• How $900 million can create a new city on 60,000 acres in Solano County

• Solving the “chicken and egg” problem of developing a thriving community

• Why it won’t be that complicated to build and run if voters approve

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Watch it in full here.

Solana: As a very little kid, for years my family would drive down from Jersey to Walt Disney World. We’d go camping at Fort Wilderness and we’d go to Disney and the Magic Kingdom and Epcot and see the incredible infrastructure everywhere — monorails and ferries — and as a kid, I was always shocked at the fact that this was a city, it was an interesting city that seemed to play by its own set of rules, totally different than the rest of the country.

And I remember wondering why other cities weren’t as nice as it was — I just was fascinated by the idea. It’s something that I’ve always had an intellectual interest in. And then 2020 happened. I was living in San Francisco when I conceived of Pirate Wires, and a big motivation for me was just processing what I was seeing out my window. Suddenly the idea of building a new city took on a different life. Jan, why don’t you just start? Who are you and what are you working on?

Jan Sramek: I’m the founder and CEO of California Forever, a city we’re building outside of San Francisco. I grew up in a tiny town of a thousand people in the Czech Republic in a very blue collar, rural area. And then through scholarships, I was able to live in some of the greatest towns and cities in the world. I lived in the old York and the old Cambridge and London and Zurich. I worked in finance for a number of years as an investor and trader. And then I worked on software startups in education for five years and eventually ended up in the Bay Area. And I love the place for all of the reasons everyone does, right? It’s the cultural openness, the innovation ecosystem, this unique combination of talent and creativity and capital. But I was not enamored with the physical place itself, particularly outside of San Francisco. And that was really the genesis of this idea back in 2014, 2015, and we can get more into that later.

Solana: Jan, can you break down what exactly is California Forever and how is it different from what we’ve seen over the last few years in this space?

Jan Sramek: California Forever is building a new city for up to 400,000 people in a place called Solano County, about halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. I’ve been working on this for eight years. We’ve raised $950 million, we’ve purchased over 60,000 acres, and we are building a city on about 17,000 of those acres. That’s about two-thirds the size of San Francisco. Really our goal is to create more room in the Bay and to build a city that the Bay Area deserves. We’re trying to build a very traditional urbanism, 19th-century American urbanism, a place that most people born in 1900 would recognize. And so you could think of a place that looks like the West Village in New York or Georgetown in D.C. or Noe Valley or the Marina in San Francisco.

Now, we do think we can improve on the design of those places, but that’s the core of it. And then we’re going to surround it with a greenbelt of open space and agriculture and solar farms and wind farms. In terms of framing it, I do think it’s different in that if I go back further, I think we had a new towns movement in the U.K. and in America that started in the 1900s and really was popular in the States in the sixties, and we built places like Reston and Columbia and The Woodlands and Summerlin and Irvine. They were really new town-scale projects, but they were very suburban. So some of them are today the best in class suburban communities, but they are not what you’d call a dense walkable city.

And then, in the last 20 years, there’s been this renaissance of what now is called New Urbanism, where after decades and decades of building what the urbanists would call sprawl, a subgroup of people have gone back and said, hey, we need to build more walkable places again. And they’ve built some spectacular places, but they tend to be on the smaller side. There’s places like Seaside or Alice Beach in Florida — and really the northeast has been probably the best place for this in the country — but they tend to be more like vacation towns. They tend to be places for 5,000 to 10,000 people. And they haven’t really confronted the big questions of scale. If you’re trying to build a walkable place, how do you make it scale to hundreds of thousands of people? I think we sit in a kind of unique quadrant in that sense, in that it’s meant to be both workable and a genuine economic engine and genuine city with employers and industrial parks and hospitals and college campuses and so on.

We’re also quite different from some of the attempts to build new cities that have come out of tech. If you look at what Sidewalk was doing at Google or what other people have announced, we are distinctly not a “smart city.” I’ve used the word “dumb city.” We’re trying to do something new in that we’re trying to build in atoms and go back to the time when California could build in the physical world. We’re not going to put sensors on every crossroad and in every toilet and none of that smart city thinking that I think has actually poisoned the well for tech when we’ve tried to do that.

Solana: You’re talking about something that’s much more Lindy. A moment ago you said this is modeled off of 19th century walkability. Devin, what is it about that period of time and the walkability? America is an easy place to be an optimist. But, in fact, our cities have gotten a lot worse. Separate from all of the politics, a big part of that is cars. What are we missing? What — if any — resistance are people facing to the notion of going back to something that we know works, that we know is beautiful, that we know we want to live in?

Devon Zuegel: I think that really captures one thing that’s so cool about California Forever: it’s incredibly futuristic and bold, but the key aspect of it is that it has deep respect for lessons that we’ve learned the hard way over the last 100 years about urbanism. When the car arose, everyone thought it was the panacea that would solve every problem.I am not a car hater, I’m actually a big fan of cars, but they have their place, and using them in every single moment, every single day is not necessarily the right thing. A single parking space is the size of a small bedroom. Once you start thinking about the width of our streets and the amount of space that is taken up simply for car storage, it ends up taking away space from people. There’s lessons that we’ve learned about how cars spread everything out. And by making everything farther apart, suddenly now you need a car because everything’s spread out. So all the distances are no longer human-scale. When you live in the New York metro area, where is the single most desirable place? It’s the West Village, which was built a long time ago. The newer neighborhoods just tend not to have as much attraction. I could talk about that endlessly, but something that’s really interesting about cities is that it’s something that we’ve seemed to get worse at over time, not better.

Why Don’t We Build New Cities?

Solana: We were asking this question of, ‘Why can’t we build new cities anymore? What is holding us back?’ And it seems to me like the big thing holding us back is our idea about building new things — maybe even our suspicion of something like this. You’ve received a lot of ferocious pushback. I noticed immediately some of it was on class grounds, and you expect that from the tech press. It’s sort of like, “Billionaires are doing something,” type attack. Maybe part of it is people thinking this is for rich people and not anyone else. But some people are also saying that it was just not possible, that this is like a pie-in-the-sky sort of thing. Where do you think this idea that your project is not possible has come from? What do you think is fueling that? Do you have any insight into that at all or any kind of suspicion about it?

Jan Sramek: I think at a high level, it goes against the order of things in some sense. I mean, we used to build new cities all the time and we haven’t done it much in California in a long time. So people are trying to figure it out, and slot it into some kind of a box.

Now, I think if you look at it rationally and you unpack the arguments, they’re all basically ridiculous. Just to mention a few, you have the attack on the investors — which is funny because in 2015 or 2016, the elite opinion in the Bay Area was that the investors and the founders of these companies were wasting their time building stupid apps to send text messages back and forth, and they should really be investing in the real world to help hard-working Californian families. And I was there in 2017 raising hundreds of millions from these people who were investing in a project that has a 20-, 30-year payback and doing exactly the kind of thing that the media was calling for. Now that they’ve done it, the media is all upset — “how dare they invest in the real economy, go back to building apps.” So that’s ridiculous.

Then, the idea that we shouldn’t be building new cities is crazy. First of all, it’s become completely acceptable in California to say that you’re building artificial general intelligence. You’re building a piece of code that’s going to be smarter than a human. Not controversial at all. That’s accepted wisdom. But the idea that — when we get to a place where a not-very-nice house costs $5 million dollars and teachers can’t afford to live here — we should maybe take some piece of ground that isn’t prime farmland, isn’t sensitive ecological habitat, and build some houses there so that teachers don’t have to have three-hour commutes is now controversial. That’s insane.

And another way to think about it is, we’ve been building cities for 5,000, 10,000 years. What a lot of the arguments of the opposition basically boil down to is, after building cities for 5,000 years, we now have the exact correct number of cities. We’ve got all the cities. We’ve reached the pinnacle, and if we ever build one additional city after 5,000 years of building, it’s the end of the world. That’s very, very bad. It’s particularly ridiculous in a country like America, where every city is basically a new city by European scale, right? It’s crazy.

Solana: On the housing thing specifically, it does blow my mind that there would be so much pushback for something that is so important. The average person intuitively grasps that we need to do something about housing because everything comes down to it.

Jan Sramek: I would actually say that one of the things I’ve been most surprised by is that — in California over the last five years — the average person really has understood that supply matters. I think some of the media has been pretty negative, and in every community you have five or ten percent of people who just hate change and they are going to protest it. But we talked to the average voter in Solano County, and basically they get it.

It’s been amazing. You talk to someone in a coffee shop and you ask them, ‘Hey, what do you think about [the project]?’ People are overwhelmingly in favor of it. And we ask them why, and they say, ‘Well, I want my kids to live here and we don’t have enough houses.’ So I think in California, something broke in the last 10 years in a good way, where people actually are understanding that the supply matters. That’s one of the things that made me optimistic about this when I started — I think it got bad enough that people understood it. We also have an interesting case study where you can easily show people a chart of how much housing is getting built in Texas, and how affordable it is — and how much is getting built in California, and how expensive it is. We have that A/B test and people understand it in a different way, so I think the winds have shifted on this.

How It’s Getting Built

Solana: I have a bunch more abstract and tactical questions, but I want to just hammer down exactly what you are doing in terms of the process now. I didn’t realize quite how much you raised, you said a couple hundred million or hundreds of millions?

Jan Sramek: Over $900 million.

Solana: What are the steps forward now? Take me from now until city. What has to happen?

Jan Sramek: We had stage one, which was to buy the land, and that was seven years. Basically, raise the money and purchase the land, and we purchased over 60,000 acres.

Now, the second stage is really design plus approvals, and that’s about a two to three year process. We announced it six months ago, we talked to the community, we took the input, we designed this plan, and we’re putting the plan on the November 2024 ballot. In the general election, every voter in Solano County is going to vote on this: changing the general plan and changing the zoning to permit the creation of this new community. All with a set of voter guarantees about how many jobs we’re going to create, how much those jobs are going to pay, how much money we’re going to contribute to making the homes more affordable to residents, and how much we’re going to invest in existing downtowns out here.

After that, we would go through environmental review and negotiate something called a development agreement, which is a more detailed version of the approvals. Hopefully, that’s going to be done in 2026 and then, subject to resolving any remaining disputes over the environmental impact report, we should be able to start building in 2027. Now, that’s a pretty ambitious timeline by California standards. It’s going to require a lot of things to go right to make it happen. But I do think there’s this cultural moment in California where people are sick and tired of high-speed rail taking 25 years to build because of environmental permitting. We are hoping to be part of the movement to say that once something’s been approved, particularly by the voters in California, we should be able to break ground in two years and not waste years and millions of dollars on legal fees, consultants, and all of that.

Solana: Are you building everything, or are you inviting people to come and build after you’ve received approval?

Jan Sramek: We’re inviting people to build. [Cities] are platforms for lots of different people to come and make their lives, lots of different businesses and developers to come and build. We’ll be one of the developers, but I would expect that we do 10, 20, 30% of the development, and then many other people will come and build on the platform.

Devon Zuegel: One thing that’s so cool about this is that it lowers the threshold for the size of a developer to be able to work on a project. And that’s in two key ways: right now in California, because it’s so hard to get through the regulatory barriers to be able to build something, you have to be a huge company for the most part to be able to build a project, because it just takes a lot of lawyers and relationships with the city to be able to get something through. That means that smaller developers who build those really richly detailed, beautiful buildings that are part of the community are pushed out of the market. But in California Forever, smaller developers will be able to participate.

Solana: Who’s going to live in this city? So this is a Bay Area project. You have a lot of people living in San Francisco right now. You have a lot of people living south of that, the engineers and whatnot. People want to be where other people are. So you have what seems like a bit of a chicken and egg problem. How do you think about solving that problem?

Jan Sramek: I was convinced that this would make sense because we’re not building a new network. We’re extending an existing one. So I’m much more optimistic about this than about someone trying to build a city in the middle of nowhere in Texas. Walnut Creek is half an hour away from the site. Now, I think that one of the obvious markets for us is going to be young families. If you think about a young family living in the Bay Area who might be having kids or they just had kids: You want to stay in the Bay Area, you want to see your friends, but I think the majority of people by now really want to live in a walkable neighborhood, and you don’t really have a good choice. Most people can’t afford to live in San Francisco, and right now it has other challenges, with homelessness and schools and so on. Or you could move to a place like the Peninsula or Walnut Creek or Lafayette, but that’s still very expensive, and then you don’t have walkable neighborhoods. Your kids aren’t going to be able to walk to school, you’re not really going to be able to walk to a coffee shop, or if you are, it’s going to be a small number of them.

And so as long as we can build a large Phase 1, which we think of as a town for 10,000 people, that gets built pretty quickly, within a couple of years. And as long as we have 10 good restaurants and a grocery store and two coffee shops (one that’s pretentious and that isn’t) and then we have a couple of bars and your kids can genuinely walk to school and the streets are safe and it’s fun and you can buy a home for a price that you can afford – there is 10,000 people in both Solano County and in the Bay Area who want to live there. And then you build on that gradually.

Who Will Run It

Solana: Is this going to be run like a standard city once it’s built? Or is it more like Disney style, like a corporation running the city? How do you keep it safe? Obviously Disney can, but San Francisco doesn’t seem capable.

Jan Sramek: Yeah, we will be what you would call an unincorporated community for a long time. And there’s a bunch of them in California. So generally, how these new cities go is they start out as an unincorporated community. What that means is the services are provided by the county, and so in our case, the Solano County Sheriff would be providing law enforcement. And the Solano County Sheriff is awesome. He is the opposite of what happens in San Francisco. And so these streets are going to be safe, I can tell you that.

What the company does is the company builds the infrastructure. We’ll build the wastewater treatment plant, the water treatment plant, the roads, the sewers, we’ll build some of the houses, we’ll work with other developers to build the houses and the offices, we’re going to operate some of those buildings. But then, everything that you would think about as the government and the public services will be provided by the county. I mean, L. A. County has probably a million people living in unincorporated areas, where the county provides the services.

Solana: A couple of sort of nitty gritty questions — I want to know about water. Where do you plan on getting it from? I know water in California is always a hot issue.

Jan Sramek: At a high level, I think the water question in California is 50% optics, 40% politics, 10% actual shortage. If you look at water use in California, 94% of it is used for agriculture. The cities only use about 6% of the water. And then a good example of how we’re going to get the water is we have an almond orchard on our site that was planted in what the local farmers will tell you should have never been planted as an almond orchard. The soil is not good enough, so it doesn’t actually produce that many almonds. That almond orchard is on about two and a half thousand acres. It uses enough water to supply 100,000 residents. One almond orchard [that] doesn’t even make money today, by the way, and it consumes as much water as a city of a hundred thousand people.

The New Frontier

Solana: Say this works, you guys get exactly what you want. The housing goes up, the community is built. It’s a great success. How do you both see this changing the country? You were alluding to the California changes that you could see, or even the local San Francisco changes you could see. Are you yourself interested in doing more of these across the country?

Devon Zuegel: Gosh, I hope so. I think that this could really be an inspiration for people building across the country. In the U.S., people are building new cities — they just don’t call them that. They call them subdivisions, and for the most part, they’re really badly designed, they use a lot of land, and they make us more isolated and away from each other.

One thing that I admire about the new urbanist approach is this idea: What if you could build a city in a way where each person that gets added to it contributes more and makes it better, as opposed to exclusivity being the thing that’s being sold. Because I think in most places across the country, what gets sold is that you’re not going to have to deal with any neighbors. You’re going to have as big of a lot as possible. And that’s great for some people. But that is sort of the only option that’s on offer right now. That’s the only way that you can live in a new community, is if you are buying that dream of exclusivity. And frankly, it doesn’t scale very well. It uses a lot of land, it’s super expensive. The infrastructure costs are astronomical. It’s really bad for the environment. So if we can build in a new way, then people who are looking for more walkable communities, then I think that’s a healthier way to live. At the very least, we need to be building some of them.

Jan Sramek: To me, the other part of it is that I am excited about the idea of reopening a physical frontier in America. For such a long time, it was a country that was defined by the sense of frontier. First it was the West, then space and industrialization and new technologies. Hollywood was another good one. And then it was the early internet and tech and that’s remained the case. But I think there’s something about a physical frontier rather than a digital frontier that’s really important for the collective imagination of the nation.

I think there is this malaise that we can’t build in the physical world anymore and everything takes 30 years. If we can crack a code on this and show that we can still build big things, but also beautiful things, and build them quickly, and have this sense of frontier, I think that would really change the conversation.

Solana: I do think about the earlier critique of the shock at the arrogance that it would take to think that you can build something so — in their mind — ambitious. One, it’s not that shocking. Two, it should happen. And the fact that you’ve internalized the idea that it can’t is extremely bad for the entire country. I hope — I know — that it will happen because I think it has to happen. I think that’s just where we are on the arc of American history right now. When it comes to urbanization and cities and the insanity of local politics specifically, I think people want things to change no more so than they do in the Bay Area, which is why I am sort of excited about the Bay Area right now. Because in a weird way, it’s where I see most of the people fighting for something new. I’m very excited about this. I think it’s the antidote. I think that if you get something like this to work, you have consequences across the country. No one can ever say it’s impossible anymore. You just point to what works and you say, why not that? Why isn’t it as good as that?