When he moved to the Bay Area a decade ago, entrepreneur Jan Sramek kept thinking about the local housing crisis—and, at the same time, how different the layout of American cities was from the cities in Europe where he’d grown up and previously worked.
“In three years of living in Zurich, I never used a car once—not an Uber, not a taxi,” he says. “I acutely felt this shortage of walkable, high-quality urbanism in the Bay Area, where it really only exists in a few neighborhoods that are super overpriced. Normal people can’t afford them, precisely because we’ve built so little of them on the West Coast in general.”
On fishing trips to rural Solano County, an area east of Napa and roughly halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento, he fell in love with the local environment. He learned about some of the challenges for people living there, who often had hour-long commutes because they couldn’t find jobs nearby. He started thinking about a radical idea: Could a walkable new mixed-use community, running on renewable energy, be built in an area that is currently mostly used for farming?
In 2017, Sramek launched a company called Flannery Associates with the goal of designing a new city in Solano County. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, who has advocated for making housing easier to build in California, was the first investor. Others in Silicon Valley followed, including VC investors Marc Andreesen and John Doerr, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs.
Flannery Associates started spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy land in the area under the radar—sparking some speculation that the mysterious company was backed by a foreign government trying to get access to nearby Travis Air Force Base. When the company’s plans to build a new city came out, the project was immediately controversial. “The community is very angry—by the secrecy, by the duplicity, by the attack on family farmers,” John Garamendi, the area’s representative in Congress, told a local paper. Farmers are worried in part about the loss of agriculture, though Flannery Associates says it plans to protect prime agricultural land.
The project is also controversial with urban planners, many of whom argue that it’s the wrong place to add new housing. “We have this vast, urbanized region already in the Bay, and a lot of it is built up at pretty low densities,” says Zachary Lamb, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley. “So then it seems pretty crazy to me to put all the energy and money into building infrastructure for an entire new satellite city. We have lots of areas that could use that investment to build better.”
SPUR, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that focuses on urban planning, has calculated that around 2.2 million homes need to be built in the Bay Area over the next 50 years to meet the demand for housing, or 45,000 new homes a year. “It’s certainly possible to fit that [number of new homes] within the urbanized footprint of the Bay Area,” says Sarah Karlinsky, a senior advisor at SPUR. (The organization doesn’t yet have an official position on the project and says it needs to see more details first; it’s worth noting that Gabriel Metcalf, who is now leading the project’s team of architects and designers, used to work at SPUR.)
Still, the expense and challenge of building in cities like San Francisco—where the city has been slow to approve new housing even after changes in state policy to encourage more construction—means that it’s incredibly difficult to add new housing quickly enough in existing neighborhoods. In theory, it could be easier to get support from the smaller population of Solano County residents to build at a larger scale. (The land they’ve purchased is not zoned for residential development, and the company will have to get approval from voters to build there.) In one recent survey the company did in the local community, 81% of residents said they didn’t see a future in the area for their own children, and residents also said they wanted more local jobs and supported the idea of walkability.
Sramek says that more construction has to happen in cities, but argues that it’s also necessary to build new communities. “We’re fully in favor of doing much more infill,” he says. “But we don’t think that will be the entire solution.”
And if new communities are built, he says, they need to happen sustainably. Right now, that’s not the case. “Basically, our de facto system for dealing with housing affordability is just to allow sprawl development in other locations,” says Karlinsky. “Because the Bay Area is so expensive, there’s been just an extraordinary amount of sprawl in the Central Valley.” New developments are typically low-density and dependent on cars.
Sramek wants to mimic the walkability and livability of European cities and older American neighborhoods, where it’s possible to walk to everyday errands at places like a grocery store or pharmacy. “The way that I like to put it is that an 8-year-old should be able to walk to school alone,” he says. Though the company won’t make specific design choices before going through the process of community planning, it will likely include a diverse mix of housing types, including rowhouses and apartment buildings, near businesses and schools.
Still, it’s hard to quickly create enough local jobs that residents can avoid long commutes to work. (And even if everyone’s eventually driving an electric car, extra driving poses other problems, like pollution from tires and safety issues for pedestrians.) “I think the history of these types of mega-projects, not just in the U.S., but all over the world, is that you can provide the walking infrastructure, but it’s very hard for these places to be self-contained in terms of jobs and have destinations,” says Adam Millard-Bell, professor of urban planning at UCLA. “Sure, it can be walkable, but there may not be anything to walk to.” In a very walkable neighborhood, “usually that just builds up organically over decades or even 100 years, or more,” he says.
In the short term, if the project moves forward, Sramek says it would provide thousands of new construction jobs for people living in Solano County. Longer-term, he sees an opportunity for biotech companies or other advanced manufacturing companies to bring jobs to the area. Some workers might work remotely most of the time, but live close enough to offices in San Francisco or Silicon Valley so that they could occasionally attend a meeting in person.
The project faces multiple other challenges. At the same time that the state will face more drought from climate change, the project will need to find a water source. Planners will also need to build new power infrastructure, through Sramek says that starting from scratch means it’s possible to make the most sustainable choices, from solar microgrids to systems for water reuse. Wildfire is a risk, though the developers say that the area has lower risk than other parts of the state. Extreme heat is more likely than in the Bay Area cities next to the coast.
The company has to convince current Solano County residents to support the project, since new development in the county requires approval from voters. Now, the company is beginning to meet with elected officials and set up more surveys and focus groups. It will also soon open offices in the county where staff can meet with residents. There aren’t detailed plans for the project yet, “because we do want to work with the community and employers and get their input,” says Sramek.
The goal, he says, is to make the homes affordable for current Solano County residents, though the company hasn’t yet announced how that could happen. (Some other developments have considered models like a community land trust, a nonprofit that keeps ownership of the land to help housing costs from ballooning. One was the Garden Cities movement in the U.K., a somewhat similar idea to build walkable green cities near London—complete with concepts for an electric train and composting, even in the early 1900s—though it didn’t ultimately end up using a land trust model.)
Other experts still argue that the money and effort going into the planning would be better spent elsewhere, including along regional transit lines in the more populated part of the Bay Area. That means “confronting the real challenges that come with making our existing cities better,” says Lamb. “Everything from entrenched patterns of racial injustice and inequality to [neighborhood opposition to more housing]. We need everybody in the fight to make these these processes work. And if people kind of give up on our existing cities and say, ‘Let’s just build this new city over here,’ that really stops a lot of the financial resources and energy that could go to making our existing cities better.”
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