The plan by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires to build a utopian city on over 50,000 acres of rolling farmlands in remote Solano County has divided and somewhat confounded the Bay Area’s YIMBY community, a movement of housing-obsessed activists who, over the past decade, have transformed the politics around residential development in cities across the country.
While YIMBYs are typically focused on making it easier and faster to add housing in dense cities and their nearby suburbs — places with plenty of jobs and good public transportation — the city proposed by California Forever would be built on isolated land currently occupied by cows and sheep, wheat and barley.
To some of the yes-in-my-backyard contingent, the plan smacks of the kind of sprawl that has choked California’s freeways and caused cars to spew carbon dioxide into the state’s atmosphere. Others, meanwhile, welcome it as a potential model for what a modern sustainable city might look like.
And a third group — perhaps the biggest constituency — have so many questions they don’t know what to think.
“I’m excited about it — more is more, and we need housing,” said Sonja Trauss, director of YIMBY Law and a founder of the YIMBY movement. “I’m from Philadelphia, so it’s not unprecedented or weird to me that rich people would try to found a city. (Philadelphia founder) William Penn was a rich guy. He got a land grant and built a city on a grid. He created something innovative and beautiful.”
In contrast, Jordan Grimes, a prominent South Bay YIMBY who is resilience manager with the Greenbelt Alliance, called the project “a woefully misguided effort with the right goals in mind but a wrongheaded approach to meeting them.”
“Behind the glossy AI-generated renderings what you have, on a policy level, is, ironically, the antithesis of innovation,” he said. “It’s a full embrace of the status quo, a perpetuation and doubling down on 70 years of failed California development patterns.”
Grimes called the project “sprawl 2.0.”
“It’s sprawl with a prettier face and prettier name,” he said. “Not only is it not going to solve our problems, it’s going to exacerbate them. It’s hard to think of a worse place for this experiment.”
While Trauss and Grimes represent opposing views, most YIMBYs and housing advocates are looking at the project with a mix of skepticism and hope.
California’s YIMBY movement has two large regional groups, YIMBY Action and California YIMBY, as well as more local groups like East Bay for Everyone and Peninsula for Everyone. There are also older pro-housing organizations like the Housing Action Coalition and SPUR, which include housing developers in their membership and advocate for infill development.
Some of these groups have connections to the California Forever team behind the new city. Two of the major investors in California Forever, Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison, donated $1 million to California YIMBY in 2018. Another investor, Nat Friedman, was a co-founder of California YIMBY.
A spokesperson for California YIMBY declined to comment on whether the group supports the Solano project. SPUR’s staff also has to deal with the fact that one of the lead consultants on the California Forever project is its former executive director, Gabriel Metcalf, a nationally known and widely respected planner and urbanist.
SPUR senior adviser Sarah Karlinsky said the group has not taken a position on the project. While Karlinsky said SPUR “has long advocated for building housing in infill locations in the urban core,” she acknowledged that not enough of that type of housing has been built to ease the regional housing shortage which has made the Bay Area among the most expensive places to live in the United States.
The California Forever “project puts into tension two of our core values,” she said. “It’s a location not well served by transit, and not a location we would historically be supportive of. On the other hand, there is a desperate need for more housing, and if the city is designed well, it could provide that housing. We really need to see the details.”
Despite the fact that the California Forever group has spent $800 million and five years buying up property, details about the project are scant. The group’s website bills it as “A chance for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space,” but doesn’t include any information about what those jobs might be, or how residents might get around in the new community.
“We are in the early community engagement phase now and we haven’t put forward any detailed plans, so we completely understand why many people — both local residents and housing and transit advocates across California — have not made up their mind about our project yet,” said California Forever CEO Jan Sramek, in a statement to the Chronicle. “We are confident that once we propose actual plans, they will have broad support of both Solano residents and state housing and transit advocates.”
Todd David, former longtime executive director of the Housing Action Coalition and current political director of Abundant SF, a housing, transportation and education policy group, said, “There are clearly smart people behind this idea, so I am open to learning more.”
“My initial reaction was very mixed,” David said. “It’s an interesting idea, but the idea of greenfield development concerns me from an environmental point of view. We want to be doing dense urban infill.”
John Minot, co-executive of East Bay for Everyone, said the group hasn’t taken a position, although the organization is generally focused on advocating for infill. He said if the development includes high-quality rail connection, flexible zoning and infrastructure that is not geared toward cars, “it’s not impossible that it could point the way for other cities in how to adapt.”
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YIMBY Action Executive Director Laura Foote said that the project will be hard to pull off, unless state lawmakers and voters are able to reform the California Environmental Quality Act — which neighborhood groups routinely use to delay or block housing.
“If this isn’t going to be a commuter town but a self-sustainable community, trying to do that in California is really hard,” she said.
Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University who has studied the YIMBY movement, said that the tech industry’s “move fast and break things” approach would be a tough proposition for a project that will require the support of the Solano County Board of Supervisors as well as Solano County voters.
“If they think that it will be quick and easy, they are wrong, no matter how much they donate to politicians,” he said. “Most of the people who will vote on this are already homeowners, and they are not going to think they would benefit from homes being built. They are more likely to think they benefit from homes not being built.”
Other YIMBYs argued that the amount of money and attention going into the California Forever project will lessen the chances that dense infill housing will be added in Solano County cities like Fairfield, which has been desperately and unsuccessfully looking to attract multifamily developers to its downtown — which is the county seat and boasts a train station, large urban park, courthouses and administrative buildings.
“There is some real irony in that you have one of the only places in the greater Bay Area that is ready and willing to expend resources to bring multifamily housing to its downtown, and instead of investing in that place, this group is pursuing this dream scenario of building a new city from scratch,” said Grimes.
Reach J.K. Dineen: [email protected]
Sep 8, 2023|Updated Sep 9, 2023 9:42 a.m.
J.K. Dineen covers housing and real estate development. He joined The Chronicle in 2014 covering San Francisco land use politics for the City Hall team. He has since expanded his focus to explore housing and development issues throughout Northern California. He is the author of two books: "Here Tomorrow" (Heyday, 2013) and "High Spirits" (Heyday, 2015).
He can be reached at [email protected].
The apology is just one of the recommendations that the city’s reparations task force made in a 400-page report.
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