A European clinical trial found that the drug sulthiame significantly reduced breathing interruptions in people with moderate to severe sleep apnea. Patients taking higher doses experienced up to 47% fewer pauses in breathing and improved oxygen levels during sleep. The drug helps stabilize breathing signals in the brain, reducing airway collapse. Scientists say the findings could pave the way for a pill-based alternative to CPAP machines.

Researchers have uncovered a molecular trick used by hornwort plants that could help future crops capture carbon dioxide more efficiently. A unique protein feature called RbcS-STAR causes the key photosynthesis enzyme Rubisco to cluster into dense compartments, helping it work more effectively. When scientists added this feature to other plants, Rubisco reorganized in the same way. The finding raises the possibility of engineering more efficient photosynthesis into major crops.

THC doesn’t just blur memories—it can create new ones that never happened. In a controlled experiment, cannabis users were much more likely to recall words that were never shown and struggled with tasks like remembering to do something later. Researchers found that THC disrupted many different memory systems at once. Surprisingly, moderate doses caused memory problems similar to higher doses.

As deep-sea waters warm, scientists expected trouble for the microbes that help keep ocean chemistry in balance. Instead, researchers found that Nitrosopumilus maritimus can adapt to warmer, iron-limited conditions by using iron more efficiently. Because these microbes control key nitrogen reactions that support marine life, their adaptability could help sustain ocean productivity. In a warming world, they may play an even bigger role in shaping marine nutrient cycles.

In this episode, I’m joined by Jan Sramek to discuss California Forever, the much-debated proposal to build a brand-new, sustainably designed city in Northern California. We explore the urbanist vision at the heart of the project, including a street grid inspired by Barcelona superblocks, and address the elephant in the room — the stealthy land acquisitions and the billionaire backers. Is this an urbanist utopia in the making or a grandiose con job?

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David Roberts

Hey everybody, this is Volts for Wednesday, March 11, 2026: “Is that brand new city in California for real?” I’m your host, David Roberts.

About halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento, roughly an hour’s drive on state highways from either, is the proposed site of, depending on who you ask, either a bold attempt to show that America can still do big things or an ill-fated vanity project for America’s oligarchs.

Up there in Solano County, a group of billionaire financiers organized under the banner California Forever wants to construct a brand-new city that would eventually, if all goes according to (40-year) plan, host 400,000 residents, a giant advanced manufacturing park, and a fully functioning shipyard. It would be roughly half the size and have roughly half the population of San Francisco itself.

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Its location would be decidedly exurban, but according to the plans, the city itself would be laid out along positively dreamy urbanist lines, featuring a dense, walkable grid served by frequent transit. A third of the land would be turned over to park space and greenways. It would be heated by a district heating system.

Is it real? It’s at least real enough that, last month, California Forever signed the largest construction labor agreement in history with local unions, mandating that all construction on the 70,000 acres owned by California Forever be done through individual project labor agreements.

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As you can imagine, the plan has attracted an enormous amount of controversy. Critics charge that the location guarantees a regional traffic nightmare, that the proposed shipyard has no chance of happening, and that businesses will have no reason to relocate themselves 50 miles away from the already existing concentration of people and talent in San Francisco. Lots of folks will tell you this is a scheme by billionaires to buy up some cheap land and flip it. Or a scheme to build a city they can control like tyrants, more of a Blade Runner scenario.

Jan Sramek, the CEO, founder, and for many years sole employee of California Forever, has been stumping for this plan for a decade and has heard all the criticisms during the dozens of meetings and consultations he has conducted. In our conversation, which lasted almost two and a half hours, we covered many of those objections and, jeez, so much else.

Because it went on for so long, I have decided, for the first time ever, to split this into two episodes. Today’s episode will cover the big overview questions: Why build here rather than somewhere else? Why build something new instead of doing infill? What type of city do you envision? In the second episode, which will be out on Friday, we will cover more concrete details of how everything will work in practice, including transit, walkability, governance, and permitting.

It is all a lot to take in. It is quite difficult, even after going through all this, to know what to think about all of it. But this one I’ll leave up to you. I’m very curious to hear from you what you think after you’ve heard these episodes. Enjoy.

With no further ado — Jan Sramek, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Jan Sramek

It’s great to be here. That was a hell of an introduction. I’m excited for this discussion.

David Roberts

Jan, I’m overwhelmed. The deeper I’ve gotten into this, the more I’ve realized there’s so much here, so many angles, so many different approaches. Building a big, brand new city turns out to be a very big and complicated thing. There are a million different ways I could come at this.

I’ll tell you, in one of your presentations, you described the layout of the city as an American street grid plus Barcelona superblocks, plus Dutch Woonerfs. If it were up to me, in my heart, we would just sit contemplating that beautiful sentence for a whole hour. I would just talk about nothing else. That’s what I really want to get to. That’s the stuff. But there is a lot of other stuff I feel we should at least touch on first.

Backing up, let’s start with why here? Why this piece of land? The biggest controversies, as far as I can tell, trace back to here — the choice of this particular spot. Why not, for instance, find a small city somewhere else and just grow it? Why not grow in an existing city? If you’re genuinely building something that’s going to be self-sufficient or close to it and not going to be a bedroom community, going to be a self-sufficient city, why not just go really far out in the middle of nowhere? Tell us why this chunk of land is the right chunk of land.

Jan Sramek

It’s a good way of phrasing that question, I would say. I have generally been the harshest critic of this idea. You said building a new city is a crazy endeavor that takes decades and an incredible amount of capital and perseverance. I didn’t embark on it lightly. All the criticisms that we have heard over the years were very much on my mind when I spent a year in the very beginning convincing myself that I wasn’t completely insane to want to do this. That comes to the question of location as well.

You can break down your question into three components. There’s why can’t we do it all with infill — number one. Then number two, should you do a 20-acre project at the edge of an existing city or a 50-acre project? And then number three, if you’re going to build a new city, should you just do it in the middle of New Mexico? I’ll take them one by one.

On the infill question, I spent about a year in 2015, 2016 working on that. I spent about a year working on a range of ideas, commercial ideas, about how do we build a lot more in existing cities. The depressing conclusion of that work was that infill would be incredibly important and hopefully the majority of the solution in California. But it couldn’t do all of it. There was just no way. When you considered the amount of land that you needed, the politics, the pricing, the complexity of permitting it.

David Roberts

Certainly nothing this big. You could do a little infill project.

Jan Sramek

You could do infill projects, absolutely. But I would say it’s been borne out in the data. I remember in 2017 when I started, Jerry Brown signed a package of 23 housing bills and all of the headlines read, “Jerry Brown signs a package of 23 housing bills to end the housing crisis.” They were all about infill. We’ve really followed this principle. Home prices in California have doubled in the last 10 years. Clearly, that alone isn’t working. Again, I think the work that we’ve done and California YIMBY has done and YIMBY Action have done and the abundance movement more broadly has been super important. Many of the laws have been passed, the landmark laws have been passed quite recently. They will only get into production later.

But still, we’re missing 3 million housing units. We’re building 50,000 a year once you deduct ADUs. It’s very hard to see how we get there. The other part of it is you look at many of those 50,000 units that we built — they’re actually greenfield. There’s a lot of construction happening in the Central Valley. There’s a lot of construction happening in Solano County. There’s construction happening on all sides of our property. Rio Vista is expanding from the east side, Fairfield and Vacaville and Dixon from the west and from the north side.

My insight, I think, was greenfield is happening. 86% of housing that is being built in America today is greenfield.

David Roberts

Yikes!

Jan Sramek

If it’s already happening, can we make it better? Can we make it walkable? Because if we do that, then number one, we build much better places that have a lower environmental footprint. But also, if we make them walkable, we can put four times as many people on the same acre. We can keep a lot more of the nature and open space.

David Roberts

One thing I would say here is if you go drive around that area of California — no offense at all to the people who live there — the way that land is currently being developed is very characteristic of the way greenfield is developing across the United States. It is not quite cities, more like villages, but they are not quite big enough to be self-sufficient. They are all bedroom communities. You get these car-dependent little smears of development that never quite amount to a city, and you get a bunch of those scattered around. The extant way that land is developing is terrible.

Jan Sramek

I think that’s true all over America. The way that I would put it is I have come to respect and recognize the fact that some people really like that and they want to live in it. That’s fine, but I think it’s a balance. What we have today is 86%, 90% of the development in America is exactly that today, probably more than that. On the other side, you have five-over-one or high rises in cities where most of the units are studios and one bedrooms, where it’s very difficult to have a family.

The missing middle phenomenon is real. In Solano County, for example, the numerical data supporting what you said is in the last 40 years, Solano County developed 20,000 acres into development, virtually all of it suburban development. About 11,000 acres of that was prime farmland. Most of it is, as I mentioned, suburban developments. Our proposal — and by the way, no jobs — 68% of the people in the county commute.

David Roberts

That’s the problem. If you just have a few shops and houses, you just don’t get the agglomeration you need to create a center of gravity. That’s the problem with those developments — they’re never quite enough to form a center of gravity and grow. They just stay not quite fish, not quite fowl, not quite suburban, not quite city, just not quite anything. A lot of that in Washington, too.

Jan Sramek

That gets exactly to your question about scale and location. People say some of what makes this scary to people is the scale of it. It’s the scale of the land holdings, it’s the scale of the capital, it’s the scale of the entitlement that we ask for upfront. The reason why we did that was all at the very foundation of the business model and the business plan, which is people have tried to build walkable neighborhoods before, and there have been some successes. The New Urbanists have built some really great communities, but they are mostly smaller resort towns or vacation towns.

Every developer comes in and says, “We’re going to bring jobs to the project.” It rarely happens. I think a lot of that is to do with scale. For example, if you want to build a true city that has walkable densities and that has jobs, you need the scale. For example, nobody wants to live in a row house or an apartment building in the middle of fields unless you have retail. But the retail doesn’t make money in the early days. The only way that you make that work is you subsidize it in the early days. You can only subsidize it if you’re building something very large where you can eventually recover the cost.

It’s the same for employment. We’ve done, I think, a tremendous job. The reason why Solano County doesn’t have jobs right now is it’s a bedroom community for Sacramento, and it’s a bedroom community for the Bay Area. There have been reports written in the county year after year about how important it is to bring employers. Nothing has happened in 40 years. In fact, the situation has gone backwards. Right now, there’s been a perfect storm in the last three months where five of the major employers in Solano County have announced they are closing. Five. These old world industries — there’s a big brewery that is closing because Anheuser-Busch is consolidating operations.

I think a big part of the reason why employers didn’t come is that it’s what you said. Someone took 100 acres at the edge of a city and they built a subdivision, then they built another one, then they built another one. Nobody ever really had an incentive or the ability to do what we’ve done, which is at our scale, we can afford to master plan it and we can afford to spend a lot of money and hire a lot of really great people who care about it to go and market Solano County all over America and say, “This is a great place to do business. You should come here.” Then we can combine that with — you can imagine if you go to an employer and you say, “Why don’t you build a factory to build advanced manufacturing or ships or whatever it is?”

In California, they generally say two things: “Where are the employees going to live?” and “How about permitting?” At our scale, what we will do is say, “We will deal with the permitting. We will get you a site where the only thing you need to do is get a building permit.” That unlocks the conversation. The second thing we say is, “This is a new place and you are taking a risk on a new location.”

“There are a lot of great people who live here and commute every morning to Mountain View for two hours. They don’t want to do that. You’ll be able to get great people. By the way, for your future employees, we’re getting entitlement to build 174,000 homes over the next 40 years.”

This isn’t going to be a situation where you come here, you start growing, and then suddenly house prices skyrocket because there’s not enough housing. The whole thing is this deeply integrated ecosystem — jobs and housing and infrastructure — that makes it work.

David Roberts

I want to pull out one point you just made. Because you are a master developer for a very, very large project, you’re dealing with very large sums of money, which means you can afford to subsidize the amenities that are going to make living in the dense housing livable and attractive. You’re describing a chicken-and-egg problem that faces a lot of these developments everywhere they go. You want the jobs and the housing and the manufacturing all to come at once.

But as you say, you just end up building a subdivision and hoping the others show up. Because you are dealing with such large sums of money, you can lose a little money up front to front-load the amenities that get people to come. Once you — I heard you discussing this on another pod — there is this concept of a minimum viable scale for a community.

What happens to these developments at the edge of town that you are discussing, and we are all familiar with them, is they do not quite reach the scale necessary where they get on this positive feedback loop and can sustain themselves. There is just not quite enough there to get it going. What you are talking about is front-loading those amenities, spending up front to make sure that even the very first people who get there have something like a community. Is that a fair way of summarizing that?

Jan Sramek

100%. That’s 100% the insight and that’s 100% the answer for why we’ve master planned. That’s one of the answers for why we’ve master planned the entire project. We’re saying we need the clarity on the entitlements upfront because we want to be able to make investments that nobody else would make in transit and retail and schools and parks that we can make if we know that we can build for 40 years and have patient capital that eventually recovers those returns. That’s very hard to do at a smaller scale.

There’s a second component to it. This is to do with overcoming the cold start problem or the chicken and egg problem that you described. There’s a second component to this which is, I would say, as important, which is by internalizing a lot of the externalities, even once it gets going, we can make decisions that are in the best interest of the investments that are in the best interest of the community that individually you could not make.

For example, if we are building the entirety of the project and we end up owning some of the industrial buildings or some of the office buildings or some of the rental buildings, then we have a real incentive to go and spend a little bit of money, continue to spend a little bit of money subsidizing the retail or making the park nicer, or investing in transportation, or continuing to do economic development.

David Roberts

This is a classic problem in cities — if you as a developer pay to make a park better, a lot of the value of that investment goes to other people, the other people who are enjoying the park. You don’t capture all the value of that investment. You will tend to underinvest in those types of things. But if you are the master planner and you own the whole thing, then anything that improves the ambiance for anyone is a benefit to you. All those externalities — you’re absorbing the positive ones too.

Jan Sramek

Exactly. We’re hoping to overcome — it’s a tragedy of the commons in some sense, or it’s a collective action problem where you have a retail shopping street and it doesn’t quite make sense for anyone to go and put up Christmas lights, because if they just do it on the store, then it doesn’t create the ambiance. You can either have a merchants association, which is how it happens in some places, or you can have someone who owns 20 or 30% of the stores, and then it makes sense for them to go and make those investments.

It also really aligns us with the community for the long run. If you have a developer who’s coming in and they’re building 500 homes at the edge of a city, they can come in and make all kinds of promises around how they’re going to improve transportation and how they’re going to build transit and how they’re going to build a coffee shop. But the reality is, by the time that they’ve sold home number 500 — in fact, by the time that they’ve sold home 400 or something — they don’t really care if the road starts cracking and the park doesn’t work and the coffee shop closes. They don’t care.

David Roberts

This is precisely what a lot of people in the county fear that you are doing. A lot of people fear that you are buying this cheap land because it was protected agricultural land, so it was pretty cheap. You buy it all up, you are going to flip it to commercial, sell it to make a profit, and then bail, and then none of these promises will pay off. This is very much the fear. I am happy to hear you address this square on.

Jan Sramek

Absolutely. I think that there are two answers to it. It was 100% the fear of a lot of the people in the beginning. A few different answers to it. The first one is what we have told people, and they have started to see the logic of it. I said, “Look, if we make all of these promises and then we build 2,000 homes and the place is awful, and we don’t improve the transportation and we don’t bring any jobs, we still have 95% of our homes to sell.” We haven’t even started to recover the investment.

Unless we do a really good job where a lot of people want to come in and move in and the place works, it is very hard for us to make any money. That is part number one. That is the same, by the way, for anyone else building there. We have no intent of getting it approved and then flipping it. I do not know that there is even someone who would want to be buying it after you do that. It is such a large project. You need such an amount of investment to get it off the ground. That is part one.

Part two is we said, “Look, we get that a lot of developers come in and they make promises and then they break them.” In some sense, the way that it felt in the beginning when we introduced it is we got saddled with all of the disappointment that happened over the years by other developers who came in and made promises.

David Roberts

That, plus the more modern hostility toward tech billionaires. There is a lot of that hanging around, too. We should say you began all this by buying this land in stealth mode. You had a bunch of investors, you created a bunch of front companies that bought all this stuff up and did not reveal what you were doing until you owned all the land.

I can see the logic why you did that. This thing isn’t going to work unless you own all the contiguous land. If you told people what you were doing while you were doing it, it would be easy for someone to come in and just buy a piece of land in the middle and block you. But I think you can also see why the residents being presented with this — “Hey, guess what? We now own most of your county.” — you can understand some initial suspicion and resistance.

Jan Sramek

100%. We fully expected that when we introduced this, this would be very controversial. What I told people in the beginning, from the moment that I walked into the first town hall, I said, “I understand all of the reservations. The only thing I’m asking is keep an open mind. I know you have all of these questions — who are you? Why are you doing this? What are you going to build? How are you going to protect the infrastructure? Where does the water come from? All I’m saying is keep an open mind. Let us answer the questions, let us get you the documents, let us bring the companies and keep an open mind.”

That’s the starting point. The second thing that I’ll say is we’ve certainly made our share of mistakes when rolling it out, and there’s no playbook for how you introduce something this big. We haven’t built a new city in America in 60, 70 years. We certainly could have done a bunch of things better, and we’ve taken responsibility for that. I think on the substance of the different points that you mentioned, I want to unpack three of them one by one.

The first one was on the empty developer promises. A lot of people changed their mind when we said we’re going to bring jobs. They said, “Every developer says that.” We said, “What if we’re willing to guarantee that? What if we’re willing to say that the approvals are lockstep, where we get an approval to build X number of homes, but unless we’ve delivered on X number of jobs, then we’re not allowed to build any more homes?” They said, “Okay, nobody’s ever agreed to that before. Fine.”

David Roberts

Wait. That’s a legal agreement in place?

Jan Sramek

It’s being discussed right now. We had it in the ballot initiative. In the first version of it was the guarantee number one, we called it a jobs guarantee. It was a legally binding agreement where the county literally wasn’t allowed to issue a building permit over a certain number of homes until we delivered a certain number of jobs.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Jan Sramek

The other, by the way, on the guarantees, I would say when we first rolled it out, the YIMBY movement was divided on this, and a lot of people were skeptical. What I’ve learned is a big part of the skepticism is people felt like, “Okay, you’re going to paint this new urbanist walkable vision, you’re going to get it approved, and then you’re going to get it watered down and just build suburbia.” We heard that and what we’ve put in the documents — it was in the ballot initiative and it’s in the current set of documents — again, we are the only project I’m aware of in America on a greenfield that has agreed not to a maximum density, but to a minimum density.

David Roberts

That made my hair stand up. I swear to God. Your zoning officially — I guess none of this is really official or legal yet, because the thing doesn’t exist yet — but the idea is most people will be familiar with zoning that gives you a maximum number of units you can put on a lot. Residential units you can put on a lot. Your zoning has a minimum number of residential units. What is that number?

Jan Sramek

That’s correct. The number is 20 units in the majority of the project and then 30 units in the downtown.

David Roberts

Per acre?

Jan Sramek

Per acre. Those numbers are not artificial. They are taken from California government code where those have been defined as what the state considers to be affordable by design. It’s missing middle housing. In urban counties in California, 30 units per acre is considered affordable by design. In the rest of California, it’s 20 units per acre. By the way, our density overall, when you run it across the entirety of the city, we come in just between Boston and San Francisco. That’s the overall density on the project.

David Roberts

That’s interesting to me because I would have thought with 400,000 people and if the entire city is laid out in this dense way, I would have thought that the density would be higher than most American cities.

Jan Sramek

It is.

David Roberts

I guess Boston is denser than most American cities.

Jan Sramek

Yeah, I think the ranking, especially for larger cities in America, is New York, San Francisco, and Boston. It will be the first.

David Roberts

You’ll be in the top three densest.

Jan Sramek

Top three, exactly. I wanted to come back to a couple of points you made earlier on the confidential land assembly. Again, 100%. We knew this would cause concerns that people ask, “Why did you have to do it this way?” The answer is there is a legitimate commercial reason for doing it, as you mentioned. It was us walking people through why we did it, showing, “Hey, this is how it happens everywhere. When a university is buying land, they do the same thing.” Also explaining, we paid four times market value on average to everyone who sold.

Oftentimes on top of that, people have been able to stay on the property for 5, 10, 15, 20 years for free. We pay their property taxes and we have been able to bring into the community people who have sold to us who said, “This was a great deal, this was a better deal than I ever dreamed I could get. This was life-changing money for my family. We have a good relationship.” That worked.

The last point I want to make is on the billionaire investors question. A couple of points on that. The first one is there was a sense — if you read the press reports when this came out, you would have thought that billionaires got together in a smoke-filled room and decided to build a new city.

The reality is Jan spent a year convincing himself he wasn’t insane to want to work on it. Then I tried to go raise money, then nobody would give me money. But I believed in it so much that I went out and I took personal loans to get it off the ground. My belief was that the only people who would back it and who would be able to take a 20 or 30-year view were billionaires, family offices, and very long-term investment funds. You couldn’t take this to a private equity fund or to a bank. Can you imagine the reaction?

David Roberts

Is there private capital that will be “Here, pay me back in 30, 40 years or whatever?” We haven’t done anything like this in 60 or 70 years. None of the institutional machinery is built.

Jan Sramek

There are very few people who could do that. Convincing every one of those people to invest was very difficult. I also started the company in 2017. In 2017, the criticism from a lot of the media and a significant part of society overall to billionaires was, “Why do you guys have to keep funding these stupid messaging apps that don’t really do anything? Why don’t you take your money and fund some real companies that solve real issues for real families?”

I was there raising this money. When it came out, I felt it was unfair because I said, “Look, you have been telling them to do this. You have been telling them, fund stuff that nobody else would fund that improves lives for people.” We went to people who did that. The way that it ties to the community is — and I have had this conversation with hundreds of people in Solano County and I think a lot of people have started to see it — I said, “Would you rather this is funded by a bank or a private equity firm that is demanding a return in seven years and we have to cut all of these corners, or someone who can take a 30-year view?”

David Roberts

That’s the dynamic that drives these disappointing other projects you’re talking about where they make big promises, build a little thing, and then bail because that’s the short-term returns they’re not getting. There is a certain scale where you have to have long-term capital, and we just don’t think in terms of long-term capital in this country anymore. I don’t know if it’s sad or not that you have to go to billionaires to find that, but it is true that there are not many places to find it.

Jan Sramek

I think we should solve the capital market problem and have patient long-term capital. I think there’s stuff happening in this space and more people are able to do it. The other part of it is if you look at many of the most walkable, beloved neighborhoods, particularly in Europe, they were built by wealthy families. The great estates of London — Holborn and Belgravia and Kensington — these were generational projects by wealthy families. Part of the reason why they are incredible is people cared about what they were building because it wasn’t just about money.

David Roberts

There’s a holistic approach too, because they own the whole thing, so they want the whole thing.

Jan Sramek

Exactly. They could make those long-term decisions. I’ve told people, look, we don’t shy away from the fact that this is a for-profit company. We never tried to pretend this was some kind of foundation. The reality is for virtually every one of our investors, there’s a reason why they invested beyond money. Now it’s different. You look at someone like the Collison brothers or Nat Friedman, they really care about urbanism and walkability and great design. You might look at someone like Laurene Jobs and she cares about economic opportunity and education. But there’s a reason to invest beyond money.

When you look at it rationally, none of these people want to be attached to some crappy subdivision in the middle of nowhere. Their biggest investment. This isn’t some AI investment that’s going to make some crazy multiple. This is a good long-term investment where I think people want to look back at it in 30 years and say, “We helped fund something spectacular.” I understand all of the skepticism that people have about it. To be clear, I’m not naive about it. But I do think there’s a lot going for being funded this way rather than being funded by a publicly listed company that has to make quarterly earnings or by a private equity firm.

David Roberts

You could make the argument that if these billionaires just wanted to make money, there are a lot of easier and lower-profile ways to make money than this. They’re also drowning in money. I can imagine them fooling themselves about some things or failing for various reasons. But it would be weird to me — I’ve read a bunch of this paranoid stuff about this project, but I just can’t make it click in my head. If I’m a billionaire and I want to make money, this would be just the most baroque, roundabout, and difficult. Of all the ways I could make money as a billionaire, this would be the most roundabout possible way to do it. Clearly, the people involved have more than that on their mind.

Jan Sramek

The last thing that I’ll say on this, and then let’s talk about the urban design. That also applies to me. I spent the first two years of my life after college being a trader at Goldman Sachs. Everyone reported that in the media. I was really good at it. There are a lot of easier ways to make money. Do you know what I left Goldman to do? I left Goldman to run an education company. I spent four years of my life running an education company before I did this. There are a lot of easier ways to make money for everyone involved here. This is a passion project.

David Roberts

Before we get to the urban design, one final question about this. You said there are three views on the land. One, why you didn’t just do infill. The second, why you didn’t just build a big development on the edge of an existing development. But then there’s the question of why this particular piece of land. You do have some things to say about the advantage of this geographically and in terms of land value. Just quickly run through that.

Jan Sramek

On the second point — expanding an existing city — that’s also worth stating. That’s what we’re doing right now.

The way that the permitting and the governance is going to work now at a very large scale.

David Roberts

You’re not really, though. I don’t know how much we want to talk about, but it’s very interesting. Initially, you were going to do an unincorporated development in the middle of the county. There was going to be a ballot initiative. It became very clear that the ballot initiative was going to lose, that the people of Solano County did not want you to do that.

You said, “Okay, we’ll be municipal, then we will be an expansion of an existing city.” You’re doing that with this little city, Suisun, about 30,000 people, about 5 square miles. But the thing is, Suisun is landlocked. Between Suisun and where you are going to build is Travis Air Force Base that you cannot build directly south of because of flight plans. This city that you’re “expanding” is still going to be Suisun City sitting over here, and then several miles of undeveloped corridor, and then a giant city over here. Legally, that’s an expansion of Suisun, but geographically, culturally, it’s not really.

I would like to hear how you think that’s going to work to have a small city of 30,000 people where the seat of government sits, governing 450,000 people that live a few miles down the road. How is that whole arrangement supposed to work? It’s odd, I think you will concede.

Jan Sramek

You said it’s only a legal arrangement geographically that you’re going to have some distance between them. I would posit that that’s the main thing that people cared about. The main thing people cared about is they wanted to know that people liked the land use plan. The land use plan hasn’t really changed since the initiative. They told us that everyone was like, “We have no issue with the land use plan.” There was a debate about the size of it. But the land use plan itself and the location, generally speaking, people liked.

What they really cared about was, “We don’t want it to be a new tech city. We want you to go into an existing governance framework.” I think that really mattered.

David Roberts

I guess I don’t fully understand why, though. Maybe it doesn’t matter. This gets into the internal politics of the county.

Jan Sramek

I think it’s bigger than the county. Even what we proposed initially in the unincorporated county, the governing body would have been the Board of Supervisors. The law enforcement agency would have been the sheriff. This was never some crazy private city with a different level of governance, but people just felt if an existing city controls it, then that’s the best outcome.

The story of a smaller city that does a very large expansion that over time becomes bigger than the original city — that is not new. You look at Barcelona that you and I have talked about, the expansion in Barcelona is bigger than the Gothic Quarter where it all started. I do not think that is unusual.

David Roberts

But they’re not geographically separated, though.

David Roberts

Fair enough.

David Roberts

They’re in the same spot.

Jan Sramek

There’s an open question of how exactly that will work in terms of connectivity and transit and so on. You’re asking about the larger area. I think there’s the question of why not do it in the middle of New Mexico. The answer is the way that new cities have generally failed in the past is there’s no demand, and governments can’t make people go in the middle of nowhere. Hence we have Brasilia and places like that.

But you’re fighting demand. I’ve been very influenced by thinking of cities as networks, effectively the same way that you have a social network or you have a marketplace of merchants. Proximity matters. I think it’s a lot easier to start a city that extends an existing network — which in our case is both Bay Area and Sacramento from both sides — than trying to start something completely in the middle of nowhere.

This particular location, the path that is relevant is this has been in regional plans done by the federal government as well as the regional government, ABAG, the Association of Bay Area Governments. This has been slated as a location for two new cities going all the way back to 1958. Both the federal Commerce Department, the Army Corps of Engineers, and then later ABAG said this is a place to build one or two new cities. They both also concluded that this wouldn’t happen until sometime in the 2000s or 2010s. They correctly predicted that urbanization would take its course in the inner Bay. Eventually we would need a bit more space, and this would be a good location for that.

In fact, it goes back to the discussion we had earlier when you were talking about how incremental development rarely will produce great urbanism or jobs. ABAG has the Bay Area Plan, 1970-1990, and in it they literally say towards the end of this period — in the 90s — we’re going to run out of space and the area is going to become unaffordable unless we build new cities. We should reserve areas that they called controlled development — large areas of land where we shouldn’t permit piecewise small development so that we can master plan them and build new cities that have at least, they wanted to build at least five new cities that have at least 100,000 people each where you can have well-planned infrastructure and jobs-housing balance.

If you look at where in the nine-county Bay Area from San Jose all the way up to Solano, they believed was the best and biggest site to do controlled development, it was southeastern Solano County by a factor of about five. The land that we own is 90% of the area that ABAG described as being suitable for this 56 years ago.

The reason they believed that is if you looked at all of the factors that matter for where you should be developing — height above sea level, fire risk, seismic risk, the quality of the soil (that is, you want to be developing on the least productive soil), the diversity of the ecological ecosystem that is there (you want to be developing on the least ecologically valuable area) — based on all of those factors, they concluded this was the best site to do this in the Bay Area. Those are the factors that I looked at.

David Roberts

Pull out that point about fire real quick because I do think that’s significant because it’s obviously something that’s on people’s minds when it comes to California. This location — there’s water on two sides, there’s a big marsh on one side, and then there’s grasslands on the other side. You’re not at the —

Jan Sramek

— the wildland-urban interface?

David Roberts

Yes, thank you. You’re not at the — where the forest and people meet, basically, where all the fires happen. I guess you can have grass fires, but it’s not nearly as big of a risk. You’re sort of uniquely fire resistant relative to the rest of California.

Jan Sramek

There are grass fires that happen in the area, but grass fires are very easy to manage because they don’t have high combustible load. The other part of it on fire is the building code has gotten so good in the last 20 or 30 years that master planned communities in California, even in areas where they are surrounded by forests, never burn. Master planned communities — to my knowledge and to everything that I’ve seen from our fire consultants and everyone else, there is no master planned community in California that was built in the last 20 years that burned. In fact, they often become places of refuge for the fire crews when they come in because the building code has gotten so strict that these places are very, very hard to ignite.

When you layer in the location where we are not in one of those high-risk areas and then on top of it, we can design the whole thing from scratch with sprinklers and systems and materials that don’t easily ignite, it is probably going to be one of the most fire-resilient places in California. Which is also true for sea level rise, by the way.

David Roberts

I thought that was interesting. It’s close to water, but nonetheless quite elevated.

Jan Sramek

Very elevated. Generally speaking, the city is about 20 to — I think the lowest point is 20, up to about 160 ft above sea level. If you assume a medium aggressive sea level rise scenario through 2150, not 2050, 2150 — the next 125 years of sea level rise — and then you assume that you have a 100-year flood in that condition layered on top of the 174,000 homes that we are building, zero of them get flooded in that condition. Zero.

David Roberts

And no tectonic faults.

Jan Sramek

Which matters a great deal for shipbuilders, by the way, and for other big manufacturers. That’s the other thing. If you’re going to build a $2 billion dry dock that has millions of tons of concrete, building it on top of an earthquake fault line — like you have in Bremerton or Hawaii — versus in Solano makes it twice as expensive to build it in those places than where we are.

David Roberts

I really want to get to the urbanism — I’m just going to have to bracket water. My apologies to all the people who hassled me to ask you about water. I think it is your position that you have all the water permits necessary.

Jan Sramek

Can I give you the one-minute answer on water?

David Roberts

Yeah.

Jan Sramek

We have secured all the water for the full build-out, including all of the residences and all of the non-residential space. As part of the environmental work, the city is going to be publishing what is called a water supply assessment. That is going to have a thousand-plus pages of detail. The short version of the story is we own about 8,000 acres of irrigated pasture northeast of the city that has appropriative rights to the Sacramento River. We are going to use that water for the city.

Then we’re going to use recycled water from the city to irrigate the pasture instead. We don’t even have to take that out of production because it’s not crops, it’s irrigated pasture. You can use recycled water to do it. We then own about 4,000 acres of almonds. They use an insane amount of water. One almond uses 4 gallons of water to grow. We’re going to take out the almonds, we’re going to replace them with solar, and we’re going to use that water instead, which is coming from the aquifer right now for the city.

Lastly, we’ve purchased the final slice for about the final 25%. We’ve purchased water rights from further up in the Sacramento Valley that are coming from conservation projects where people have taken out crops and they have turned land into habitat, which frees up water we can use for the city. The purchase price from us to buy the water is contributing to those conservation projects.

We wrap all of that up with one of the most sustainable designs for the infrastructure of any city in America, where I think we have about a 70% rate of recycling the water, which we are then using for landscaping, flushing toilets in some big buildings, parks, and then for irrigation of the pasturelands around it. It is very unusual for a project in California to have such a good story. This is a unique location that makes all of that possible. All the details will come out in the environmental work in the summer.

David Roberts

Jan, this was supposed to be the prelude. Now we are 15 minutes into it.

Jan Sramek

I have time to go as long as you want.

David Roberts

Good, because there is much more. I think this gives a decent sense of why here, why the land, why a new city, why not infill, why not expand an existing city, and why locate right here. You have a body of water, you are pretty elevated, no earthquakes, low fire risk. It is, we should say, going to be hot as hell, but that is a problem lots of cities are going to have to deal with.

Jan Sramek

Can I say one thing about that?

David Roberts

Sure.

Jan Sramek

It has a climate that is close to Sacramento, not as hot as Sacramento, but it sits in the delta where in the summer, between May and September, you have a steady prevailing wind coming off the ocean and heading into the Central Valley. What we have done is we have oriented the street grid at a 45-degree angle to the prevailing wind so that we do not let it blast through the city, but we do not also completely slow it down. We are pulling the trick that you find in places — the Greek islands — where they use the winds to cool off the cities by orienting correctly.

David Roberts

Air-cooled?

Jan Sramek

It is going to be hot, but I think it is going to be a lot nicer than most places in California other than the very, very coastal areas in the summer.

David Roberts

Let’s talk about the urbanism then. We could do a whole pod on the foundry, which is fascinating on its own. Do a whole pod on the shipyard. Fascinating on its own. But I love urbanism and want to talk about it. When I first heard about this, I had the same reaction I think everybody has, because tech billionaires are on my mind and not necessarily in a good way, but I have loved listening to you talk about urbanism.

Particularly what I find amusing is you have a story, a personal story that echoes what I hear from so many people in the urbanism and YIMBY community, which is, “I went to college in a nice place and then I moved to the US and I said, ‘What the hell is this?’” This is a scarring experience that so many people I know have gone through. Same for me — I went and spent 10 days in Barcelona and it basically ruined me.

Jan Sramek

It is very hard to come back from that.

David Roberts

Just talk briefly about your personal — you were born in Czechia and poor and then worked your way up and ended up seeing a bunch of cities. Tell us briefly about your urbanism tour in your life.

Jan Sramek

I grew up in a small village of a thousand people with decent, not great, but decent urbanism in the village. Then you had to take a bus, which wasn’t very frequent, to go anywhere to see friends. Isolating in that environment. Then I got a scholarship to go to the UK and I spent 10 years, coincidentally just living in some of the best urbanism in the world. I lived in old York for two years. I lived in old Cambridge in the UK. I lived in London and then I lived in Zurich and altogether it was about 10 years.

It got to a point where in those 10 years, I never owned a car. Not once. I got a driving license when I was 17, but I never owned a car, never used the car regularly. In the last three years of it in Zurich, I did not physically get into a car once in three years, other than when I think we got a van to go to Ikea and bring back some furniture. I physically, in three years in Switzerland, did not get into a car — not an Uber, not a taxi, nothing in three years.

David Roberts

Here’s — and I know this will resonate — the longer you go without getting in a car, the more getting in a car and getting on the road feels bizarre, like something humans should not be doing. You lose your familiarity with it. Then when you do it, you’re like, “Why would people do this all day long?” It’s an awful experience that we are dulled to because we’re so familiar with it. But you leave it behind for a while and come back to it, you’re like, “Man, cars suck,” particularly for moving around within a city.

Jan Sramek

In the US, the reality is between cities, we’re probably going to have to get in a car a lot. But within a city, you are 100% right. It’s one of those David Foster Wallace, “what is water?” situations where you get used to it. California Forever overall was made possible by the contrast — this very quick contrast between 10 years without a car and then suburbia of the Bay Area.

David Roberts

It’s bad there. Living abroad, this is something I hear from a lot of people who come from other countries. You hear about Silicon Valley — the glittering future, where the future is born. Innovation, all the greatest minds. Then you go look at physical Silicon Valley and it is so ugly and squat and unpleasant. Just a smear of the grossest kind of suburbia. You’re like, “This is where the future is?”

Jan Sramek

You’re right. It’s a tremendous shame, because the way that I thought about it is these combinations of creativity and wealth and human capital and cultural openness and industry — that’s what created Florence and Paris and London and New York and Chicago. That’s what funds the great urbanism and the museums and the architectural beauty and all of it. I was sad when I got here because I felt this is modern day Florence. This is what it should feel like. When you get here, it should feel like that, and it didn’t.

Quick story. The first 36 hours for me in California ever — I grew up with this idea of this place as a place that could build anything and optimism and sunshine. Then I get on a train — super clean, modern, cheap train in Switzerland. I got on the tram, I got on the train. Swiss trains — they are as good as advertised. They are better than people say they are.

I was radicalized by the experience of Switzerland. I walked out of my apartment in Zurich. I got to the tram. I didn’t look when the tram was leaving because it was always there. I got on a tram, I changed the tram, I changed to a train, I got to the airport. That whole thing took 20 minutes. It was super pleasant. The airport was modern and beautiful. I got on a flight and I landed at SFO and, like a good European, “How do I get to San Francisco?”

I went and I got on BART. It was the moment when I got on BART that I looked around and I’m like, “That’s not what I expected.” I get to San Francisco, which has a lot of beauty, and 40% of San Francisco is deeply walkable and incredible, super expensive and unaffordable. But that’s what it is. My experience with the car was so bad that I had a meeting on the Peninsula in Silicon Valley on Monday, and I get here on Saturday. On the Sunday, I rented a Zipcar to just go drive around to make sure I could still physically drive a car because I hadn’t done it in eight years. Then I drove to Silicon Valley, and I kept driving around like a crazy person and being like, “Where the hell is Silicon Valley?”

David Roberts

There’s no there there. There’s literally no there there.

Jan Sramek

Is it Howard Kunstler, who has this book, The Geography of Nowhere? Kunstler, yeah, where he talks about how much of American life, unfortunately, is driving from nowhere to nowhere, looking for a place that is worth being in. I think that’s a tremendous shame, and that’s what I would love to make a contribution to improving.

David Roberts

This is where the podcast, as an oral medium, is a little bit of a liability. It would help people to be able to look a little bit at the plan. It’s on the website. It’s easy to go find. On the northwest side of the city, over by Travis Air Force Base, there’s this big foundry, this big industrial park where businesses are going to come locate. A couple miles south of the city is where the shipyard is allegedly going to be. The city itself is a big grid. There’s a giant park straight up all the way through the middle of it, which, if I heard you correctly, is bigger than Central Park, bigger than Golden Gate Park.

Jan Sramek

Exactly. The pathway that goes through the city itself is about as big as those two. Then it fans out in this expansive grassland that goes all the way to the Sacramento River. Once you add that, it is even bigger.

David Roberts

All around that is a living space, grids. You have a big downtown in the southwest, and then a little what you’d call, I guess, an arts district or a makers district, a Soho-style place where you’re going to have warehouses and artists and all that stuff. Over on the other side, on the east side, there’s another small downtown and small arts district, two more small downtowns, as I think I recall.

The rest of it is a street grid. Describe the grid. It’s a layered architecture. Describe starting at the smallest level and then work out.

Jan Sramek

Andres Duany, who is one of the founders of New Urbanism, described it as a tartan grid, which I thought was a really good name for it recently.

David Roberts

Tartan.

Jan Sramek

It looks like that pattern. We obsess about the street grid. Gabe Metcalf, who runs Pruning here, who was the longtime CEO of SPUR in the Bay Area, for those who know it, myself and our head of urban design at a company called Site Lab, we have this foundational belief that we all share that the laying down of the street grid is the most profound decision that you make in the city.

It’s not the architecture, it’s not the zoning, it’s the laying of the street grid, because that’s the thing that you can’t change. The Manhattan street grid hasn’t changed in 200 years and probably won’t. We’re really obsessed about it. In particular, what we’ve tried to find is the right set of trade-offs between walkability and cars. Gabe and Laura have told me that I’m the only developer who’s ever pushed their planning team to make it more walkable, not less, and kept pushing — “How many more cars can we get out of it?” They’re like, “This is unheard of. Nobody ever does this. Developers are always, ‘One more car.’ What are you doing?”

But we’ve really thought about it, and Jay Primus is our head of transportation on the team as well, and he’s been deeply running the process. One more piece of context. We’ve been inspired by what the New Urbanists have done in places starting with Seaside and Alys Beach and Ion and all of these wonderful developments all over America.

The new problem that we had was a problem of scale and of movement. Most of these places that have been built that are wonderful new urbanist communities have maybe a few thousand people in them. Maybe 10, 20,000 people at the edge of it, but really more like a few thousand, some of them only a few hundred. What that means is you can design a system where people drive to the edge of the development and then they walk wherever they need to go or bike, but we don’t have the luxury. If you want a city for 400,000 people, you can’t do that.

The way that we’ve solved that, we believe, is we have a system of superblocks. The whole city is a grid. It’s about 7 miles east to west and about 4 miles north to south. Every half a mile to quarter mile, depending on where you are, there is what we call a movement street, which you can think of as a boulevard. Very importantly, it is not an arterial road, the way that American transportation engineers would describe it. A movement street, generally speaking, has one lane for cars, one lane for rapid transit — we can talk about what that would be — it has a parking lane, it has a bike lane, and it has a sidewalk.

David Roberts

These are the corridors, which means the biggest street will have one lane of car traffic in either direction.

Jan Sramek

That’s correct.

David Roberts

There will be no three-lane, four-lane, no stroads.

100%.

Jan Sramek

If you look at the width of those lanes, we’ve really pushed it down as well. That was one of the pieces of feedback that came from the urbanist community and from the YIMBY community. When the first version of the plan came in 2024, Ezra and Derek talk about everything bagel liberalism, and we had everything bagel streets, where we tried to design a street that was the widest sidewalk and a wide bike lane and then a street and then a wide lane of trees and landscaping. They get very big.

We had an internal effort called a street diet. We worked on how do we narrow it down, because you want that feeling of enclosure and coziness. We’ve now been through Street Diet 1.0 and then Street Diet 2.0, and now we’re very proud of where we landed.

David Roberts

Every half mile is a corridor street — a boulevard.

Jan Sramek

Exactly. Every quarter mile in between those is another street that has cars on it that can go a little bit faster. We’re still working out the speed limits, but a little bit faster. Think of it this way: inside every area that is half a mile by half a mile, those are the movement streets. That’s where transit runs, which means you are at most, on average, five, at most maybe seven, ten minutes away from a transit stop — that’s number one. Inside that area, you’ve got 32 blocks. Each of our blocks is about four acres in size.

It’s the size of a block in Chicago or in the Marina in San Francisco. You’ve got 32 blocks, and about halfway between them, you’ve got a street that has cars going a little bit faster. There are two superblocks inside that area of half a mile by half a mile. Within each of the superblocks, which has 16 blocks — imagine 16 blocks in Chicago or Marina or the West Village — the streets are Woonerfs. They are slow streets inspired by the streets in the Netherlands. We have a few different types, but generally speaking, they have a merged right of way for pedestrians, cyclists, and cars. We would like the speed limit to be 10 to 15 miles an hour. There might be a regulatory change that is required to get that low, but that is where we would like to get to.

David Roberts

I would have thought even lower. I feel in Barcelona, it’s six or seven miles an hour. Inside the superblocks, it’s designed so pedestrians will be safe. That’s pretty slow.

Jan Sramek

We might look into that. I think about this a lot. In some sense, I’m really glad that the assembly — because you said, I’ve worked on it for 10 years, eight of that was just buying the land. The last two years has really been the design and so on. In some sense, I’m really glad that the assembly took that long because we had our first kid four years ago, and then we’ve had two more since then.

Being a father just gave me much more visceral feel for things that I knew intellectually before then about how to design for kids. Now as we — I’ve given the team an official design goal of designing the most child-friendly city in the world. I think a lot about what it would take for me to let the kid wander on the street by themselves at different ages.

David Roberts

Who’s the famous urbanist who says, “A true city is where I can let go of my child’s hand”? Was that Jane Jacobs? Somebody famous?

Jan Sramek

I’ve never heard that quote. That’s an amazing quote. I’m going to write that down.

David Roberts

I should dig it up. This is a familiar concept in urbanism. Sometimes it’s women, sometimes it’s feminist urbanism saying that women are an indicator species. If you design — so that women are always comfortable — everybody else will be comfortable too. It’s the same thing with kids. If you design a city where a kid can wander safely, almost by definition, everybody else is safe too.

Jan Sramek

100%. I think it’s really useful to think of it that way. Also makes it really accessible to older people or people with disabilities, which is a big deal for us. I’m really encouraged that Barcelona makes it work as six miles an hour.

David Roberts

I’ll verify that.

Jan Sramek

I will verify. Then I’m going to cause a nightmare for our team by pushing them more to make it even slower.

David Roberts

I love this nested — you have the one block that’s got a bunch of parcels on it. Then you get 16 of those, that’s a superblock. Then you have two of these superblocks stacked on top of each other. You’re calling that a neighborhood that’s within these half-mile boundaries?

Jan Sramek

That’s right.

David Roberts

Then it says three to seven of these neighborhoods clumped together gives you a district. You have nested — block, superblock, neighborhood. To me, one of the most exciting things about all this — all of this is urbanist dream. This is really just all the best stuff. One of the most exciting things to me is that the neighborhood level — two superblocks stacked on side of each other — each neighborhood will have retail and a school in the center of it. That is huge. That’s huge for a million different reasons. Just talk through some of them.

Jan Sramek

There’s a lot that went into that decision. It’s one of the decisions that I’m most proud of that we made on the team. The contrast that you’re reacting to, I think, is in most new American developments, the school goes on the worst parcel by the freeway.

David Roberts

If you get a school at all —

Jan Sramek

— If you get a school at all.

David Roberts

Because everybody is going to drive to it.

Jan Sramek

Exactly.

David Roberts

All right, folks, that’s it for today’s episode. Tune back in Friday to listen to Jan and I discuss transit and walkability, permitting, jobs, much, much more. There is a lot more to dig into. I will see you Friday.

💾

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