“California Forever,” the Billionaire-Backed City No One Asked For

Some say it was the Gold Rush and others the Golden Age of cinema, but no one really knows how the California Dream came about. Didion and Kerouac wrote reams on the subject; Steinbeck portrayed it as a place of boundless potential, replete with fertile valleys, an endless coastline, and trees far as the eye can see. Snap back to reality, and anyone who’s witnessed California’s warts can tell you that life there is just as much Grapes of Wrath as it is East of Eden. From pollution to homelessness to wildfires to drought, the Golden State has, by many measures, lost its luster, leading some to believe that, like the American Dream, California’s might also be fizzling out.

Few people have dedicated more time, money, and effort to resurrecting the state’s past glory than 36-year-old Jan Sramek, founder and CEO of Flannery Associates, the corporation with designs to develop a large tract of California’s Solano County into a town, so named California Forever, from scratch. Since 2017—with the help of billionaires Laurene Powell Jobs, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, and others of their ilk—Sramek has been secretly buying agricultural land, accumulating at least 50,000 acres to the tune of $900 million. His proposal is nothing if not ambitious: A walkable community (unthinkable by most in California) of an initial 20,000 homes—and eventually as many as 400,000 people—just northeast of San Francisco that includes its own roads, parks, schools, offices, restaurants, and public transit, with wind and solar farms to boot. “In California,” Sramek told reporters months ago when explaining the impetus for the idea, “we have dug ourselves into such a deficit in terms of housing. We can deliver a big solution to the problem.”