This Tech-Backed Company Tried to Disrupt California’s Housing Crisis. It Couldn’t

J

an Sramek saw one of California’s biggest challenges — its dire housing shortage — and wanted to propose a big solution.

The former investor and startup founder’s bold “East Solano Plan,” headed to the November ballot, would have authorized construction of a dense, walkable city amid eastern Solano County farmland, complete with schools, parks, homes, and offices connected by bike lanes and buses.

By approving the entire city at once, rather than adding new homes and offices piecemeal, Sramek sought to cut through the red tape that often slows new development.

But 11 months and $9 million later, Sramek’s development company, California Forever, pulled its measure from the November ballot. Sources close to the company say the abrupt change in course was partly the result of an increasingly meandering campaign that lacked a cohesive strategy. Others pointed to Sramek’s inner circle — dominated by a white, male “bro culture” — as failing to adequately consider constituents’ needs.

Ultimately, though, supporters and critics alike agreed the project was stymied by the same foe that tanks countless housing projects across the state: winning neighbors’ approval.

“I think it was clearly a very controversial process we went through, and I think it was a bit too quick on our part,” Sramek said. “There’s this really fine balance between process and delivering results.”

Tech City

Even before California Forever first unveiled its proposed new city last fall, the company was facing an uphill battle wooing would-be voters, who needed to sign off on the plan. Mystery and mistrust had clouded the company for six years as it quietly spent nearly $1 billion to purchase more than 60,000 acres of farmland. Some speculated a foreign entity was purchasing land close to the Travis Air Force Base to interfere with military operations. Others thought Disney was trying to build a new theme park.

It wasn’t until a New York Times story revealed the identity of the venture’s investors — a cadre of some of the most wealthy and influential tech elite — that California Forever was forced to go public. And when it did, it was with a plan that few had anticipated: a master-planned city larger and more ambitious than any in recent memory.

Anna Kirsch, a Vallejo resident with the group Artists Against Billionaires, immediately distrusted the company and its plan.

“It showed that they had something to hide because of the secrecy,” she said.

That distrust was on display during California Forever’s first town hall meetings held late last year. Sramek faced a barrage of questions about his background in Silicon Valley’s tech industry and how that would influence the project. He had intended for the meetings to foster productive discussions about what residents wanted out of the project. Instead, angry opponents heckled him.

The distrust was compounded by news that, in May 2023, California Forever had sued a group of farmers who had refused to sell their land, accusing them of colluding to drive up prices. While farmers are not Solano County’s largest employers, they hold a significant amount of cultural capital.

“You just don’t sue farmers — it’s a bad look,” said Chris Rico, president of the Solano County Economic Development Corporation. “It shows a lack of understanding of the geography that you’re trying to work in.”

Solano County Supervisor Monica Brown, who represents southern Vallejo, Benicia and parts of Fairfield, said the company’s secret land purchase and subsequent lawsuit against farmers “didn’t make a lot of sense” to her.

She was one of the project’s most ardent opponents, sharply criticizing it when it came up during county discussions. But Brown said her constituents commended her for it.

“Of all the emails I got, I only got two who were not happy with what I had to say, but I got a lot of, ‘Thank you, Monica, you smacked them down,” she said, adding that even in the months since the project was first proposed, her opinion hasn’t changed. “We’re just going to have to keep our eyes open. I don’t trust them.”

Despite the deep skepticism surrounding the project early on, some prospective voters kept an open mind. It was a novel, bold solution to some of residents’ biggest problems: long commutes, unaffordable housing and a general lack of job opportunities within the county.

Sam Houston, a tech worker who moved to Vallejo in 2018 to find relatively more affordable housing, was on the fence about the project during those first town hall meetings. However, once his son, Jasper, was born in December, his perspective completely changed.

“Jasper being a real thing now definitely makes me think about the future and take it more to heart,” he said. “What is the future of Solano County and of Vallejo and this regional economy? This is basically a startup as a city; it’s an exciting opportunity. Maybe my son could be in that place.”

The Campaign

In January, California Forever formally presented voters with its proposed ballot measure, the East Solano Plan. With it came a suite of grand promises: ten “guarantees” that included 15,000 jobs that pay 125% of the county’s average wage; down payment assistance programs of up to $50,000, vocational training and loans for new businesses; money for parks and wildland preservation; highway widenings, street improvements and more.

It opened campaign offices in malls and downtown squares, hired local residents to serve as ambassadors, plastered billboards with the East Solano Plan’s guarantees and aggressively hired the state’s most well-connected campaign strategists and consultants.

The company seemed open to changing its plan to work with its neighbors. When Travis Air Force Base objected to the project’s development map and said it would interfere with military training, California Forever obliged and rewrote its ballot language several times to comply with the base’s demands.

Within the first three months, the campaign spent some $2 million, mostly on campaign consultants and signature gatherers, to qualify its measure for the November ballot. But despite its spending and cooperation with the county, the company’s plan didn’t appear to be gaining enough ground with would-be voters and local elected officials.

A former California Forever consultant who asked to remain anonymous told KQED that political strategists urged Sramek and other company leaders to stay focused on the project’s initial plan. But as the campaign inched closer to November, Sramek tacked on even more promises.

A regional sports complex. A beach-lined lagoon built by the same company that constructed a Disney theme park. A series of regional medical clinics.

Rico, a member of the company’s community advisory committee, said some of these new promises distracted from the original ten guarantees, which were already lacking detail. And without any binding legal agreement to ensure that California Forever would actually deliver on all of those “guarantees,” he said voters remained skeptical.

“What I would like to see as we move forward in this process is how do we take those big shiny things that they were dangling in front of people to try to get them to vote for this and say no, this is actually what people want,” Rico said. “How do we codify those things into a plan in a way that they are binding?”

According to another person who worked directly with the company but was not authorized to speak publicly, California Forever also perpetuated a type of exclusive “bro culture,” where most high-level decisions and conversations were steered by white men who held top leadership positions at the company. The source said that culture overlooked some of the project’s most ardent supporters: young, working-class families of color.

Anthony Summers, an African American pastor at Impact Vallejo Church, was excited about the East Solano Plan but wanted to make sure communities of color were included in the grand vision.

“I believe it’s a fresh idea and a chance to revitalize this area,” he said. “We just have to make sure that the partnership is such that people are afforded the opportunities that are being talked about and that we can hold the founders of the company accountable.”

Sramek acknowledged his company has “more work to do when it comes to diversity” and pointed to its community advisory committee, a diverse group of Solano County residents, as one way the company strived to better represent the community.

“Urban planning and real estate is an industry that, historically, has not had the kind of diversity and representation that you would expect,” he said in response to the makeup of the company’s leadership. “We are working on that, but we do have team members who are from different ethnicities and different parts of the region. We are excited to do more in the future.”

A Close Race

Ultimately, California Forever spent $9 million on its campaign, according to campaign finance records.

But despite that spending, Sramek said internal polling revealed a close race. Though he thought it was likely the measure would still pass, he said it would be far from a landslide victory. And, it lacked the one thing that would ensure the city could actually get built: support from elected officials.

A California Forever employee who was not authorized to speak publicly told KQED that the company attempted to work with city council members and county supervisors multiple times throughout the campaign, but the project became so politicized that few wanted to be associated with it.

After KQED reported that a Fairfield city council member’s wife had received $4,000 for connecting the company with Asian-American community groups, she returned the money because she didn’t want to appear to be partnering with the company.

“We didn’t fully appreciate the extent to which putting this on the ballot would make it harder for people to work with us locally,” Sramek said. “There’s a lot of people who wanted to work with us who felt that, because this was such a political issue in November, they couldn’t.”

Without cooperation from county supervisors, the company would have a hard time building its ideal city because all of the infrastructure — roads and utilities — would first need county approval, even if voters had signed off on the larger plan. And if California Forever wanted to use property taxes or other public funds to pay for that infrastructure, it would also need supervisors’ approval.

Board of Supervisors Chair Mitch Mashburn is one of the few on the board who has expressed an openness to California Forever’s plan. But, he remains skeptical of its current form.

“I still don’t feel that this project itself is a good thing for the county or a viable project, given the impacts to the area or the need for huge, massive investments in infrastructure that would have to take place,” Mashburn said. “Show us how this is planned to do no harm. How it’s planned to truly help and not hinder or hurt our county.”

A source close to California Forever told KQED that when company leaders saw unanimous dissent from the board, they decided to pull the initiative and spend the next two years bettering those relationships. The company plans to reintroduce its initiative to Solano County voters in 2026.

Looking ahead, Sramek said he wants to spend more time talking with local leaders, businesses and residents about what they want. He plans to focus more on how local and national media cover his company and speculate about his intentions. And he said he is committed, perhaps more than ever, to bringing his grand vision for a new city to fruition.

“California is at a kind of turning point — people are deciding whether they believe we can fix many of the challenges we are dealing with or whether we are just going to set the state in amber and make it impossible to build anything,” he said. “I think in two years, this is going to be a referendum on California.”