$800 Million And Nothing To Show: How Activists Derailed Silicon Valley Billionaires’ Dream City
Source: Fast Company, Bryce Covert
Photo: Getty Images
Plans for a utopia in Solano County, California, were temporarily scuttled after community advocates pushed back against the project. It’s a rare instance of tech titans not getting their way.
In a 2017, billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz had a pitch for potential investors: Put your money into a plan to build a brand new city in Solano County, about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco, and reap the profits once the project breaks ground. “If the plans materialize anywhere close to what is being contemplated, this should be a spectacular investment,” he wrote in a note at the time. His idea clearly struck a chord: Big tech players like Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs eventually backed the plan, spending some $800 million to buy up over 60,000 acres across the county. They would eventually dub their project California Forever.
But turning that newly acquired land into their utopian dream requires permission to change the county’s zoning laws, which currently designate the land solely for agriculture. Their vision is the creation of a brand new, middle-class, walkable city with and affordable housing. The investors have repeatedly said they want to build as fast as possible. Shortly after their plans were unveiled, they began the process of putting a ballot initiative in front of voters in the upcoming election in November. In February they started collecting the necessary 13,062 signatures, and subsequently spent over $9 million to barrage residents with website banners and TV ads.
But in July, Jan Sramek, former Goldman Sachs trader and CEO California Forever, abruptly announced that the group was pulling its initiative from November’s ballot.
It was a big victory for a scrappy group of community advocates that had far fewer resources at their disposal. And it’s one that shows that, even with billions of dollars at their disposal, tech titans don’t always get their way.
Duane Kromm, former member of the County Board of Supervisors, says locals “weren’t surprised” that the measure was pulled. A poll commissioned in March by the opposition coalition, called Solano Together, of over 400 county voters found that 70% said they would vote against it. Voters were also highly aware of the issue and the investors, with three-quarters saying they had heard of California Forever. Solano Together spent about $20,000 to put up some yard signs and hand out stickers, according to Kromm. “In terms of bang for the buck, we won that one big time,” he says.
Sramek contends that his organization was not cowed into withdrawing. “We feel we would have won, but it would have been a close election,” he says. Better, he claims, to withdraw and go back to voters in 2026 with more of their plans firmed up.
But many see Sramek’s explanation as an attempt to save face, arguing California Forever thought it was going to lose in November and wanted to get out before such a damaging result. “You wouldn’t pull it if you were gaining traction and getting close to 50%,” Kromm says. “It would have been more embarrassing to have lost in November.”
Advocates know that the issue is far from resolved. What they don’t know is what exactly comes next.
California Forever’s plan is now for the group of investors to seek the necessary reports and approvals, in which its plans will be vetted by county agencies and the public, and then have county residents vote on a ballot measure in 2026. Sramek expects a “decisive victory” at that point, in part because the group’s promises about being able to find a water source in a place where water is scarce, increase transportation infrastructure in a community already clogged with traffic, protect the ecosystem, and deliver on a set of community promises will be legally binding.
California Forever had published ten “voter guarantees” for things like down payment assistance and investments in jobs and education, but those are only enforceable after a development agreement has been inked. (Those promises could also evaporate if the new city were to incorporate and form its own government, something the investors discussed doing at the outset.) “It doesn’t change the construction timeline,” he asserts, which is to break ground in 2027 or 2028.
It’s an ambitious timeline. First, California Forever will need to draft and distribute an environmental impact report (EIR) to the public and a multitude of local agencies, including the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the state department of transportation, and the Solano County Airport Land Use Commission. Responses will have to be incorporated into the EIR, and litigation is common. “EIRs are big, technical documents, and they don’t get done in a month or two,” Kromm says. It will also have to come to a development agreement with the county.
Sramek, for his part, points out that California Forever started working on studies and engineering assessments for its plans in the summer of 2023. Jennifer L. Hernandez, a partner at law firm Holland & Knight who is serving as land use counsel to California Forever, noted that the California Environmental Quality Act requires an EIR to be done in one year. “The team is on track to do what we need to do on our side to get it done,” she says.
The unchanged plans and timeline have led some community members to believe that nothing has truly changed. “They said they’d do more outreach and engagement, but they also said they’re going to keep doing the project they want to do. You can’t really do both,” says Sadie Wilson, director of planning and research at local nonprofit the Greenbelt Alliance, which is part of Solano Together. “It’s not true engagement if you ask people what they want to see and don’t actually have any place to incorporate that.” (Sramek contends that his team has met with the community and elected officials, and that most of the feedback they receive is not to do with the land use, but with other concerns.)
Al Medvitz, a farmer in Solano County, worries that, now that California Forever isn’t fighting a direct fight to win over public support for a ballot vote, the negotiations will move behind closed doors. “It’s gone from a very public, participatory process,” he says, to one between lobbyists and county officials. California Forever has already taken an aggressive stance with local agencies; Hernandez wrote letters to the county’s Airport Land Use Commission accusing it of being “radically expansive” and “motivated by political aims” when it approved a new plan that cut into the group’s territory.
The investors will also now have to contend with how their tactics have impacted the community and whether they can rebuild trust with residents. California Forever, which originally went by Flannery Associates, spent years buying up land in secret before The New York Times unveiled the tech titans behind the project last year. “That’s not a way you build a relationship with a community,” Kromm says.
Those in the community say the first step should be dropping a federal lawsuit Flannery Associates lodged against local ranchers and farmers, most of whom had refused to sell their land, seeking $510 million in damages. The lawsuit accused them of violating antitrust laws by seeking to “conspire, collude, price fix, and illegally overcharge Flannery” and forming “a secret conspiracy to drive up prices” by talking to each other about holding out for higher offers. Kathy Threlfall, a local landowner who is not subject to the lawsuit, says she has neighbors who feel forced to settle with California Forever and hand over their land after all, rather than continuing to accrue costly legal fees. “It’s like a hostile takeover,” she says.
The settlements mean the investors continue to gobble up more land, and Threlfall says her property is “being surrounded more and more and more” without a clear idea of what California Forever has planned for it—it’s not in the core area it says it wants to turn into a city. She worries that will decrease the open space that makes her property so unique, one that her great-grandparents owned and she wants to pass down to her grandchildren. The uncertainty of how much more land will be consumed by California Forever and what its ultimate fate will be has meant that Medvitz and his wife are “on hold,” he says. The kind of farming the community does requires a lot of cooperation to rotate between growing and grazing and to partner on the different stages of production. Typically Medvitz would pursue new initiatives and investments, but he’s put that on pause without knowing which neighbors will still be around to work with and how much land will be farmed.
It’s a tight-knit community, one where everyone knows everyone. But the lawsuit “has changed our culture,” Threlfall says. Medvitz agreed. The lawsuit has forced people “into isolation and silence,” he says. “It really has fractured the community.”
But letting it go is not on the table. “We will not be dropping the case,” Sramek says. He noted the judge in the case denied a motion to dismiss it from the defendants in March.
Solano Together is now focused on developing an alternative development plan for the county, Wilson says, one that directs residential investment into the existing cities while investing in agricultural production and open space elsewhere. That was the intent behind the existing Solano County Orderly Growth Initiative, which is what California Forever was seeking to change through the ballot initiative and which directs investment to existing cities. “We’re not NIMBYs,” Kromm says. They want to see more housing built in existing urban areas, but it’s hard to attract investment for that kind of project.
“They have no right to develop this land because they own it,” Wilson adds. “They bought agricultural land that was not zoned for that and they knew that going in that it was a risky investment.”