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If you think it sounds crazy, you’re not wrong: tech billionaires have bought up over 18,000 acres of rural farmland, nowhere near any existing cities or major highways, in order to reap massive profits by building a new city there. The fact that this is completely prohibited under existing land use law isn’t deterring them – they’ve already put a ballot measure on Solano County’s November 2024 ballot to persuade voters to change the laws for their benefit.
Although I usually try to focus on local issues in this blog, this proposal deserves our attention because of its huge size and potential negative environmental impact. Leaving aside the strong-arm tactics used by this group (they’re suing the farmers who wouldn’t sell their land, and they’ve threatened a beloved local environmental organization) as well as the shady and secretive nature of their plans (they apparently want to rethink everything from construction standards to forms of governance), Solano County voters should reject the proposal because it could be terrible for the environment.
To begin with, where will this new city of 400,000 people get water from? What will that do to the surrounding farmland if they rely on groundwater? We’ve already seen the impacts of overpumping groundwater in the Central Valley, where thousands of wells have gone dry and the ground has subsided by several feet. If they take water from the nearby Sacramento River, that could impact the fragile ecosystem of the San Francisco Bay Delta, including the possibility of saltwater encroaching further up the Sacramento River. In addition, this sprawling new city would destroy habitat for protected species such as California tiger salamander, Swainson’s hawk, and burrowing owl, and would also be right next to a wetland and wildlife refuge.
But the biggest problem with California Forever is its impact on climate change. This will be a massive sprawl development, out in the middle of rural open space, accessible only by car. The 400,000 people living there will probably commute hours to work in the Bay Area or Sacramento. Although the billionaire developers promise 15,000 jobs, local residents don’t believe them, and in any case, that’s still a huge jobs-housing imbalance. When sprawl development is built on open space or farmland, we not only lose the carbon-absorbing capacity of the soil once it’s covered with pavement, but we also create a situation where people have to get in their cars and drive in order to get to the places they need to go.
Of course, we need to build more housing, but the solution is not to plop a new development in the middle of a rural landscape where there are no public transit options to connect this development to the rest of California. The right place for housing growth is in urban infill areas near transit. Here in Redwood City, we’ve done a great job of focusing dense housing in our downtown, near Caltrain and the bus terminal, near job centers, and near shopping and restaurants. This is the model everyone else should follow.
The California Forever proposal reminds me of Redwood City’s Cargill Saltworks proposal from over a decade ago – a plan for a city of 12,000 residences on the San Francisco Bay salt ponds just east of Highway 101 between Woodside Road and Marsh Road. This proposal would have destroyed over 1400 acres of restorable wetlands and put 30,000 residents in an area vulnerable to rising sea levels, close to heavy industries, and far from transit. Cargill withdrew its proposal in the face of massive opposition from Redwood City residents and environmental organizations (including my own organization, Green Foothills), and potential development was further deterred by a successful lawsuit. But the obvious next step – restoring these former wetlands, like Bair Island and the Don Edwards Wildlife Refuge – has not occurred, leaving us to conclude that Cargill still intends to bring its misguided development proposal back again.
These two proposals – California Forever and Cargill Saltworks – share many traits in common. They are both grandiose plans for massive new development in areas where such development would have serious negative environmental impacts. They both demonstrate a breathtaking arrogance and extremely cavalier attitude towards the consequences of their sweeping plans. They both would garner massive financial gains for the wealthy entities backing them while leaving the public holding the bag for infrastructure costs and environmental damage. And they are both strenuously opposed by actual local residents, who dislike seeing billionaires and giant corporations taking over their communities.
This November, Solano County voters will have the opportunity to decide whether to abandon their decades-old Orderly Growth Policy in order to allow the billionaires’ moneymaking fantasy of California Forever to move forward. I certainly hope they choose to protect their open space, farmland and communities by rejecting the proposal.
Hmmm, here’s a recent contrarian blog post calling out some YIMBYs and enviros for being too quick to jump on the opposition bandwagon:
The California Forever project is a great idea
Implementation will be very tricky, but there’s a big opportunity here.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-california-forever-project-is
The plans look like any other plan coming with any other development on the Peninsula. Just look at the “Grand Boulevard Initiative”.
These Silicon Valley guys live and work all in the section between Woodside, Atherton, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto. If those guys were so serious about European style living, why aren’t they visible in local politics transforming the cities we live in?
This is about business and money not healthy lifestyles. These guys would be the first complaining if Menlo Park removed one lane from Sand Hill Road for a bus or bike lane (their plans seem to be missing bike lanes btw.)