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Why tech billionaires are trying to create a new California city
Starting back in 2017, something mysterious was going on just 90 minutes northeast of San Francisco: a secretive group was purchasing farmland – lots of it, some 60,000 acres – in rural Solano County. Many feared it might be a Chinese government plot to try to set up shop near Travis Air Force Base.
But as The New York Times’ Conor Dougherty (who helped break the story) found out, the truth was even stranger than the rumors.
“Like a lot of people, I was chasing it and running into the usual locked doors,” said Dougherty. “I got a tip from someone that what was behind the locked doors was the richest people in the world quietly buying all this farmland: Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a venture capitalist; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective and Steve Jobs’ widow; Marc Andreessen of Andreesen Horowitz, venture capital firm, just really a who’s-who of Silicon Valley was involved in this.”
Something else surprising: Within hours of Dougherty’s big scoop, this mysterious company launched a website and publicly identified itself as California Forever, an ambitious plan to build a brand-new kind of city for as many as 400,000 residents.
California Forever
Jan Sramek, a 37-year-old Czech-born, former Goldman Sachs trader-turned-aspiring city-builder, is trying to convince the public that the project isn’t just an oasis for billionaires or some high-tech city of the future. His vision: turn all this farmland into a walkable city in the mold of Savannah, Philadelphia, or New York City’s West Village.
“Instead of taking all of these well-paying jobs that are being created in Northern California and sending them to Texas or Florida, let’s create a place where we can send them to Solano County,” he said.
California Forever/Sitelab Urban Studio
So, how could such a city remain a place that middle-class people could even afford? “By continuing to build for a long time,” said Sramek. “If we look at why places have become unaffordable, it’s because they’ve just stopped building.”
The project’s fate will ultimately be decided this November by the voters of Solano County, who have to decide whether or not to overturn a three-decades-old law restricting where new development can go. Sremek’s charm offensive have been met with, let’s just say, a healthy amount of skepticism by many locals.
“We’re gonna have total gridlock,” said one man at a public meeting about the proposal.
Locals Al Medvitz and Jeannie McCormack are two of the last holdouts here. Most of their neighbors have sold to California Forever (at far over market value), but they’ve turned down millions to keep farming the 3,700-acre ranch that has been in Jeannie’s family for more than a century. “Having developers come was always a fear [throughout] my whole childhood,” said McCormack, “because California was just changing so fast with development in farm areas.”
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Many of their neighbors who didn’t sell have been sued by California Forever, who has accused them of colluding to raise land prices in the area (a charge they deny).
“The housing is important, there’s no question about it,” said Medvitz. “But there are appropriate ways to do it.”
California Forever is sparing no expense to try to win over county residents, in what The New York Times’ Conor Dougherty says could be the most expensive political campaign in the history of Solano County.
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Burbank asked, “The idea that this tech money is being redirected to this very kind of brick-and-mortar thing as an investment is kind of weird to me. Is it just that there’s that much money to be made potentially?”
“Everyone thinks I’m crazy when I say this, but I just don’t think it’s principally about money,” said Dougherty. “I think that many of the people involved are extremely frustrated that the pace of change in the physical world has lagged so far behind the pace of change in the digital world.” He believes California Forever’s motivation is, “If we could redesign everything and not have to deal with all the inherited problems that cities come with, then that would make everything so much easier.”
California Forever still has plenty of hurdles to clear, some that may prove impossible.
But Sramek insists this idea of designing and building a relatively-affordable walkable city within the nation’s most unaffordable and car-centric state is in fact possible. He says his company has the know-how, the patience, and (critically) the deep pockets to make it a reality.
“To me, success is that, in 10 or 15 years, Solano County is this incredible economic success story that people all over America are looking at and saying, can we replicate that here?” Sramek said.
And does he see himself living there? “Yeah, I’ll be moving in the first house!” he replied.
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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The escalating fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continued Saturday as both sides traded strikes as the war in Gaza nears one year.
The Israel Defense Forces said its air force struck Hezbollah fighters inside a mosque in southern Lebanon that they said was used as a command center to “plan and execute terrorist attacks against IDF troops and the State of Israel.”
The mosque was adjacent to Salah Ghandour Hospital in the town of Bint Jbeil. The hospital said in a statement that Israeli forces had shelled it after being warned to evacuate. The shelling “resulted in nine members of the medical and nursing staff being injured, most of them seriously,” while most of the medical staff were evacuated. On Thursday, the World Health Organization said 28 health workers in Lebanon had been killed in the past 24 hours.
ANWAR AMRO/AFP via Getty Images
At the same time, 12 Israeli airstrikes hit Beirut’s southern suburbs, including one that badly damaged a large hall Hezbollah used to hold ceremonies, Lebanon’s state news agency said.
Later in the day, more strikes hit the area, from which tens of thousands of people have fled over the past two weeks.
Israeli airstrikes also hit areas in southern and eastern Lebanon, according to state media. At least six people were killed, according to NNA.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah said it launched a series of rockets at an Israeli air base near Haifa, about 30 miles from the Lebanese border. Israeli police said fragments of interceptors fell in several sites but no injuries were reported, according to the Associated Press.
Israel has sharply expanded its strikes on Lebanon in recent weeks after nearly a year of exchanging fire with the Iran-backed Hezbollah — long designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., Israel and many other nations. The IDF has been carrying out nightly bombardment of Beirut’s once densely populated southern suburbs, a stronghold of Hezbollah. Overnight, a military spokesman issued three alerts for residents there to evacuate.
Houssam Shbaro/Anadolu via Getty Images
Nearly a week of Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon, near Israel’s northern border, and two weeks of airstrikes in that region and in southern Beirut — both Hezbollah strongholds — had killed more than 2,000 people, the health ministry said. More than 1 million people have been driven from their homes, including tens of thousands under Israel evacuation orders in almost 100 towns and villages near the border.
Hezbollah started launching those attacks in support of its ideological ally Hamas, which is also backed by Iran, the day after Hamas sparked the ongoing war in Gaza with its Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. The IDF says Hezbollah militants have fired over 10,000 rockets across the border since Oct. 8, 2023. The vast majority of them have been intercepted by Israel’s advanced missile defense systems.
Israel conducts more ground raids
The Israeli military said on Saturday its special forces were carrying out ground raids against Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon, destroying missiles, launchpads, watchtowers and weapons storage facilities. The military said troops also dismantled tunnel shafts that Hezbollah used to approach the Israeli border.
Some 1.2 million people have been driven from their homes since Israel escalated its strikes in late September aiming to cripple Hezbollah and push it away from the countries’ shared border. On Tuesday, Israel launched what it calls a limited ground operation into southern Lebanon.
Nine Israeli troops have been killed in close fighting in the area in the past few days, which is saturated with arms and explosives, the military said.
Americans attempt to leave Lebanon
The U.S. government has warned Americans not to travel to Lebanon since mid-September and urged any citizens in the country to leave via commercial travel routes. As of Friday night, the U.S. State Department has assisted approximately 500 U.S. citizens, permanent residents and their families to leave Lebanon on flights organized by the agency.
Other nations are also working to evacuate their residents from Lebanon. Germany has evacuated 460 citizens on German military flights, while a Dutch military transport plane carried more than 100 citizens out of Lebanon. There were also citizens of Belgium, Finland and Ireland who were repatriated on that flight.
ROB ENGELAAR/ANP/AFP via Getty Images
“It’s great that these people are safely back in the Netherlands. These have been tense times for them,” Christiaan Rebergen, secretary-general of the foreign ministry, said after they landed Friday.
Fighting ongoing in Gaza
Palestinian medical officials say Israeli strikes in northern and central Gaza early Saturday have killed at least nine people, including two children.
One strike hit a group of people in the northern town of Beit Hanoun, killing at least five people, including two children, according to the Health Ministry’s Ambulance and Emergency service.
Another strike hit a house in the northern part of Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least four people, the Awda hospital said. The strike also left a number of wounded people, it said.
The Israeli military did not have any immediate comment on the strikes but has long accused Hamas of operating from within civilian areas.
Earlier in the day, the Israeli military had warned residents in parts of central Gaza to evacuate, saying its forces would soon operate there in response to Palestinian militants.
The warnings cover areas along a strategic corridor in central Gaza, which was at the heart of obstacles to a ceasefire deal earlier this summer. The military warned Palestinians in areas of Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps, located along the Netzarim corridor, to evacuate to an along Gaza’s shore called Muwasi, which the military has designated a humanitarian zone. It’s unclear how many Palestinians are currently living in the areas affected by the order, parts of which were evacuated previously.
Almost 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during the almost year-long war, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths.
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1-month-old twins who died with mother believed to be the youngest-known Hurricane Helene victims
Month-old twin boys are believed to be the youngest known victims of Hurricane Helene. The boys died alongside their mother last week when a large tree fell through the roof of their home in Thomson, Georgia.
Obie Williams, grandfather of the twins, said he could hear babies crying and branches battering the windows when he spoke with his daughter, Kobe Williams, 27, on the phone last week as the storm tore through Georgia.
The single mother had been sitting in bed holding sons Khyzier and Khazmir and chatting on the phone with various family members while the storm raged outside.
AP
Kobe’s mother, Mary Jones, was staying with her daughter, helping her take care of the babies. She was on the other side of the trailer home when she heard a loud crash as a tree fell through the roof of her daughter’s bedroom.
“Kobe, Kobe, answer me, please,” Jones cried out in desperation, but she received no response.
Kobe and the twins were found dead.
“I’d seen pictures when they were born and pictures every day since, but I hadn’t made it out there yet to meet them,” Obie Williams told The Associated Press days after the storm ravaged eastern Georgia. “Now I’ll never get to meet my grandsons. It’s devastating.”
The babies, born Aug. 20, are the youngest known victims of a storm that had claimed more than 200 lives across Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and the Carolinas. Among the other young victims are a 7-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy from about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south in Washington County, Georgia.
“She was so excited to be a mother of those beautiful twin boys,” said Chiquita Jones-Hampton, Kobe’ Jones’ niece. “She was doing such a good job and was so proud to be their mom.”
Jones-Hampton, who considered Kobe a sister, said the family is in shock and heartbroken.
In Obie Williams’ home city of Augusta, 30 miles east of his daughter’s home in Thomson, power lines stretched along the sidewalks, tree branches blocked the roads and utility poles lay cracked and broken. The debris left him trapped in his neighborhood near the South Carolina border for a little over a day after the storm barreled through.
He said one of his sons dodged fallen trees and downed power lines to check on Kobe, and he could barely bear to tell his father what he found.
Many of his 14 other children are still without power in their homes across Georgia. Some have sought refuge in Atlanta, and others have traveled to Augusta to see their father and mourn together, he said.
He described his daughter as a lovable, social and strong woman. She always had a smile and loved to make people laugh, he said.
And she loved to dance, Jones-Hampton said.
“That was my baby,” Williams said. “And everybody loved her.”