California Forever founder Jan Sramek: 200 transactions, 700 sellers, and a plan to break ground on a new city in 2028

Summary

Jan Sramek founded California Forever roughly eight years ago with a thesis that the Bay Area needed to rediscover what made Silicon Valley work in the first place — advanced manufacturing, aerospace, and defense, not just software. The company now owns 68,000 acres, just over 100 square miles, of grazing land roughly halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento, about 30 minutes east of Napa. Last week it introduced a proposal to build the Solano Shipyard, which Sramek describes as the largest shipbuilding complex in America.

Land assembly

Acquiring the site took seven years, 200 individual transactions, and 700 separate sellers — what Sramek calls probably the most successful land assembly in American history. That phase is complete. The company is now in phase two: planning and permitting, which Sramek expects to take another two to two-and-a-half years. The target is to break ground in 2028, starting with roughly 500 homes in year one and scaling to thousands of homes per year, alongside industrial, retail, and commercial space.

What they're actually building

Sramek is explicit that he is not trying to reinvent the city. His model is Charleston, Savannah, Brooklyn, and Georgetown — two-to-five-story rowhouses, small apartment buildings, small-parcel fabric where every house differs slightly. He argues that America has stopped building the middle range between single-family subdivisions and six-story apartment towers, and that the walkable, mixed-density neighborhood is where quality of life actually lives. The ambition is a working city with jobs, not a weekend retreat for liquid tech money.

Wildfire and disaster risk

Sramek pushes back on the fire risk framing with a specific claim: no neighborhood built in California after roughly 2000 has ever burned down. Updated building codes have made new construction borderline impossible to ignite, and during major fires in Mission Viejo and Santa Rosa, new master-planned communities became firefighter staging areas. He adds that the Solano site has the lowest natural disaster exposure of any site within 200 miles — no earthquake fault lines crossing the 68,000 acres — and is surrounded by water and grassland rather than tree cover, which limits combustible load.

Zoning architecture

Every parcel in the proposed city is permitted up to five stories from day one. Neighborhoods can restrict density further through private covenants, with a majority vote — 50 to 60 percent of residents — required to lift those covenants. Sramek says this is cleaner than California's zoning fight model because it makes explicit who holds the power to change the rules and what the trade-offs are when they do.

The abundance agenda

Sramek says he has been a fan of Ezra Klein's abundance argument for years and has discussed it with Derek Thompson directly. His read is that Klein, Marc Andreessen's "it's time to build," and Tyler Cowen's state capacity argument are all reaching the same underlying truth from different directions. His skepticism is practical: California needs a flagship win in the built environment to reset the national perception that the state can only build apps. He points to the Solano Shipyard thread going viral on X, where roughly 195 of 200 critical comments followed the same pattern — great idea, California will never permit it — with high-speed rail cited repeatedly as the cautionary case.

On regulatory structure, Sramek argues the core problem is vetocracy: building the city requires local, state, and federal permits simultaneously, and any single no kills the project. The abundance movement's practical task, in his view, is reducing the number of parties who can individually block construction.

Sramek's personal benchmark for success is simple: kids walking to school alone. He plans to move into the first house himself.