Even spending hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t enough to build a city without giving the locals time to get used to the idea or see an environmental impact report.
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California Forever tech billionaire-backed plan to build a new city 60 miles away from San Francisco is on hold 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 (including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Andreessen Horowitz investors Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs) had secretly bought up hundreds of millions of dollars worth of farmland in Solano County to build their own city.
With former Goldman Sachs trader named Jan Sramek spearheading the project, it filed for permission to develop the land only months after its plans became known. According to a Solano County-commissioned study, that process usually takes years, and it “estimated the full project would require tens of billions in infrastructure investment but warned that details about the development remained so vague it was hard to assess its full impact,” reports the Times.
In his own statement, Sramek said, “…doing the Environmental Impact Report first does not impact the overall timeline – it just reorders the steps,” and that the plan is to resubmit its requests in 2026. However, a local congressman quoted by the Times said, “The California Forever pipe dream is in a permanent deep freeze.”
