and space."
The response from companies has been overwhelmingly positive. They're essentially saying: if you can create a place in Northern California where our employees can actually buy homes, and where we can build offices or factories predictably within a year instead of waiting five years for approvals, we'd love to stay in California.
But California Forever isn't just betting on spillover from the Bay Area. They're strategically targeting industries that build on Solano County's existing strengths. The county has deep roots in advanced manufacturing and defense, with Travis Air Force Base and a long naval tradition. Companies like Hattan, which builds precision parts for jets and rockets, and Zipline, which makes delivery drones, are already planning operations there.
Agriculture represents another natural fit, though with a modern twist. Companies like Living Carbon, which develops trees that sequester more carbon and grow faster, are looking at building a 10 million tree nursery. Plenty plans vertical farms that can produce more food than the entire 175,000 acres of new community land using 99% less water and 95% less land area.
Then there's the construction boom itself - a $30 billion investment over 15 years creating more than 10,000 construction jobs. These aren't temporary positions when you're building an entire city. "We're going to have people who will apprentice, work, become a foreman and supervisor, then retire on this city and never leave," Sramek explains. Many of those workers will live in nearby towns like Fairfield and Vacaville with 10-20 minute commutes.
What's particularly compelling is the vision of construction workers building schools their own kids will attend. "If you're a construction worker and your kids or grandkids are going to go to the school, the school is going to look different. You just care more," Sramek observes.
Learning from History: Why American Cities Used to Be Beautiful
One of the most fascinating aspects of California Forever is how it draws inspiration not from futuristic concepts, but from America's own urban planning heritage. Sramek and his team studied the country's most beloved neighborhoods - places like Noe Valley in San Francisco, Georgetown in DC, West Village in New York - and discovered most were built between 1860 and 1920.
"There's something interesting about building new communities where so much of it is iterative," Sramek notes. "We've been doing this for 5,000-10,000 years. There are all these timeless lessons that our ancestors incorporated about how big to make buildings, how wide streets should be so humans feel safe, what kind of architecture makes people feel welcome."
The design process literally involves putting their plans next to historical examples from Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, and older parts of San Francisco. "There's so much wisdom in those old lessons," he says.
This historical approach explains why the first phase will feature two-to-four-story row houses along walkable shopping streets - the same pattern that made America's great neighborhoods so livable before we "threw it all out in the 40s and 50s" and spent decades rediscovering what we'd lost.
The 5,000 initial residents will get a neighborhood that feels like the best parts of American urbanism, complete with a local shopping street (subsidized initially), grocery store, a couple coffee shops ("one pretentious, the other isn't"), restaurants, and places of worship. Kids will be able to walk safely to school - a simple thing that's become revolutionary in modern America.
Climate Innovation Through Systems Thinking
Starting from scratch allows California Forever to integrate sustainability features that would be impossible to retrofit into existing cities. The result is what Sramek believes will be "the most sustainable city in America, possibly in the world."
The secret is systems-level thinking about energy flows. Instead of treating heat, power, waste, and water as separate systems, everything connects. The sewage treatment plant sits next to the heating plant because wastewater from showers and dishwashing contains significant heat that can be extracted and reused.
Data centers, which normally require massive energy expenditure to cool, get co-located with the thermal heating system. "You can take the heat off and actually get paid for taking it off, reduce power consumption in the data center, and provide cheap or subsidized heating for all the residents," Sramek explains.
The whole community will have a negative carbon footprint thanks to massive solar installations and existing wind farms on the property that remove more carbon from the atmosphere than residents could ever produce. It's the kind of integrated approach that becomes possible when you're designing everything from the ground up with modern knowledge about energy systems.
Why This Might Actually Work
The skeptics have a point - building entire new cities sounds impossibly ambitious. But Sramek's response is refreshingly practical: "It's not rocket science. We are not trying to invent a reusable rocket that lands. We are not trying to cure cancer. We are not trying to invent AI."
The technology for building cities is literally thousands of years old. We need water treatment, sewer treatment, power connections, fiber optic cables, roads, and buildings. "It's become non-controversial to say we can invent software that's as smart as humans or smarter, but somehow people say we can't build houses and factories and a sewer line," he points out.
More importantly, America still builds new communities all the time, especially in Arizona, Texas, and Florida. They often don't call them "new cities" - the term is usually "master-planned communities" - but there are plenty of places that had zero residents 15 years ago and now house 25,000 or 50,000 people.
The historical precedents are even more compelling. Columbia, Maryland and Irvine, California both started in the 1960s as new cities between major metropolitan areas. Today they house 100,000 and 300,000 residents respectively, and both have become job centers with more employment than residents. These places looked like cow pastures 60 years ago.
What makes California Forever potentially different is the combination of walkable design, integrated sustainability systems, democratic approval process, and strategic location between San Francisco and Sacramento. If it works, Sramek hopes it becomes "a model that gets replicated eventually elsewhere in the country."
The timeline is aggressive by California standards but conservative anywhere else - first residents in 2028, growing to 50,000 people over 15+ years. Sramek's wife set the deadline six years ago when she declared their daughter (now two and a half) has to go to school in the new community.
It's exactly the kind of audacious, practical, historically-grounded project that California used to be famous for. Whether it succeeds depends partly on Solano County voters, but mostly on whether America remembers how to build the kinds of places people actually want to live.
