California Forever has become one of the most closely watched urban development proposals in the country. The company says it wants to build a new walkable city in Solano County, pair it with a major manufacturing district and shipyard, and create room for hundreds of thousands of residents over the coming decades.
What it has today is not a finished city or an approved development. What it does have is land, wealthy backers, a clearer political strategy than when it started, and enough momentum to keep the project alive.
What Is California Forever?
California Forever is a development effort led by entrepreneur Jan Sramek that has spent years assembling a large land position in southeastern Solano County through its subsidiary, Flannery Associates. The company has acquired more than 50,000 acres of farmland, often through a secretive process, with purchases estimated at about $900 million. The site sits between San Francisco and Sacramento, near Suisun City, Rio Vista, and Travis Air Force Base.
In practical terms, California Forever is not just a housing proposal. It is a long-range plan built around three linked pieces: Solano Living, a new community intended to support up to 400,000 residents over 40 years; Solano Foundry, a 2,100-acre advanced manufacturing park; and Solano Shipyard, a large waterfront shipbuilding hub tied to the region’s maritime geography.
That combination is central to the pitch. The company is not arguing for housing alone. It is arguing that a new city works best when it is paired with jobs, industrial capacity, and infrastructure from the start.
California Forever’s Core Idea Is Bigger Than Housing
The most distinctive part of the California Forever pitch is that it frames the project as both city-building and industrial policy. Solano Living is described as a walkable community with slow streets, bike lanes, greenways, parks, schools, and a mix of housing types and price points. The company has said it wants to build what it calls the first true walkable city built in America in more than a century.
That is an ambitious claim, but the larger point is how the housing plan is paired with employment. Solano Foundry is a proposed 2,100-acre advanced manufacturing park envisioned as the largest of its kind in the United States, offering up to 40 million square feet of space for frontier technology industries. The goal is to reconnect research and manufacturing by co-locating R&D, skilled labor, and modern facilities near Silicon Valley.
Solano Shipyard, meanwhile, is planned as a massive maritime hub spanning roughly 7,500 acres of waterfront along a federal deep-water ship channel. The project aims to revive West Coast shipbuilding while linking directly to the advanced manufacturing ecosystem at Solano Foundry.
Supporters of the project argue that this scale matters because California’s housing shortage cannot be solved through infill alone. A project spokesperson cited the California Department of Housing and Community Development’s view that the state needs 2.5 million new units during the 2023–2031 period. In that argument, California Forever is not a substitute for urban infill. It is an attempt to add housing and jobs at a scale that existing patterns have not produced.
The Project Has Made Political Progress, but It Is Not Yet Entitled to Build
The clearest way to understand California Forever’s progress is to separate land control from development approval. The company has made substantial progress on the first. It has not yet secured the second.
The land remains governed by agricultural zoning and slow-growth rules, which means major development still requires approvals that the company does not yet have. California Forever first pursued a countywide ballot initiative that would have changed the rules. After polling showed weak support, the company withdrew that measure in July 2024 and agreed with county officials to prepare an environmental impact report and a development framework.
Since then, the strategy has shifted. Rather than relying solely on a countywide vote, the project has also moved through annexation discussions involving existing cities. Suisun City initiated discussions in 2025, with annexation efforts later moving into formal local processes, while Rio Vista also began exploring annexation. That matters because annexation offers a different path to governance, planning, and jurisdiction than the original ballot approach. It does not eliminate the need for review, but it changes the arena in which the fight happens.
Labor Backing Gave California Forever a New Kind of Momentum
One of the most concrete developments cited in the source material came in January, when California Forever announced what it called the largest construction labor agreement in U.S. history. The 40-year agreement with the Napa/Solano Building Trades Council and the Northern California Carpenters Union covers major construction across nearly 70,000 acres and applies to infrastructure, public works, and large commercial and industrial projects.
That does not mean the city is approved. It does mean the project has gained institutional support from a politically important constituency. Labor backing changes the conversation because it broadens the coalition behind the development beyond investors and company executives. It also reinforces the company’s argument that this is a long-horizon economic development project, not just a speculative land play. A deal structured around four decades of union labor signals the scale of the ambition and the time frame required to realize it.
Why California Forever Remains So Divisive in Solano County
The project’s biggest obstacle may be less about imagination than trust. Much of California Forever’s early land-buying effort was conducted in secrecy, which the company said was meant to avoid speculation and rising prices. Critics saw the same strategy as a transparency problem that poisoned public sentiment from the outset.
That mistrust deepened when Flannery Associates sued a group of landowners in 2023, alleging collusion to inflate land prices. Some local residents and ranchers described the tactic as intimidation.
There has also been years of local frustration over the project’s tone, its pressure on holdout landowners, and fears that a development backed by wealthy investors could reshape the region without broad public buy-in.
The opposition is substantive, not just emotional. Environmental groups, local organizations, and some residents have raised concerns about water supply, habitat loss, biodiversity, farmland conversion, pollution, infrastructure limits, and the broader effects on lower-income rural communities.
Infrastructure is another major challenge. Concerns about limited highway access, weak transit connections, and bottlenecks on Highway 12 and the Helen Madere Memorial Bridge all threaten the viability of California Forever. The project’s vision depends on much more than land assembly. It depends on whether roads, utilities, governance, and regional coordination can catch up to the scale of the proposal.
What Comes Next for California Forever
California Forever has advanced from an abstract vision to an organized campaign. It has a land base, influential financial backing, a more developed industrial strategy, a labor agreement, and active annexation discussions that could reshape its path through local government.
But the project is still defined by unresolved tests. It must complete environmental review, secure entitlements, win regulatory approvals, and convince more people in Solano County that its promises outweigh its risks. It also has to prove that its proposal for a walkable city, industrial district, and shipyard can function in a place where water, roads, ecology, and politics are all active constraints.
That is what makes California Forever worth watching for both urban planners and the broader public. The grand plan is easy to describe. The harder question is whether a project this large can turn accumulated land, capital, and vision into a durable public mandate.