The Wall Street Journal has published a fascinating story about California Forever, the Silicon Valley-backed effort to build an entirely new city in Solano County, about 90 minutes from San Francisco.
The company is led by Jan Sramek, a 39-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader who has raised approximately $1 billion from some of the largest names in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. California Forever secretly accumulated approximately 60,000 acres with the ultimate objective of constructing a master-planned community that could eventually accommodate 400,000 people.
The development was envisioned as a walkable alternative to traditional suburban sprawl, with housing, parks, commercial districts, advanced manufacturing and access to public transportation. California Forever also sought to develop a major shipyard along the Sacramento River.
The shipyard briefly appeared to provide the project with the economic anchor it badly needed. Saronic Technologies, a rapidly growing manufacturer of autonomous naval vessels, was considering a $3 billion facility that was estimated to create as many as 10,000 jobs.
State officials were understandably excited when the Solano County site made the company’s short list. Major projects that supply good jobs, economic development, and tax revenue are not easy to find.
Ten months later, Saronic selected Brownsville, Texas.
That loss is now part of a bitter dispute over who is responsible: an inflexible county government incapable of acting with sufficient urgency, or a wealthy and aggressive developer that managed to alienate many of the people whose cooperation it needed.
The answer, as is often the case in municipal government, appears to be both.
California and the Failure to Build
I have previously written about Abundance, the important book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that calls upon Democrats—and government generally—to rediscover the ability to build.
The authors devote considerable attention to California, one of the wealthiest and most technologically advanced places in the world. If considered as a stand-alone economy, California would rank among the largest economies on the planet. It is home to extraordinary universities, immense pools of capital, innovative companies and some of the most talented people in the world.
It also has the nation’s worst housing affordability problem, a severe homelessness crisis, and a high-speed rail project that has consumed years and billions of dollars without carrying a single passenger between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Klein and Thompson argue that government, particularly in progressive states, has become much better at stopping projects than completing them. Environmental review, zoning restrictions, litigation, procurement rules, fragmented authority and innumerable opportunities for appeal have accumulated over time. Many of these requirements were adopted for legitimate reasons. Together, however, they can create a system in which almost every organized interest has the ability to delay a project while no public official has sufficient authority—or accepts sufficient responsibility—to ensure that anything actually gets built.
California Forever presents an almost perfect test of that proposition.
California needs housing. Solano County has lost major employers, including a Budweiser brewery and a Valero refinery. Sramek proposed housing, advanced manufacturing, a shipyard and thousands of well-paid jobs. He assembled capital, hired prominent urban planners and attracted the attention and support of state officials, including Governor Gavin Newsom.
When Saronic began looking at the Solano County site, Sramek warned state officials that the approval process could prevent California from competing successfully for the project. That warning proved accurate. Saronic chose Texas, where it believed it could proceed more quickly.
For advocates of Abundance, it is difficult to imagine a clearer example. California publicly says that it wants new housing, advanced manufacturing and good jobs. When presented with a project offering all three, its governing institutions could not move quickly enough to secure even the industrial component.
On budget and on time. What a thought.
The Developer’s Original Sin
There is, however, another side to this story, and it is not a minor one.
California Forever did not begin with an open proposal to Solano County and an invitation for the community to help shape it. Its investors quietly purchased tens of thousands of acres through an entity called Flannery Associates without disclosing who was behind the purchases or what they intended to do with the land.
The secrecy naturally generated suspicion. The properties are located near Travis Air Force Base, causing federal officials to investigate whether the buyer might be connected to a foreign government. Residents eventually learned that the secretive purchaser was backed by some of the richest and most influential investors in Silicon Valley.
The secrecy was followed by an even more damaging decision. Flannery sued multigenerational farming families that resisted selling, alleging that they had conspired to inflate land prices. The lawsuit reportedly sought hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
There may have been a legal basis for the claim. Politically, it was disastrous.
A group of extremely wealthy outsiders had secretly purchased an enormous amount of land and then sued local farmers who would not sell on the terms offered. When the group’s ultimate purpose was finally disclosed, residents learned that it intended to build a city that might someday contain nearly as many people as the entire existing population of Solano County.
That is not a public-relations difficulty that can be corrected with a few town-hall meetings.
It changed the fundamental political character of the proposal. Residents were not simply being asked whether they supported an imaginative response to California’s housing shortage. They were being asked whether they trusted a powerful organization that had concealed its identity, acquired the land, sued some of their neighbors and designed the broad outlines of the county’s future before openly introducing itself.
Sramek compounded the problem with his rhetoric, at one point referring dismissively to opponents as the “70-year-old Sierra Club type.”
At a public meeting, one resident offered him some very basic advice:
“You need to work on your soft skills.”
Wall Street Journal, “Silicon Valley’s Dream City Has Crashed Into Small-Town Politics,” October 10, 2026
For a municipal official, the significance of that advice is readily apparent. A development of this magnitude cannot be advanced through land acquisition, legal strategy and lobbying alone. It requires the developer to establish credibility with existing residents, local officials and the institutions that will be responsible for reviewing—and ultimately living with—the project. California Forever began spending that political capital before it had earned any.
Political Legitimacy Is Infrastructure
Sramek appears to have regarded local politics as another technical obstacle that could be managed.
Land could be purchased. Lawyers could handle unwilling sellers. Urban planners could design the community. Lobbyists could work with Sacramento. Consultants could develop the ballot campaign. Public opposition could be addressed after the basic shape of the project had already been determined.
Municipal and county governments do not work that way.
Public trust is not an amenity that can be added after the site plan is complete. For a project of this magnitude, it is part of the essential infrastructure.
California Forever spent millions seeking approval of a 2024 ballot initiative that would have exempted the project from Solano County’s antisprawl rules. The company withdrew the measure after polling showed that it was likely to lose badly.
After that retreat, Sramek and County Supervisor Mitch Mashburn publicly agreed to slow the process and work together. California Forever then developed a new route. Instead of relying upon the county to approve the development, it pursued the annexation of more than 22,000 acres by Suisun City, a four-square-mile municipality with approximately 30,000 residents.
The attraction for Suisun City is understandable. California Forever offered to cover project-related expenses, pay the city $10 million if the annexation is completed, and discussed investments that could assist the financially struggling municipality. For California Forever, annexation offered a potential path around the county’s restrictions on development outside existing municipal boundaries.
Again, there may be nothing unlawful about that strategy. But to county officials and project opponents, it looked like another effort to bypass the community that appeared poised to reject the original plan.
The same pattern continued when California officials attempted to create a faster approval process for a future shipyard. Solano County officials objected that they were again being asked to accept a process designed without giving them a meaningful role. The county supervisors rejected the proposal and chose to study the matter further.
Newsom publicly rebuked them for failing to act. From the state’s perspective, Solano County had helped California lose a transformative industrial investment and then declined to make the changes needed to compete for the next one.
From the county’s perspective, Sramek and the state were once again trying to force through decisions while treating local government as an impediment rather than a participant.
The entire development now may depend upon a tax-sharing agreement between Suisun City and Solano County. County officials contend that they cannot be compelled to enter such an agreement. What began as a vision for a new city has become a struggle over annexation, governmental authority and the allocation of future tax revenue.
Anyone who has spent time in municipal government could have predicted that result.
The Difficult Lesson of Abundance
The California Forever story does not disprove the argument advanced by Klein and Thompson. In many respects, it reinforces it.
A $3 billion shipyard and an estimated 10,000 jobs went to Texas while California officials, local officials and the developer argued over authority and process. California may have compelling environmental protections and extensive opportunities for public participation, but none of those protections will sustain public confidence if the ultimate product of government is paralysis.
Passing legislation is not enough. Announcing housing goals is not enough. Adopting climate objectives is not enough. Government must be able to convert its promises into housing, energy, transportation and jobs.
But California Forever also highlights an important qualification to the Abundance argument.
Not every objection is obstruction. Not every environmental review is a disguised effort to stop growth. Not every public hearing is evidence of governmental incapacity. Large projects create real costs, require public infrastructure and permanently alter the communities in which they are located.
Speed cannot simply mean transferring effective decision-making power from government to people with enough money to assemble land and hire lobbyists.
California may have created too many ways to stop a worthwhile project. Sramek gave Solano County residents unusually good reasons to use every one of them.
He may have been right about California’s inability to build. He was badly wrong if he believed that being right relieved him of the obligation to earn public trust.
Who Is Responsible?
The developer deserves substantial responsibility for creating the political crisis.
The secret land purchases, the lawsuits against farming families, the scale of the proposal, the dismissive treatment of some opponents and the attempt to use Suisun City to circumvent county resistance all reinforced the public’s original suspicions. Sramek treated political legitimacy as something that could be obtained after the deal had been assembled.
Solano County, however, also bears responsibility for failing to distinguish between its distrust of the developer and the merits of a specific industrial project.
The county did not have to approve a city for 400,000 people in order to work aggressively on a shipyard. It could have imposed conditions, protected taxpayers, demanded enforceable infrastructure commitments and retained its regulatory authority while recognizing that 10,000 jobs presented an extraordinary opportunity.
The ability to say no is an important governmental power. The capacity to negotiate a responsible yes is a more difficult—and sometimes more valuable—one.
California Forever therefore presents a challenge to both sides.
The Abundance movement must recognize that democratic legitimacy and community participation cannot simply be dismissed as friction. Local government must recognize that process is a means of reaching a decision, not a substitute for making one. And that decision- making process should not last forever.
The original California Forever strategy has largely blown up. The ballot initiative was withdrawn. The shipyard went to Texas. The broader development remains caught in a struggle among the developer, Suisun City and Solano County.
The project is not necessarily dead. California Forever still owns an enormous amount of land, possesses considerable financial backing and continues to pursue annexation and development. But whatever eventually emerges will be shaped as much by the political mistakes of its founder as by the merits of its urban design.
The resident who advised Sramek to work on his soft skills may have offered the most important planning advice he received.
Transparency, coalition building, negotiation, respect for existing institutions and the judgment to understand when not to use every available legal advantage are often described as soft skills. For a project of this scale, they are hard infr
The Wall Street Journal Article on California Forever.
The California Forever Plan Overview
A Look at my review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Joint statement by Solano County and California Forever
