California Forever City Design: I Read the Whole Plan

📬 Intro: The Plan Worth Reading

Every generation dreams of building a city from scratch. The garden city movement did it well over a century ago. So did Walt Disney, whose original EPCOT was meant to be a real working town, not a theme park.

California Forever spent two years in the news for the wrong reasons: secret land buying, lawsuits, a ballot measure pulled before a vote. So I read the actual plan.

It wants to be the first brand-new American city in a lifetime, engineered from the street grid up as the lowest carbon of any city in the country. This spring it asked Sacramento for permission to start digging.

🌍 Field Notes: Building a City From a Blank Page

🏛 The Grid

Flannery Associates bought more than 60,000 acres of Solano County farmland for close to a billion dollars, backed by Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, and Stripe's Collison brothers. The city fills 17,500 of those acres at 16,600 people per square mile, a density midway between Boston's and San Francisco's.

Every block is a 280-by-600-foot Chicago block, a design known to hold value across decades. Head of Planning Gabriel Metcalf, formerly of the urbanist think tank SPUR, sums it up: ‘build the streets, then let others fill in the buildings’.

The plan draws 15 street types and almost no buildings.

🚶 Zero Minimums

Parking minimums are zero. Bus rapid transit runs on dedicated boulevard lanes a half mile apart, and a car-free spine cuts through downtown. Inside the superblocks, cars are capped at under ten miles an hour, another way to nudge drivers out of the car without banning it.

Harvard's Ed Glaeser and UC Davis's Chris Elmendorf called it an audacious effort to operationalize thirty years of urban economics research.

Its own models predict the lowest driving miles of any American city, save NYC.

⚡ The Numbers

Each resident gets 60 gallons of water a day, 40% under the county average and mostly recycled. Homes use little if any natural gas, a two-gigawatt solar array powers the city, and stormwater recharges the groundwater through green infrastructure.

Sustainability chief Bronson Johnson targets the lowest per-capita carbon footprint of any city in the country. It offers what most Americans only get on vacation: the open land of a mountain cabin and the ease of a small town, in a city of 400,000.

The environmental review decides whether the land can deliver it.

🚢 The Forcing Function

A city this size needs an economic engine, and the plan centers one: the Solano Foundry, pitched as America's largest advanced-manufacturing park. This spring it landed its marquee tenant, the defense firm Saronic, now choosing between a connected Solano Shipyard and a site in Texas.

In January the project signed the largest construction labor deal ever, and it is asking Sacramento to fast-track the review. As of July, the plan has an anchor employer and a deadline.

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🏛 Built to Last:

Suisun City accepted the application last October. Groundbreaking is realistically late 2027, and nothing is built yet.

You do not need the annexation to borrow the biggest ideas: Every design choice traces to research, and the water target is set in the land-use plan, not the equipment room.

By role:

🏛 Architects: 15 street types, every building fronting its street.

🔧 Builders: A 40-year union labor agreement across 70,000 acres.

⚡ Engineers: All-electric from day one against two gigawatts of solar, no legacy gas grid.

🏢Operators: 60 gallons per person per day, no lawns to irrigate.

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