He Thinks His City Can Solve California's Biggest Problems. Even if the Public Says Otherwise.

Yahoo

21-03-2025

SOLANO COUNTY, California — It doesn't take long, driving north from San Francisco past bay and sea, to remember just how new, in the scheme of things, this place is.
Towns become infrequent and then disappear altogether, replaced by hills, fields and farms. The land opens up in green and yellow, a reminder of a time when California was defined in the national consciousness by verdant pastures and gold-flecked creeks, rather than by crime or unaffordability.
In the mind of Jan Sramek, 38, a 6'7"-ish, Czech, new-urbanism evangelist, change comes quickly. Not so long ago, San Francisco, too, was a collection of camps and houses on an improbable spit of land at the end of the continent; Oakland, a swampy peninsula surrounded by orchards. As we built great bridges and towers, the hilly port city became the world's center of technology and innovation. It would have seemed impossible, but then it happened.
Working from a generic office park 40 miles north of San Francisco, Sramek believes it can happen again. As a child growing up in the post-Soviet Eastern bloc, Sramek became enchanted with the sparkling promise of California. And now, as an adult real estate entrepreneur, he envisions a future in which the hayfields and sleepy towns that surround him transform into a new glittering city — one divorced from the problems facing the Golden State's older models. The name of the metropolis, California Forever, is itself an ode to what the state has achieved and could still.'The modern world was basically made in California over the last 100 years, and that meant it was built with Californian values,' Sramek said. 'I think we have a responsibility to keep it going.'
It is here, in an unheralded, 27 square mile swath of semi-rural Solano County, smack-dab between Sacramento and San Francisco, that Sramek intends to prove that California can still be bold. It is here, he says, where he will cut through the state's red tape, build a model 400,000-person sustainable community, and triumphantly reestablish a tradition of dense and walkable cities dating back to the dawn of human civilization.
If, at least, California lets him.
The path has not been easy since Sramek announced his plans for a new city backed by tech luminaries, including Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs. If 2023 was the year in which Sramek unveiled California Forever to the world, 2024 was a forced humbling from a wary — and often downright hostile — public skeptical of billionaire outsiders. 2025 will now determine whether Sramek's sweeping, transformational, and some argue self-serving, visions for the future are compatible with the slow-moving gears of local government.
Just last year, he failed to get approval for his new city via referendum, pitching an updated urban center that was affordable and devoid of sprawl. But polling showed voters weren't convinced of the merits, and he pulled the referendum from the ballot before it could be shot down. Now, Sramek is working with the county government to hash out the details of the plan in hopes of quelling concerns, gritting his teeth while enduring the county's rolling demands for detailed paperwork. By year's end, he will have to decide whether to go back to voters in 2026 on the whole grand vision.
This is the new stage of Sramek's quest, as he's forced to build a new city by collaborating with the systems he seems to resent most. While Elon Musk and David Sacks, Trump's crypto czar, test their ability to control Washington's machinery, Sramek faces a choice: work methodically to win over a skeptical public — or bulldoze his way through local government, public opinion be damned.
Long before Sramek pulled his initiative from the 2024 ballot, there were signs that things might not go according to plan.
At a town hall in late November 2023, Sramek stood at a lectern wearing a casual button-down shirt and a bewildered look as he was dressed down by Solano County residents.
The event in Vallejo, a working-class city of 124,000, was the first of eight such townhalls California Forever planned over the year — an early attempt at voter outreach as California Forever organizers began campaigning for a ballot measure that would allow them to rezone thousands of acres from agricultural to 'new development' and begin building their city. Backed only by renderings of colorful neighborhood scenes, California Forever's CEO seemed somewhat wrongfooted by the level of hostility of the crowd.
'I'm sick and tired of developers coming in and we don't know nothing,' a woman shouted at Sramek, as he looked on, mouth agape, during a recording of the meeting produced by ABC7 News Bay Area.
'Honestly, I'm probably more skeptical now than I was when I walked in,' a man said just before walking out.
It was far from a friendly reception, and a harsh reality check for Sramek and his tech billionaire-funded team, who projected a sense of exceptionalism from the time they arrived in Solano County.
After moving to California in the 2010s, Sramek became fixated on the idea of solving the state's housing crisis. Growth in existing cities wouldn't be enough — he needed to do something big. After spending years researching the idea, he began quietly pitching big name funders to invest in the project, which he called California Forever.
Then in 2018, he set his sights on Solano County, a region with the highest unemployment and child poverty rates in the Bay Area region. There, he thought, it was possible California Forever might find a receptive audience. The land, too, was appealing — a stretch of grazing properties that had once been identified by the Army Corps of Engineers as a future location for development.
Sramek and California Forever started quietly buying up tens of thousands of acres of land, suing residents who chose not to sell — accusing them of price fixing — and becoming, almost overnight, the largest landowner in the county. Then, in August 2023, following a New York Times exposéouting their efforts, Sramek and California Forever announced themselves to the world in a burst of near-messianic fervor.
Within the next five years, company officials declared, they would build a new city, right there in Solano County. They promised to bring jobs and cheap homes for the financially struggling region. They pledged to build hospitals and schools and water parks and sports complexes. And they would be taking the project straight to voters. A ballot initiative would allow them to eschew traditional county planning procedures, build outside of existing jurisdictions, and rewrite the zoning code to reclassify 17,500 acres of agricultural land for a community of 400,000 residents — roughly the population of Tampa, Florida. The plan was funded by the co-founder of LinkedIn, run by the one-time chief strategist for John McCain, and featured leaders of Kamala Harris's presidential super PAC.
'They just walked in and said, 'Here's the plan,'' said former Solano County supervisor Duane Kromm.
Soon, California Forever embarked on a months-long, $100-million charm offensive with Sramek serving as its lead pitchman, cajoling residents of Solano County to back a ballot measure allowing him to bypass a decades-old orderly growth ordinance restricting development outside of existing cities. The initiative was written in a way that would give the county and the public minimal oversight over the future city.
'This would solve the housing situation in Solano County and regionally,' Sramek argued at the time. 'This would fix the lack of good-paying local jobs that we have been trying to fix in Solano County for 40 years.'
By June 2024, they'd gathered enough signatures to place the initiative on the local November 2024 ballot. But by then, voters had already made up their minds. Many residents were disturbed by the lawsuits against their neighbors. Others were concerned about what the new development would mean for traffic and congestion; still others about the financial impact it would have on existing cities as well as its effect on threatened species and seasonal wetland habitat. Broadly, opposition rose from the perception that wealthy outsiders were trying to manufacture a hostile takeover of their county.
In late July 2024, sensing imminent defeat, Sramek and his team pulled their measure from the ballot, an unceremonious end to what they'd seen as a can't-fail campaign. In a joint statement with the county board of supervisors, Sramek said he would instead do what the county had originally asked: study the project, come to an agreement with administrators on a detailed development plan — and then return to voters to change the zoning code.
But even that did little to mollify critics. The enemies of California Forever grew to be vast and varied, from farmers to climate advocates to the county Republican Party. (Sramek himself is not publicly affiliated with either party.) The quasi-utopian renderings of California Forever, ultimately, only aggravated voters.
Those onlookers argue Sramek should've seen this coming — as evidenced by that Vallejo town hall in November 2023, long before the ballot measure campaign screeched to a halt. But back then, although maybe taken aback by the level of vitriol from locals, Sramek quickly shrugged off residents' concerns.
'Certain people just hate development,' Sramek told reporters after that meeting.
According to two people who have worked with Sramek, he has always been guided by extreme self-confidence bordering on hubris. Sramek frequently left meetings with local elected officials positive that everything went swimmingly, according to those two people who have worked with him. He told reporters that most people in the county did, in fact, support the project. Polling indicated otherwise.
For months, during the ballot measure campaign, his team advised him to keep a lower profile, according to former staff who were granted anonymity to speak candidly. The various perks, like water parks and hospitals, that he promised to the county were doing more harm than good, they argued. As one former employee put it, it looked like 'you are just making shit up.'
Sramek's team disputes that narrative. In an emailed statement, a California Forever spokesperson said, 'This was clearly going to be a controversial project in the beginning, and while there's always room for improvement, by the end of July 2024, a poll of likely voters in Solano County conducted by Impact Research found that 65 percent supported development in east Solano County.
'This, and the continued progress since then, is a testament to the community work and relationship-building that Jan and the California Forever team have been doing,' the spokesperson said.
Catherine Moy, the mayor of a nearby town called Fairfield, framed things differently.
'They couldn't have done a worse job with PR to start their campaign,' Moy said. 'Suing farmers that a lot of us grew up with for a half billion dollars? And it just got worse and worse from there.'
The time between the town hall in November 2023 and the ballot measure's failure seven months later seemed to be Silicon Valley's education in local California politics, a fascinating case study in what happens when visionaries and deep-pocketed investors run up against the realities of regional land-use debates. That tension, of civil servants versus disruptors, is currently defining national politics. Elon Musk is trying to dismantle American bureaucracy from the inside out. Silicon Valley tech billionaires, some of whom are also funding California Forever, are flexing their muscles in Washington in an effort to see how deregulation can benefit them and their companies.
Many of those same instincts animate Sramek's quest, and he has earned comparisons to Musk in the county and from observers. He wants to move quickly, and he's frustrated that California's regulatory structure does not allow it. Although he submitted to the hard work of environmental impact reports, traffic studies, and emissions analyses after the referendum failed, he's still not willing to accept the decade-long horizon that has become the norm for California projects.
'If we can build a bridge spanning the Golden Gate, a 400-acre island in the middle of the Bay, and a brand-new jet that will revolutionizes aviation, all in under four years, then surely we can plan a new community in less than six,' Sramek wrote to county administrators in a heated letter in late October.
'It should be entirely reasonable to get local approvals done by 2026, and shovels in the ground in 2028.'
Except, of course, it's never that easy in California.
Last summer, on a now well-traveled tour of the future city, Sramek sipped a can of flavored carbonated water while driving a Rivian truck through the vast fields and farms of his future kingdom.
It was August 2024, a challenging time for California Forever. The ballot measure had been pulled a month earlier. There was no clear path to success before voters. It seemed like the whole project could be teetering on the precipice. During the drive, as he wound through the Solano County exurbs into open space, Sramek vacillated between acceptance and being downright perplexed by the challenges posed to his masterplan.
On one hand, land use debates in California, as he put it, are 'a bloodsport.' The secretive land purchases, the intense local vitriol, the dramatic, nationally televised courtship with the county — in his view, that's just the cost of doing business in California.
On the other hand, the state has a housing crisis recognized by all levels of government. As Sramek sees things, his project would build that housing in one of the best places to do so in the state. It sits at the center of the San Francisco Bay mega-region, connecting both San Francisco and Sacramento. He said the thousands of acres his company owns in the rolling hayfields near the Sacramento River Delta is a rare Western location with no risk of fires, earthquakes or floods (although some of the land now does fall within the state's newly updated wildfire hazard zones).
For almost every criticism leveled at the project, Sramek believes he has an answer — a product of good planning and a solid year under the microscope. Water supply? The development will use what is currently going to a somewhat unproductive almond orchard to meet the needs of initial residents. Environmental concerns? Sensitive habitats, like seasonal pools where certain rare species breed, will be protected and preserved. Congestion getting into and out of the city? We've never had a problem building highways — we'll just build more.
'If you look at every state bill that has passed in California in the last 10 years, they call for a simple zoning code, walkable neighborhoods, affordability by design, sustainability and low emissions,' Sramek said. 'Everything they are calling for is in our proposal. And the bottleneck to building it is widening seven miles of highway?'
Sramek approaches his dream city with an almost fanatical intensity. In his view, California Forever is a chance to revive the type of city that has been lost to time in America. For hundreds of years, we created vibrant metropolises that were based around human movement: Athens, Madrid, London, and New York. Then, during World War II, the American wartime government issued a moratorium on new development. In the United States at least, the chain was broken, and post-war housing was built to serve the automobile. Today, many of the most desirable, dense, walkable cities are also the most expensive — and they were all built before the war. (Arguably one exception: Los Angeles, which is reasonably dense but built entirely around the car.)
That pitch of the walkable city, underscored by the odd dynamic of Sramek selling his idea while driving a $60,000 electric truck down ranch roads, is what has attracted some of the richest people in the world to Sramek's project. And however unfeasible it sounds, it is true that California Forever is not the first time that someone has conceived of a master-planned community. Celebration, Florida, the Disney-built resort community drafted in the model of quaint small-town America, sprang into being from the longleaf pines south of Orlando nearly 30 years ago. Even before that, Irvine, California was developed to escape pollution and crime in Los Angeles' urban core.
Perhaps the closest analogue to California Forever is Columbia, Maryland, a community built by a man named James Rouse in the 1960s who touted the city as a 'garden for growing people,' where residents would live, work and respect the land. Like California Forever, the land was secretly bought up through dummy corporations, leading to local rumors that it was going to be turned into a sprawling municipal dump. Like California Forever, it was announced with salvational overtones, with plans to eliminate religious, racial and class discrimination. Like California Forever, it faced initial zoning concerns. Later, it became an extremely desirable place to live.
Beyond Sramek's obvious financial stake in the city (he's put a significant sum into the project personally, although he has declined to say how much, and would make a lot of money if the city comes to fruition), he is also deeply invested in the project emotionally. Raised by working-class parents in a small town in the Czech Republic, he ultimately went on to study at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Soon after graduating, he worked as an investor at Goldman Sachs before moving to the United States to pursue a series of start-up ventures. During his apprenticeship in Silicon Valley, he began to think about how to solve California's housing crisis. Although he first considered infill (the process of building new developments within existing cities), he quickly decided that the scale of these projects was infeasible to meet the moment. Then, slowly, the idea of California Forever began to form. That was nearly 10 years ago.
'I spent eight years of my life buying this property without knowing that this would ever work,' Sramek said. 'There are so many easier ways to make money than trying to build a new city.'
The project, officially launched in 2017, is as much a real estate play as it is a chance to prove to himself that the California he imagined as a child still exists. As Sramek put it, the culture of post-communist Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall became enamored with all things American. California, with all its glamor and ambition and opportunity, was the outward projection of that.
'There's a really unique combination of people, natural beauty, climate, diversity, and openness to innovation that just happened in California,' Sramek said. 'It's extremely sad that we are destroying it, basically by an entirely unforced error.'
As we whizzed past orchards and a small ranch house, he emphasized that the experts who support his development 'weigh more heavily than a couple of angry voters who don't know the details of the project.' He lashed out at public meetings with fuming residents as 'undemocratic'; called the economic policy of California 'self-inflicted suicide'; and the state's environmental and planning regulations a 'layer cake of bad ideas.'
'Hollywood happened here, they found gold here in the hills, then Silicon Valley happened here, and then the countercultural revolution happened here,' Sramek said. 'And then we screw it up because we can't build enough housing?'
In Sramek's view, the state is at risk of becoming something like Florence, the ancient Italian city that was once Europe's center of art and innovation and is now essentially a large, open-air museum. The decades of regulation and development roadblocks erected by California, in his view, could easily tumble the state in the same direction. You could build California Forever, with its commitments to advanced manufacturing and $30-billion private investment, or you could watch all those opportunities go elsewhere — essentially because of regulations.
'When you take 50 good ideas and you lay them on top of each other, you don't get an idea that's 50 times as good as the 50 good ideas,' Sramek said. 'You might actually get a really, really, terrible system.'
And yet, it is that system that Sramek has pledged to work within, at least for the foreseeable future. He says working with the county doesn't bother him (although his angry letters about the county's pace indicate otherwise), and that pulling the ballot measure allowed his team of engineers and city planners to work out the details without the political pressure of a looming ballot measure. California Forever leaders have insisted that the decision to pull their measure was never an admission of defeat but rather a simple reorganization of steps. Voters, they said, rightfully had questions about the project.
They promised to answer all of them over the next two years.
Then they would return to the ballot.
Last December, the grand, world-historic ideas behind California Forever landed on the desk of Solano County administrator Bill Emlen, a longtime county staffer who has been tasked with coordinating how to build America's next great city.
Emlen, who has lived in the county and worked in local government for over 30 years, epitomizes the kind of roadblock that seems to most infuriate Sramek.
'Let's face it, it's not your average development proposal,' Emlen said. 'And I don't get the sense that governmental processes are something they particularly embrace.'
According to Emlen, California Forever's initiative never gave specific timelines for when development would occur, or how it would provide services to the community. Although he sympathized with the challenges to building new housing, he said there were always few details about how the highly touted affordable city would actually be created — no clear analysis of greenhouse gas emissions, no measurement system for tracking job creation, no nothing.
After California Forever pledged to work with the county, Emlen wanted to know the answer to all those questions. And he had others, too. What about the impact on the nearby Air Force base? How would stormwater, sewage and transportation be provided? What about the loss of agricultural lands?
In an October letter to Sramek, Emlen laid out the county's needs: Submit a general plan, a rezoning plan, an environmental impact report and a development agreement. If the county and California Forever can come to an agreement, the project would still have to go before voters (presumably after having addressed their concerns).
Developers usually have reams of material as they move through the permitting process. While California Forever blamed the county for its lack of motivation to move the project forward, Emlen said that even by the beginning of 2025, he had yet to receive those materials.
'We're kind of just waiting for them to file an application,' Emlen said in January. 'They still haven't done that yet.'
It was an exponential demand on information for a team that leaned heavily on sweeping promises. Although Emlen recently announced he would be retiring at the end of March, the next county administrator will likely have similar questions.
Sramek, meanwhile, says his team is in the process of submitting all the necessary paperwork to the county, and that he welcomes questions from elected officials and the community. He argues that he has no problem doing the regulatory work that makes a city better, safer, and more sustainable. But he refuses to accept delays that he believes will entrap his project in a bureaucratic death spiral that he argues is commonplace in California development.
Edwin Okamura, the mayor of Rio Vista, a quaint river town adjacent to the California Forever property, said his conversations with Sramek have always been civil, and that it's not so different from working with 'any other businesspeople.'
'You sit across from someone you may like or dislike, and when you leave the table you say, 'OK, he's really trying to push this project,'' Okamura said. 'But you're either at the table or you're being cooked in the kitchen.'
Okamura tries to avoid the emotional aspects of the California Forever debates, and he said that if Solano County rejected all investors simply because they were rich, no development would happen at all. That being said, there's no part of him that believes Sramek's city, as currently presented, is the best way forward for the county. California Forever's success, quite likely, could come at the expense of existing cities like Rio Vista. And like Emlen, Okamura has only ever seen a vague outline of a plan, always extremely light on details.
'I think many of the ideas that they have are great, better farming methods, better ranching methods, a sustainable community,' Okamura said. 'But nothing has been proven.'
At the end of January, after a month without rain, Northern California seemed to be held in a state of suspended animation. The familiar downpours were replaced by bluebird skies and warm days.
California Forever, too, appeared to be on pause. The media attention and public developments surrounding the plan slowed to a crawl. Opponents of the project were still meeting relatively regularly, but without the intensity as during the ballot measure campaign. Sramek seemed to be getting nowhere with the county. To detractors, it appeared like David had defeated Goliath.
Then, on Jan. 30, the leaders of Suisun City, a small, 28,000-person underdog city along the train tracks, dropped a bombshell in an agenda item during an otherwise routine city council meeting: They would be working with 'regional partners' to explore expanding their city, and annexing the land around them.
Notably, the only direction the city could expand was east, directly into the land owned by California Forever. Although Suisun City council voted only to explore the possibility of annexing the land, it shocked Solano County residents who for months viewed the project as dead in the water.
Suddenly, Sramek's plan was revived.
'At only four square miles, we are Solano County's smallest city,' Suisun City manager Bret Prebula said in a statement following the council meeting. 'Now is the time to consider what more we can do to creatively grow our community and deliver more economic opportunity.'
Even when they were failing to convince voters, California Forever was always trying to woo local leadership — with little to no success. For months on end, almost no elected officials had come out in support of the project. At an event for a local elected official in 2023, Suisun City Councilmember Princess Washington said she was lobbied by a representative for California Forever who demanded to know if she would support the project. (She didn't.) Meanwhile, Moy, the mayor of the nearby town of Fairfield, said that California Forever would likely try to get their supporters into office if local officials didn't get on board.
But now, it seemed like all the California Forever team's efforts had finally paid dividends with financially struggling Suisun City. It was also a potential end-run around voters. They would no longer have to work with the county. A countywide ballot initiative would no longer be necessary. Instead, the process would resemble a traditional municipal land-use project, and the annexation would only need the approval of a regional planning agency to proceed. The land they've already bought up would be incorporated into Suisun City, and California Forever could start building. It would just have a different name.
'The project would stop being California Forever and it would start being the city of Suisun. That's what was a total mind trip,' said Washington, who is the only council member who voted against exploring the annexation.
'To do this was very cunning. It's diabolical.'
Sramek and California Forever, for their part, declined to confirm any agreement with the city, saying only they would be 'open to discussion.'
The power dynamic, again, appears to have shifted. Earlier this month, Rio Vista City Council announced that they too would be exploring a potential partnership with California Forever — formally claiming their seat at the dinner table.
After Suisun City's decision, even Moy, the mayor and a frequent critic, reached out to Sramek and California Forever to discuss ways in which her city, Fairfield, could collaborate with the project. In return, she received a from the company, shared with POLITICO Magazine, outlining the negative comments Moy had made in the press about Sramek and the team, accusing her of 'brand damage' and a 'persistent campaign of slander.'
'Ms. Moy has proven herself either unable or unwilling to deal with any facts or reality,' the letter read. 'Could you please let us know how the city plans to address the brand problems Ms. Moy has created?'
The letter was nameless, signed, simply, California Forever.
It is that spirit of vindictiveness, perhaps a natural counterpoint to Sramek's fervent belief that this project must come to fruition, that has now cast a shadow over elected leaders in Solano County. At one point, it seemed that California Forever's endless resources alone were not enough. Today, it seems that they are.
'They've forced our hand,' Okamura said. 'We need to be at the table, and we need to start being more forward thinking.'
On the tour of Sramek's hayfields, it's not impossible to see the outlines of his vision. The city limits would begin here, the advanced manufacturing district there, the ring of parks and open space now here. With a little imagination, you can picture the rolling golden hills as scenic backstops for a bustling community, trails leading to a lookout point for weekend hikers glancing back down at their neighborhood, kids biking around leafy streets like all those renderings presented at town hall meetings. After all, things can change quickly out here.
It's harder to imagine, if California Forever is ultimately built, that the people of Solano County will feel like it was their decision. Should the Suisun City annexation play out as some expect, they will have watched wealthy outsiders come in and remake their county as they see fit, without ever getting to vote on it. As in Washington, Silicon Valley does not seem to be in the mood to take 'no' for an answer.
In conversations with Sramek, he seems little concerned with that eventuality — that Solano County residents will always oppose this plan, regardless of how good of an idea he believes it is.
In February 2024, Sramek said he had a conversation with an elected official privately supportive of the project who described opposition in the county as something akin to stages of grief. First, people were angry. Then there was disappointment, then bargaining. Eventually, he said, there will come acceptance.
'I pitched what I wanted to build. That's what I pitched. I talked about what I thought California could become. I talked about what I thought Solano County could become,' Sramek said, driving the car out of the fields and back toward civilization.
'The process was controversial. But I think it ended in the right spot.'