The Solano East Plan, a proposal backed by a list of tech billionaires to build a city of up to 400,000 inhabitants on farmland about 100 km from San Francisco, is delayed at least two years to study the project’s impact on the environment.
The California Forever technological plan, backed by a billionaire, to build a new city 100 km from San Francisco is suspended for at least two years, pending an environmental impact study, reports The New York Times.
Last year, The Times reported that a group of Silicon Valley investors (LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs) had secretly purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth of farmland in Solano County to build their own city.
What do we know about California Forever
Jan Sramek, former Goldman Sachs trader, led the project and requested permission to develop the land just a few months later after his plans became known.
But the proposal created tensions in the area. California Forever, the company behind the project, spent years buying farmland worth $900 million without revealing anything about the identity of its sponsors or its plans for a new city.
As their lands grew and surrounded Travis Air Force Base on three sides, neighbors and members of Congress feared it could be linked to foreign spies.
The company further alienated the neighbors by filing a $500 million antitrust lawsuit, claiming that a group of farmers who had refused to sell their land were colluding to raise prices.
Despite being involved in an expensive legal battle, those neighbors had no idea who was behind the company.
Last week, a study commissioned by Solano County estimated that the entire project would require tens of billions of investment in infrastructure, but warned that the details about the development remained so vague that it was difficult to assess its overall impact.
While most large projects usually require years of study, the report noted that “this was presented to the County only a few months after the public became aware of the proponents’ intentions.”
To no one’s surprise, this project has been put on hold for two years, as a comprehensive report on the environmental impact needs to be done. For that reason, California Forever will remain just a vague idea until 2026.
