"California Forever" sounds like a bumper sticker. For a few years, though, it was a real and aggressively secret plan to build a brand-new city on 55,000 acres of Solano County farmland northeast of San Francisco. Silicon Valley billionaires tied to LinkedIn, Stripe, and Andreessen Horowitz spent years quietly buying up parcels before the public knew anything about it. When the story broke in 2023, the backlash was immediate. Local ranchers felt ambushed. Elected officials wanted answers.
Now, according to reporting this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom has been working behind the scenes to salvage the project, or at least keep the investors from walking. Details are thin, as backroom maneuvering tends to be. But the broad strokes fit a pattern that goes back further than most Californians realize.
California has been here before. A brand-new, purpose-built city on open land, funded by private money, backed by powerful political patrons, sold to the public as progress. Old as the state itself. And it has almost never gone the way anyone planned.
The City That Was Supposed to Fix Everything
The clearest precedent isn't in the Bay Area. It's in the Central Valley, dating to the 1940s and '50s, when California was growing so fast that planners genuinely believed the state needed to manufacture new urban centers rather than let existing ones sprawl outward. The idea wasn't fringe. The Eisenhower-era boom in highway construction and federal housing policy made greenfield city-building seem not just possible but logical.
In Marin County, the postwar era produced serious proposals for entirely new communities on undeveloped land. Down in Los Angeles, the planned community of Lakewood was assembled in the early 1950s on what had been sugar beet fields and dairy farms. Developers D.J. Waldie, Louis Boyar, and Mark Taper built 17,500 homes in roughly three years. At peak construction: one house every 7.5 minutes. Lakewood incorporated as its own city in 1954, the first in American history to contract out virtually all its public services to Los Angeles County rather than build a municipal government from scratch. A genuine experiment in what private capital could do with a blank piece of land and a receptive government.
The model worked, after a fashion. People moved in. Schools got built. But the deeper promise, that a planned city could be designed free of the dysfunction plaguing older, organically grown places, turned out to be wishful thinking. The problems of California life followed people right across the city limits.
The Investor Class Has Always Wanted a Clean Slate
What made California Forever different from garden-variety real estate speculation wasn't the money. It was the ideology. The investors, operating for years under the shell company Flannery Associates, talked openly about building a city designed around walkability, green energy, and high-speed transit. A physical rebuke to every failed urban planning decision the Bay Area had made since the 1960s.
That framing has a long California pedigree. In 1965, architect William Pereira unveiled his master plan for UC Irvine and the surrounding community on land donated by the Irvine Company, 93,000 acres of open ranch land in Orange County. The plan was radically idealistic. Pereira envisioned a university at the center, ringed by residential villages, linked by greenways, insulated from the commercial strip-mall chaos consuming the rest of Southern California. The Orange County Development Company poured in private capital. State and local officials cleared the way.
Irvine today ranks among the most highly rated cities in the country by various quality-of-life measures. It's also, critics have noted for decades, one of the most economically segregated. A planned paradise that, by design or market outcome, ended up affordable mainly to a narrow slice of the population. Clean slate, clean product. Just not available to everyone.
When the Politics Get Complicated
Newsom's involvement adds a dimension that Pereira and the Irvine Company never had to manage: a hostile, organized local electorate. Solano County voters rejected a ballot measure in November 2024 that would have unlocked the project's development potential. The vote wasn't especially close. Ranchers who'd spent generations on those flatlands between Fairfield and Rio Vista didn't want a tech utopia next door, and they said so clearly.
Past California governors have stepped into similar land fights, sometimes decisively. Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown was the key political patron behind the State Water Project in the early 1960s, a $1.75 billion infrastructure commitment that essentially decided which parts of California would grow and which wouldn't. Brown pushed it through over fierce opposition from Northern California farmers who correctly predicted it would drain their water south. The project remade the state's geography. It also created water dependency structures California is still arguing about 60 years later.
The lesson isn't that governors shouldn't intervene in big land and development fights. Sometimes they have to. The lesson is that the intervention tends to outlast the governor, and the problems outlast the intervention.
Same Dream, Different Century
The California Forever investors haven't formally abandoned the project. Newsom, according to reporting this week, hasn't walked away either. The land is still owned. The architects' renderings still exist somewhere on a server. And Solano County is still a place where almond orchards and aging air force infrastructure sit side by side, waiting for someone to figure out what comes next.
California has been building imaginary perfect cities since before it was a state. Sometimes they got built. Sometimes they became something nobody intended. Sometimes they stayed imaginary. The honest answer, looking at the record, is that nobody ever really controlled which outcome it would be.
Newsom might want to keep that in mind the next time he picks up the phone.