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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.
Roger Carstens, the Biden administration’s top official for freeing Americans held overseas, on Friday arrived in Damascus, Syria, for a high-risk mission: making the first known face-to-face contact with the caretaker government and asking for help finding missing American journalist Austin Tice.
Tice was kidnapped in Syria 12 years ago during the civil war and brutal reign of now-deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. For years, U.S. officials have said they do not know with certainty whether Tice is still alive, where he is being held or by whom.
The State Department’s top diplomat for the Middle East, Barbara Leaf, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, accompanied Carstens to Damascus as a gesture of broader outreach to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, known as HTS, the rebel group that recently overthrew Assad’s regime and is emerging as a leading power.
Near East Senior Adviser Daniel Rubinstein was also with the delegation. They are the first American diplomats to visit Damascus in over a decade, according to a State Department spokesperson.
They plan to meet with HTS representatives to discuss transition principles endorsed by the U.S. and regional partners in Aqaba, Jordan, the spokesperson said. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Aqaba last week to meet with Middle East leaders and discuss the situation in Syria.
While finding and freeing Tice and other American citizens who disappeared under the Assad regime is the ultimate goal, U.S. officials are downplaying expectations of a breakthrough on this trip. Multiple sources told CBS News that Carstens and Leaf’s intent is to convey U.S. interests to senior HTS leaders, and learn anything they can about Tice.
Rubinstein will lead the U.S. diplomacy in Syria, engaging directly with the Syrian people and key parties in Syria, the State Department spokesperson added.
Diplomatic outreach to HTS comes in a volatile, war-torn region at an uncertain moment. Two sources even compared the potential danger to the expeditionary diplomacy practiced by the late U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who led outreach to rebels in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and was killed in a terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound and intelligence post.
U.S. special operations forces known as JSOC provided security for the delegation as they traveled by vehicle across the Jordanian border and on the road to Damascus. The convoy was given assurances by HTS that it would be granted safe passage while in Syria, but there remains a threat of attacks by other terrorist groups, including ISIS.
CBS News withheld publication of this story for security concerns at the State Department’s request.
Sending high-level American diplomats to Damascus represents a significant step in reopening U.S.-Syria relations following the fall of the Assad regime less than two weeks ago. Operations at the U.S. embassy in Damascus have been suspended since 2012, shortly after the Assad regime brutally repressed an uprising that became a 14-year civil war and spawned 13 million Syrians to flee the country in one of the largest humanitarian disasters in the world.
The U.S. formally designated HTS, which had ties to al Qaeda, as a foreign terrorist organization in 2018. Its leader, Mohammed al Jolani, was designated as a terrorist by the US in 2013 and prior to that served time in a US prison in Iraq.
Since toppling Assad, HTS has publicly signaled interest in a new more moderate trajectory. Al Jolani even shed his nom de guerre and now uses his legal name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.
U.S. sanctions on HTS linked to those terrorist designations complicate outreach somewhat, but they haven’t prevented American officials from making direct contact with HTS at the direction of President Biden. Blinken recently confirmed that U.S. officials were in touch with HTS representatives prior to Carstens and Leaf’s visit.
“We’ve heard positive statements coming from Mr. Jolani, the leader of HTS,” Blinken told Bloomberg News on Thursday. “But what everyone is focused on is what’s actually happening on the ground, what are they doing? Are they working to build a transition in Syria that brings everyone in?”
In that same interview, Blinken also seemed to dangle the possibility that the U.S. could help lift sanctions on HTS and its leader imposed by the United Nations, if HTS builds what he called an inclusive nonsectarian government and eventually holds elections. The Biden administration is not expected to lift the U.S. terrorist designation before the end of the president’s term on January 20th.
Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder disclosed Thursday that the U.S. currently has approximately 2,000 US troops inside of Syria as part of the mission to defeat ISIS, a far higher number than the 900 troops the Biden administration had previously acknowledged. There are at least five U.S. military bases in the north and south of the country.
The Biden administration is concerned that thousands of ISIS prisoners held at a camp known as al-Hol could be freed. It is currently guarded by the Syrian Democratic forces, Kurdish allies of the U.S. who are wary of the newly-powerful HTS. The situation on the ground is rapidly changing since Russia and Iran withdrew military support from the Assad regime, which has reset the balance of power. Turkey, which has been a sometimes problematic U.S. ally, has been a conduit to HTS and is emerging as a power broker.
A high-risk mission like this is unusual for the typically risk averse Biden administration, which has exercised consistently restrained diplomacy. Blinken approved Carstens and Leaf’s trip and relevant congressional leaders were briefed on it days ago.
“I think it’s important to have direct communication, it’s important to speak as clearly as possible, to listen, to make sure that we understand as best we can where they’re going and where they want to go,” Blinken said Thursday.
At a news conference in Moscow Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he had not yet met with Assad, who fled to Russia when his regime fell earlier this month. Putin added that he would ask Assad about Austin Tice when they do meet.
Tice, a Marine Corps veteran, worked for multiple news organizations including CBS News.
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