California Forever, The Group Planning A New Bay Area City, Gears Up Amid Scrutiny
The secretive group behind a project known as California Forever that has its sights set on creating a new city in Solano County, California, has established a new office in Fairfield and is planning another in Vallejo as it prepares a ballot measure that will send its ambitious plans to voters.
Plans for a new city northeast of San Francisco were announced last summer and entail building on 78 acres purchased over the course of five years by an investor group that includes Silicon Valley locals and overseas entities. The group hopes to put a measure that will kick off its plans on the ballot in November and has said it will release the ballot measure and begin the signature-gathering process later this month.
The land was purchased by an acquisition vehicle called Flannery Associates, but the project goes by the name California Forever.
“As we get ready to introduce our ballot initiative by the end of the month, Solano County residents are invited to visit California Forever’s offices throughout the county,” California Forever CEO Jan Sramek said in a release. “In addition to the offices in Vacaville and Vallejo, this Fairfield office will help showcase California Forever plans to create a safe, walkable community with good-paying jobs, and middle-class homes for all of Solano County.”
Details on the massive development effort are scant, and scrutiny is growing, particularly around the identities of its foreign investors and its intentions given its location near Travis Air Force Base.
The Wall Street Journal last week reported the group was contacted at the end of 2022 by the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which sought proof that the funds used to purchase the land originated in the U.S. Sramek told the WSJ that his group complied with the request.
California Reps. Mike Thompson and John Garamendi have called for a formal investigation by CFIUS, but the committee has yet to launch one.
According to the California Forever website, 97% of its funding is domestic and 3% comes from overseas investors. Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who created the California Forever project in 2017, grew up in the Czech Republic before moving to the U.S., the website says.
A California Forever spokesperson told the WSJ that the 3% is held by three British and Irish investors, as well as Thomas Mather, the manager of Flannery Associates.
The project’s U.S. investors include several big names in Silicon Valley: LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs and former Sequoia Capital partner Michal Moritz.
Solano County, positioned between Sacramento and California’s wine country, is like many Bay Area communities in its struggle with housing affordability. The average home price jumped 29% to $580K from 2019 to 2023, according to data reported by a local television station.
California Forever positions itself as a development that will help ease the burden of local housing shortages with its acres of new development. The project could also feature solar panels and an agricultural greenbelt, as well as house “thousands” of jobs, according to the website.
