Residents of Solano County, northwest of the San Francisco Bay Area, realized that someone had been secretly shopping a large amount of farmland. In fact, even the army He asked who had been purchasing all the land around one of his military bases located in that county.
After much investigation, it was learned that behind these purchases there was a group of Silicon Valley billionaires with a plan as utopian as it is controversial: build an entire city from scratch, in the middle of dry fields.
A secret land purchase. It all started in 2018, when a company called Flannery Associates was acquiringlittle by little, agricultural plots throughout the county. The owners received figures well above the market value, but no one knew who was behind the purchase. The county itself detected that a single company was purchasing large amounts of land and asked for an explanation.
It wasn’t until 2023 when it came to light that Flannery was actually the real estate arm of California Foreverand that investors had been secretly buying land in Solano since 2018, until finally announcing their true purpose: to build there a new city. By then they already had some 24,281 hectares and between 800 and 900 million dollars invested.
Who puts the money. The name that shows the face is Jan Srameka former Goldman Sachs trader of Czech origin. But behind the project there are Silicon Valley investors like Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell JobsLinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, as well as Michael Moritz, former partner at Sequoia Capital. His initial idea was to build a walkable city in the style of New York’s West Village, designed to attract high-net-worth employees driven by housing shortage in Silicon Valley.
The plan stood on paper, but I needed something to only county voters of Solano could grant: change the law Solano County’s “Orderly Growth Initiative” of 1984, known as Measure A, which protects agricultural soil. Without that permission from the citizens there was no city possible.
Water, the great obstacle. That’s where the problems started. Solano It is not an area with water leftover, and the neighbors immediately saw the risk of shortage to build a new city and increase consumption. Congressman John Garamendi, one of the most critical voices of the project, assured that “From the beginning, I have maintained that the proposed project was just a pipe dream, not a real plan. Accelerating the process without a comprehensive environmental and community review would have been disastrous for the current residents of Solano County”, criticizing that the project did not take into account that it was a site without water, without sanitation and without roads.
The company tried to promote a campaign to win the vote of the citizens in 2024, which became one of the most expensive in the history of the county, and even then it was not enough. The vote was withdrawn and the project was, for the moment, frozen.
The turn towards the shipyard. After that blow to the continuity of the project, California Forever changed its arguments. Instead of first selling a city in the middle of nowhere, he now sells a plan of industrialization with connections to the military: a shipyard in which to build ships equipped with the latest technology in naval defense, and close to the Travis military base.
The new plan pivots on two axes. On the one hand, the Solano Foundryan industrial park of about 850 hectares located just over an hour from San Francisco that aims to become the factory for robotics projects and materialize all the R&D of Silicon Valley.
On the other hand, the Solano Shipyarda complex of about 3,035 hectares designed to house several shipyards dedicated to military and civil naval construction. The idea with this turn is clearly to first attract the industrial fabric and employment, and then cover the housing needs of its workers by building the city that had been projected from the beginning.
Unions, Trump and what remains to be decided. To win over Solano this time, California Forever has played another card: unions. The company signed with the construction union council and the carpenters union a labor agreement for the next 40 years on the 28,328 hectares of land it owns, in which it undertakes to hire your affiliates in the construction of that city.
The speech is also supported by national politics and from California Forever they defend that building shipyards on the west coast is necessary to stand up to Chinaand has sought to fit the project into the SHIPS Actthe law that Trump has promoted to reindustrialize the US naval industry.
A report Commissioned by the Bay Area Council, it estimates some $215 billion in private investment and the generation of 530,000 jobs in this industrialization plan for the area. However, the shipyard remains without a permit from the county, and the chosen land is next to the Suisun Marsh protected areaone of the largest brackish water wetlands on the West Coast. Water, again, will decide if this project remains a promise or becomes something real.
In Xataka | The other war between the US and China is in the shipyards
Image | Unsplash (Daniel J. Schwarz, Charlie Huston)
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings