Can California Ever Build Again? - EP 34 Jan Sramek

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
Today's podcast is not in our usual studio. We are in Solano County. I'm with Jan Sramek, who is, are you the CEO of California Forever? All right, so we're in Solano County. This is the home of California Forever, to just give some context for people who've never heard of it before. It's this long running project, basically to create a new city in California.
And it's been backed, I think, to the tune of about a billion dollars, has gone through some maybe downs and then some ups, some ups and downs, and then now ups, just as to how people were feeling about this idea of building a new city in California, which we used to do all the time, and then suddenly became a strange, difficult concept. But so I wanna, obviously, we're gonna spend some time get into all of this, the history of the project, why you'd wanna do such a thing, some of the journey and your background, but why don't, for people who've never heard of California Forever before, why don't you tell us what it is?

**Jan Sramek** (1:05)
Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks, Ashlee. California Forever is a company that I founded eight years ago to build the next great American city. And when I say the next great American city, I mean all of the things that you would find in one of the great cities in America. And so our focus has been on manufacturing and then more recently on shipbuilding. And so as of now, the city includes the proposed Solano Shipyard, which would become the biggest shipbuilding complex in America. The Solano Foundry, which is an advanced manufacturing park that we rolled out recently. And then incredible neighborhoods around it with 175,000 homes downtown, really focused on traditional American urbanism, like you would find in San Francisco or Philadelphia or Chicago.
And we're really doing this to create a place where California can build again. And so we're doing this to bring back a lot of the legacy that the state used to have, and solve some of the biggest issues that California is dealing with. A place where companies can stay and grow in California, a place where the next generation of Californians can afford to buy a home, and a place that brings back this sense of optimism that the state used to have, that we would love to come back.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:26)
So a bit practical, solving some problems that the state and the nation face, and then a bit of a symbolism on top of that.

**Jan Sramek** (2:35)
100%. Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:37)
And how many people, what's the goal for how many people would live here?

**Jan Sramek** (2:43)
Yeah, so we own about 68,000 acres, so that's about almost 110 square miles for context. That's about two and a half times the size of San Francisco. It's five times bigger than the island of Manhattan, 70% bigger than Washington DC. And the proposal for the city, which is on about 15,000 acres of that in the middle, is for 400,000 people. And then the land around that is used for advanced manufacturing, it's used for shipbuilding. There's a lot of land that right now is in a long-term strategic reserve, which could be used for energy generation. And then we would surround the entirety of that with a green belt of open space and agriculture. And so really allows us to master plan the entire area.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:48)
Jan, thank you for joining us.

**Jan Sramek** (3:50)
It's great to be here.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:51)
Tell me where we are.

**Jan Sramek** (3:54)
We are in Solano County, about an hour north of Silicon Valley, where we're building a new city, and we're sitting at the southern edge of the holdings. So the land holdings is 100 square miles, basically between Travis Air Force Base, and what is the confluence of the San Francisco Bay with the Sacramento River? And we're sitting at the tip of the land holdings in a very old house that someone built here 50 years ago, and overlooking the, actually overlooking Mount Diablo just by Walla Creek. And this is just some, just somebody's house that used to, Yeah, my understanding is this was a fairly eclectic couple who built this in the 70s. I think they were, I want to say they were the descendants of one of the steel fortunes in the country. And they built this for entertainment. And there's a lot of history in it. I think this wood in the ceiling comes from the original Yolo bypass when they were building that back during the gold rush. And so they reclaimed it and there's a lot of history and that entertained. But then they sold it, I think, 40 years ago and nobody's lived here for 40 years.