California Forever Plans City of Retro Row Houses

Jan Sramek, who convinced a bevy of Silicon Valley billionaires to invest $800M buying 55,000 acres of rural land in Solano County, has gone public with his campaign to build an entirely new city between San Francisco and Sacramento.

A measure will be on the November 2024 ballot asking Solano County voters if they want to allow urban development in the sparsely populated area, east of Travis Air Force Base, which is mainly farmland, ranchland and dusty hills.

Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader, in an interview on KQED downplayed any futuristic aspects of California Forever, the new name of the project, which was known as Flannery Associates when it was quietly buying up property in Solano County during the past five years.

Sramek said his vision is “a city of yesterday”—more specifically, a city that looks like parts of early 20th-century Philadelphia, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The plans for California Forever, Sramek said, “will be very inspired by those great old American neighborhoods that someone who was born 100 years ago will recognize.”

“We are very different than many of the attempts to build new cities by people who’ve been wooed by the vision of some star architects to build the city of tomorrow. We want to build a city of yesterday,” Sramek told KQED.

The city of yesterday will be filled with row houses, which Sramek said would be “affordable by design.”

“We do believe that one of the dominant types of housing in the new city should be row houses. We think that row houses are some of the most underappreciated types of buildings,” Sramek said. “You can have small construction firms build them. They can be built much more cheaply. They can be single-family row houses where you have a yard.”

In what appeared to be a concession to the initial reaction to the news that a group of billionaires had been secretly buying up a large chunk of the county with plans to build their own city, Sramek suggested that California Forever initially would not incorporate as a city, but instead would submit to county governance.

“This could remain in unincorporated Solano County for a long time. We think government is fine as it is in Solano County. The county does a great job of running the county,” Sramek told KQED.

“And then at some point, it would be a decision of the voters in this new community whether they want to incorporate,” he added.

California Forever will unveil a detailed proposal at the end of the year, Sramek said, promising that the plans will reflect the feedback he receives during a four-month “listening tour” he is conducting in Solano County. He shared some of the feedback in the broadcast interview.

“What we hear in Solano County is, it’s a county that’s become a bedroom community. It’s a county that hasn’t received its fair share of major employers. It hasn’t received its fair share of tax dollars. Many people feel that they’ve been left out,” Sramek said. “We hope that our projects can be a catalyst to bring more investment, bring more tax dollars to Solano County.”

Catherine Moy, mayor of Fairfield—the county seat—remains unconvinced. Moy has vowed to fight the project.

“There are other areas that this group could develop in and do a lot of good for humanity, including our downtown,” Moy told the Chronicle. “Putting a city in an area that is 98% (agricultural) is not a good idea. We are running out of (agricultural) land. We don’t need to develop it.”