The company’s application remains largely similar to its original plan, but instead of the project becoming a new city in unincorporated Solano County, the mega-development could now be located largely within Suisun City, if city and county leaders eventually approve the annexation deal. Rio Vista leaders have also expressed interest in annexing a portion of California Forever’s plan, but those details have yet to be publicly unveiled.
Suisun City leaders have said they are exploring annexation to grow the city’s tax base and solve a structural deficit. Officials in Rio Vista also want to expand their tax base, but aim to preserve the city’s character as a quaint, river-side town.
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Now that the application is complete, Prebula said he will spend the next month holding meetings with staff and Suisun City officials to start an environmental impact report, and eventually, the public will be able to read and comment on it.
The point of the Suisun annexation is for each side to help the other solve a problem. California Forever’s problem is that it wants to build on unincorporated land in Solano County, which has a law forbidding the building of much of anything outside established cities. Suisun’s problem is that it is broke.
If the idea is approved, Suisun would absorb California Forever’s land, turning the rural plot into a developable area — all while expanding Suisun’s footprint and securing a gusher of future tax revenue if and when anything ever gets built.
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In 2017 a mysterious company called Flannery Associates started amassing farmland in an eastern corner of Solano County. Flannery had no known business, shareholders or employees, yet in the space of a few years it spent about $950 million on about 70,000 acres, an area twice the size of San Francisco.
Everyone knew it was a front, but couldn’t figure out for what. Chinese spies? A new Disneyland?
The truth turned out to be even stranger: billionaires with plans to build an urbanist's fever dream from scratch.
The company is run by a former Goldman Sachs trader named Jan Sramek, and his investors are a who’s who of Silicon Valley. They include Michael Moritz and Marc Andreessen, both venture capitalists; Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn; Laurene Powell-Jobs, the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs; and Patrick and John Collison, the sibling founders of the payments company Stripe.
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Assuming California Forever is like every other decades-long construction venture, the plans will change over time and many of the people talking about them today will be dead before it’s completed. So what the company is really asking locals for is their trust. And, as the fractious meetings show, this has yet to be fully earned.
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The most frequent point of contention is the company’s past deception: How can you trust a group that spent years suggesting to local officials that Flannery/California Forever was a passive buyer of farmland? There are also the company’s hardball tactics, such as suing a group of holdout farmers in a $510 million antitrust case.
In the beginning, Mr. Sramek’s pitch was heavily centered on addressing California’s housing shortage, and it seemed that anytime he showed up at a meeting all anyone did was yell at him. Today, however, while California Forever still wants to build housing, its emphasis has shifted toward developing a local factory sector, and the reaction has gone from almost entirely negative to more mixed.
There are still a lot of shouters like Mr. Russo. But the company has become a local power player with Solano offices and Solano employees. Both California Forever and Suisun City have signed agreements to use local trade unions on future work, hence the contingent of cement masons and sheet metal workers who showed up to the recent meeting in hats bearing the names of their locals.
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A longstanding question in Solano County is whether Suisun is capable of being city at all. The town is perennially strapped and sits next to the larger city of Fairfield (population: about 120,000). A half-century ago there were discussions about combining the two neighbors, and in the decades since Suisun officials have argued again and again that they are just one project away from financial stability.
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Suisun is merely exploring the idea, with California Forever paying for the various consultant reports and environmental studies that have to be completed before the proposal can be voted on. The final approval would come from the Local Agency Formation Commission, the body that decides the borders of cities in Solano County.
I feel like this whole article is kind of unfair in its phrasing toward California Forever. "An urbanist's fever dream" etc. More annoyingly though, it's horribly one-sided. I can tell you why...
I feel like this whole article is kind of unfair in its phrasing toward California Forever. "An urbanist's fever dream" etc.
More annoyingly though, it's horribly one-sided. I can tell you why Flannery Associates is so damned secretive: it's because the moment property owners realize that they're selling to a billion-dollar project, they'll jack up the price. It's the classic coordination problem, where the value of the land is the large contiguous section and thus the neighbors gain exponentially more bargaining power the larger the land purchase grows, because the value to the buyer becomes exponentially more than to the seller (because they've sunk so much into buying the adjacent land already).
California Forever (and similar projects) are basically an acknowledgement that incrementalism won't solve Cali's housing problem, and the only solution is to build a city-sized piece of land outside the city zoning requirements to build a city. That necessarily means that they have to pony up all the money, up front, which means there is a lot of opportunity to essentially blackmail them with obstructionism. If you can get even 0.1% of $50B then you're up $50M.
Yes, Cali Forever isn't inherently trustworthy - they're a bunch of billionaires (who tend to think they're smarter than they actually are) and they were considering some privacy-invading creepy shit, but honestly this is the best chance to smash through California's housing crisis - if they can build e.g. 100k new homes, it'll create a political shock that could smooth the way for future repeats of the same basic concept, and eventually copycats overseas.
Housing doesn't become desirable in a vacuum. Housing becomes desirable when people who live in it can get to jobs from it, food is accessible from it, etc. There are many cheap empty houses in...
Housing doesn't become desirable in a vacuum. Housing becomes desirable when people who live in it can get to jobs from it, food is accessible from it, etc. There are many cheap empty houses in rural areas without nearby jobs. In urban areas with plentiful jobs and services, there are fewer houses than people who want to live there.
I don't see how building houses on currently rural land (to make it into a far suburb) addresses the problem of more people wanting to live inside the city (or at least a close suburb) than city housing unit density supports.
If the development is big enough, it isn't a far suburb. It's a city. And since California Forever's plan overview explicitly marks the majority of the development as zoned for mixed-use, there'll...
I don't see how building houses on currently rural land (to make it into a far suburb) addresses the problem of more people wanting to live inside the city (or at least a close suburb) than city housing unit density supports.
If the development is big enough, it isn't a far suburb. It's a city. And since California Forever's plan overview explicitly marks the majority of the development as zoned for mixed-use, there'll be plenty of business opportunity once people start moving in.
Right. Their plans may have changed, but the impression got when I was reading about them before is that they want to build something resembling the mixed-used residential communities encircling...
Right. Their plans may have changed, but the impression got when I was reading about them before is that they want to build something resembling the mixed-used residential communities encircling Tokyo. Highly walkable and bike-friendly with essentials within arm’s reach and reasonable cost of living.
A lot of people in the US would love to live in a place like that, including many remote workers who’d be enough to bootstrap the local economy. From there, it’s not as difficult to get companies to commit to building offices and factories and boom you’ve got the virtuous cycle needed for self sustainability.
It wouldn’t on its own, but they also hope to attract businesses. That’s the difference between building a housing development and a city. It’s too far out to be a suburb.
It wouldn’t on its own, but they also hope to attract businesses. That’s the difference between building a housing development and a city.
If they succeed then maybe someone else will try, but it might also be a one-off, considering the huge amount of long-term investment needed and the risks. I think that’s taking speculation a bit...
If they succeed then maybe someone else will try, but it might also be a one-off, considering the huge amount of long-term investment needed and the risks.
I think that’s taking speculation a bit too far. Building a successful new city would itself be a tremendous achievement that benefits many thousands of people. That’s plenty of ambition.
Half of the risk is the lack of big flashy examples of this sort of thing working. If it works, then by definition it'll be an example of it working, which should make future projects easier to...
Half of the risk is the lack of big flashy examples of this sort of thing working. If it works, then by definition it'll be an example of it working, which should make future projects easier to gain political buy-in for and therefore be easier to kickstart.
I think there are some examples of cities being built from whole cloth for a purpose. Canberra, Australia's capital, was built between its two biggest cities to keep either one from being...
I think there are some examples of cities being built from whole cloth for a purpose. Canberra, Australia's capital, was built between its two biggest cities to keep either one from being dominant, and was entirely planned. But even after a century it's population is only 500k, and the government only recently stopped being the employer of the majority of the people living there.
Cities naturally grow in places that have some other reason for people to be there, and Suisun City has so little reason for existence that it's basically on the verge of dissolution. Once the real estate is built, why will people want to live there? To work there? In what businesses? Why would the businesses be there? To serve the population? What population?
It's not all that close, but it's not too far from the SF bay area and Sacramento. Presumably, it will be significantly more affordable than the bay area. But that only works if there are jobs....
It's not all that close, but it's not too far from the SF bay area and Sacramento. Presumably, it will be significantly more affordable than the bay area. But that only works if there are jobs. There need to be anchor businesses. It would be have to be the sort of business that can convince people to move in order to work there. Perhaps businesses that need more land and infrastructure (provided by the investors) will find it attractive?
I agree that building it will only be half the challenge. Subsidization of the first people to move there seems inevitable? The real question is how long it'll take before the place is...
I agree that building it will only be half the challenge. Subsidization of the first people to move there seems inevitable? The real question is how long it'll take before the place is self-supporting.
The first residents will obviously be the construction crew. The website claims to create over 12000 jobs on construction, with a total capacity of 400k people after everything is done. If we...
The first residents will obviously be the construction crew. The website claims to create over 12000 jobs on construction, with a total capacity of 400k people after everything is done. If we assume that even 5000 construction workers live in the place (even temporarily), that will be enough to support some shops and bring in some e.g. LA remote-workers and get the ball rolling. The obvious solution is that if they can't get enough residents, just drop the rent to $1 until they can.
And there are a lot of reasons for that. For instance, Canberra is, from what I've heard, a desert (to be fair it might be because it's mountainous, or the closest thing Australia gets to...
But even after a century it's population is only 500k, and the government only recently stopped being the employer of the majority of the people living there.
And there are a lot of reasons for that. For instance, Canberra is, from what I've heard, a desert (to be fair it might be because it's mountainous, or the closest thing Australia gets to mountainous) that gets literally freezing sometimes. It snows once every few years there. Australia doesn't get snow! What is this bullshit? In contrast, Sydney (and Melbourne IIRC) is quite mild year-round, and federal building insulation standards are quite weak due to that mildness in the big 2 population centres that make up 40% of the country alone. So when it snows in Canberra, it snows in a city where the walls have fuck all for insulation. It's more comfortable to live through snow in Canada than Canberra. And you'd better hope your power doesn't go out.
Canberra is also the most car-centric hellscape you've ever seen - like you said, Canberra was planned, and it was planned with big wide roads for cars, and the designer had an obvious fetish for lots of green space between and on either side of the road.
Seriously, why build in mountain desert instead of a mild area near a ton of beaches? Well, it was a deliberate choice to reduce Canberra's vulnerability to naval attacks. And they were willing to sacrifice the mild climate, world-class beaches, and easy access to shipping that comes for free with a coastal city on Australia's east coast.
I wouldn't want to live in Canberra. I would want to live in California Forever (if it were built in Australia). Because Canberra is dogshit. It's no surprise that Canberra is smaller than Newcastle - everything about Canberra was a mistake. Anyone who cracks open a modern urban planning textbook can tell you why Canberra failed.
A positive example would make it easier to raise funds, but I doubt it would reduce local political opposition much, and it would be harder to buy land without people guessing why.
A positive example would make it easier to raise funds, but I doubt it would reduce local political opposition much, and it would be harder to buy land without people guessing why.
Is there any good summary of who California Forever are/what they want? I can't really tell from the article. They want to start a new city from scratch but why? And how will they fund it?
Is there any good summary of who California Forever are/what they want? I can't really tell from the article. They want to start a new city from scratch but why? And how will they fund it?
Their view on “why” is that it’s almost impossible to get anything done in terms of improving/building LA or SF (cf the million dollar bathroom), so it makes more sense to build a new city where...
Their view on “why” is that it’s almost impossible to get anything done in terms of improving/building LA or SF (cf the million dollar bathroom), so it makes more sense to build a new city where you have pre-reformed zoning and better urban design baked in from the start.
California Forever - Wikipedia Wiki does a good job of running down the history. As for the "why" I don't know. I don't have positive opinions based on what I've read.
I'm rooting for it. Everyone wants the perfect unicorn solution, but here's a group that's offering a pretty decent solution. If they can achieve that aim, that'd bring some relief to the housing...
I'm rooting for it. Everyone wants the perfect unicorn solution, but here's a group that's offering a pretty decent solution. If they can achieve that aim, that'd bring some relief to the housing market here. It'd be immoral to not build housing when tens of thousands of people sleep in Bay Area streets.
From what I know, it's a bunch of billionaires, so I assume the funding comes from... Well, themselves...? I don't know much, but there have been other posts about them and this whole initiative.
From the article:
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A City Is Broke. Can a Billionaire’s Urbanist Dream Offer It a Last Chance?
https://archive.is/NPeGs
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I feel like this whole article is kind of unfair in its phrasing toward California Forever. "An urbanist's fever dream" etc.
More annoyingly though, it's horribly one-sided. I can tell you why Flannery Associates is so damned secretive: it's because the moment property owners realize that they're selling to a billion-dollar project, they'll jack up the price. It's the classic coordination problem, where the value of the land is the large contiguous section and thus the neighbors gain exponentially more bargaining power the larger the land purchase grows, because the value to the buyer becomes exponentially more than to the seller (because they've sunk so much into buying the adjacent land already).
California Forever (and similar projects) are basically an acknowledgement that incrementalism won't solve Cali's housing problem, and the only solution is to build a city-sized piece of land outside the city zoning requirements to build a city. That necessarily means that they have to pony up all the money, up front, which means there is a lot of opportunity to essentially blackmail them with obstructionism. If you can get even 0.1% of $50B then you're up $50M.
Yes, Cali Forever isn't inherently trustworthy - they're a bunch of billionaires (who tend to think they're smarter than they actually are) and they were considering some privacy-invading creepy shit, but honestly this is the best chance to smash through California's housing crisis - if they can build e.g. 100k new homes, it'll create a political shock that could smooth the way for future repeats of the same basic concept, and eventually copycats overseas.
Housing doesn't become desirable in a vacuum. Housing becomes desirable when people who live in it can get to jobs from it, food is accessible from it, etc. There are many cheap empty houses in rural areas without nearby jobs. In urban areas with plentiful jobs and services, there are fewer houses than people who want to live there.
I don't see how building houses on currently rural land (to make it into a far suburb) addresses the problem of more people wanting to live inside the city (or at least a close suburb) than city housing unit density supports.
If the development is big enough, it isn't a far suburb. It's a city. And since California Forever's plan overview explicitly marks the majority of the development as zoned for mixed-use, there'll be plenty of business opportunity once people start moving in.
Right. Their plans may have changed, but the impression got when I was reading about them before is that they want to build something resembling the mixed-used residential communities encircling Tokyo. Highly walkable and bike-friendly with essentials within arm’s reach and reasonable cost of living.
A lot of people in the US would love to live in a place like that, including many remote workers who’d be enough to bootstrap the local economy. From there, it’s not as difficult to get companies to commit to building offices and factories and boom you’ve got the virtuous cycle needed for self sustainability.
It wouldn’t on its own, but they also hope to attract businesses. That’s the difference between building a housing development and a city.
It’s too far out to be a suburb.
If they succeed then maybe someone else will try, but it might also be a one-off, considering the huge amount of long-term investment needed and the risks.
I think that’s taking speculation a bit too far. Building a successful new city would itself be a tremendous achievement that benefits many thousands of people. That’s plenty of ambition.
Half of the risk is the lack of big flashy examples of this sort of thing working. If it works, then by definition it'll be an example of it working, which should make future projects easier to gain political buy-in for and therefore be easier to kickstart.
I think there are some examples of cities being built from whole cloth for a purpose. Canberra, Australia's capital, was built between its two biggest cities to keep either one from being dominant, and was entirely planned. But even after a century it's population is only 500k, and the government only recently stopped being the employer of the majority of the people living there.
Cities naturally grow in places that have some other reason for people to be there, and Suisun City has so little reason for existence that it's basically on the verge of dissolution. Once the real estate is built, why will people want to live there? To work there? In what businesses? Why would the businesses be there? To serve the population? What population?
It's not all that close, but it's not too far from the SF bay area and Sacramento. Presumably, it will be significantly more affordable than the bay area. But that only works if there are jobs. There need to be anchor businesses. It would be have to be the sort of business that can convince people to move in order to work there. Perhaps businesses that need more land and infrastructure (provided by the investors) will find it attractive?
I agree that building it will only be half the challenge. Subsidization of the first people to move there seems inevitable? The real question is how long it'll take before the place is self-supporting.
The first residents will obviously be the construction crew. The website claims to create over 12000 jobs on construction, with a total capacity of 400k people after everything is done. If we assume that even 5000 construction workers live in the place (even temporarily), that will be enough to support some shops and bring in some e.g. LA remote-workers and get the ball rolling. The obvious solution is that if they can't get enough residents, just drop the rent to $1 until they can.
And there are a lot of reasons for that. For instance, Canberra is, from what I've heard, a desert (to be fair it might be because it's mountainous, or the closest thing Australia gets to mountainous) that gets literally freezing sometimes. It snows once every few years there. Australia doesn't get snow! What is this bullshit? In contrast, Sydney (and Melbourne IIRC) is quite mild year-round, and federal building insulation standards are quite weak due to that mildness in the big 2 population centres that make up 40% of the country alone. So when it snows in Canberra, it snows in a city where the walls have fuck all for insulation. It's more comfortable to live through snow in Canada than Canberra. And you'd better hope your power doesn't go out.
Canberra is also the most car-centric hellscape you've ever seen - like you said, Canberra was planned, and it was planned with big wide roads for cars, and the designer had an obvious fetish for lots of green space between and on either side of the road.
Seriously, why build in mountain desert instead of a mild area near a ton of beaches? Well, it was a deliberate choice to reduce Canberra's vulnerability to naval attacks. And they were willing to sacrifice the mild climate, world-class beaches, and easy access to shipping that comes for free with a coastal city on Australia's east coast.
I wouldn't want to live in Canberra. I would want to live in California Forever (if it were built in Australia). Because Canberra is dogshit. It's no surprise that Canberra is smaller than Newcastle - everything about Canberra was a mistake. Anyone who cracks open a modern urban planning textbook can tell you why Canberra failed.
A positive example would make it easier to raise funds, but I doubt it would reduce local political opposition much, and it would be harder to buy land without people guessing why.
Is there any good summary of who California Forever are/what they want? I can't really tell from the article. They want to start a new city from scratch but why? And how will they fund it?
Their view on “why” is that it’s almost impossible to get anything done in terms of improving/building LA or SF (cf the million dollar bathroom), so it makes more sense to build a new city where you have pre-reformed zoning and better urban design baked in from the start.
California Forever - Wikipedia
Wiki does a good job of running down the history.
As for the "why" I don't know. I don't have positive opinions based on what I've read.
They want to do something ambitious and make a ton of money doing it.
I'm rooting for it. Everyone wants the perfect unicorn solution, but here's a group that's offering a pretty decent solution. If they can achieve that aim, that'd bring some relief to the housing market here. It'd be immoral to not build housing when tens of thousands of people sleep in Bay Area streets.
From what I know, it's a bunch of billionaires, so I assume the funding comes from... Well, themselves...? I don't know much, but there have been other posts about them and this whole initiative.
One thing that is clear is they bought a lot of land and they want to sell it for a profit after it has been rezoned and developed