The plan to create a big, new green city on the California Delta in southeast Solano County recently overcame an impasse. Officials in Suisun City announced in October that they accepted an application by the developers of the ambitious California Forever plan to be annexed into the city.
The annexation and buildout will be incorporated into the existing Suisun City Expansion Project. The plan was initially pitched to California Forever by Suisun City Manager Bret Prebula, who had been mulling over ways to encourage Suisun City growth. This partnership solves the problem that had blocked California Forever in 2024, which was the need to amend the Solano County General Plan, which stipulated all growth be confined to existing communities.
Next steps include an update to the General Plans of Suisun City and nearby Rio Vista, and the annexation of tens of thousands of acres—totaling almost 40 square miles—of California Forever-owned land through applications with the Solano County LAFCO.
If the annexation process works out, the team at California Forever says they plan to immediately begin building a community that will house an initial 150,000 residents, with the ultimate vision of a sustainable, walkable city of 400,000.
To employ these folks and others, California Forever includes plans for the nation’s largest advanced manufacturing park, branded the Solano Foundry, and a major shipyard.
An audacious vision to be sure, and one its backers believe has every chance of success. Developing what is, in essence, a “master-planned community” on subprime agricultural rangeland, purchased at literal dirt-cheap prices, is a builder’s dream.
Fear of a Billionaires’ Utopia
California Forever was founded in 2017 by Czech-born entrepreneur Jan Sramek and funded by an A-list of Silicon Valley investors with the aim of building a new city from the ground up just northeast of the San Francisco Bay area.
A subsidiary, Flannery Associates, started quietly purchasing land between the communities of Fairfield to the west and Rio Vista to the east, some of it adjacent to Travis Air Force Base. After a 5-year effort and spending an estimated $900 million, almost 50,000 acres of rangeland had been acquired. When authorities noticed that parcels adjacent to the airbase were being bought up by a shadowy entity, national security alarm bells went off and an investigation revealed the buyer.
Soon after, California Forever revealed their East Solano Plan with a vision to build a new, modern, walkable, affordable and ecologically sustainable city for up to 400,000 residents. Because the Solano County General Plan mandates that residential and commercial development be confined to existing communities, California Forever prepared an initiative for the November 2024 ballot to amend the General Plan to accommodate development of the proposed new city.
Facing stiff local opposition because of its secretive origins, and in the face of certain defeat at the polls, the initiative was pulled from the ballot in July. Undeterred, that same month, California Forever released a plan for the Solano Foundry, a modern manufacturing and R&D campus to be developed in conjunction with the proposed new community.
The company also continued to invest in ramping up in-house planning and development expertise, and building relationships with local communities and in neighboring Yolo County. In the spring of 2025, the company proposed building the Solano Shipyard on 1,400 acres of land near the community of Collinsville already designated for that purpose in the Solano County General Plan.
In March of 2025, the municipalities of Suisan City and Rio Vista initiated conversations with California Forever around annexation of company-owned land for future growth by the two cities. The company responded favorably, and submitted the application for annexation of 22,900 acres to Suisun City which was accepted in October. The conversations with Rio Vista are ongoing as of this writing.
The Beauty of ‘Greenfield’
Its supporters see this bold plan as the best possible scenario for building a community that provides affordable housing and sustainable active transportation systems. Because the land was purchased for much less than property in developed areas, housing can be built for a fraction of what it would cost just down the road in the Bay Area.
For the same reason—and because it is a “greenfield” project, being built on open land rather than being squeezed into an existing urban space—the transportation network can include wide sidewalks, and physically separated bike, automobile and bus lanes. In addition, the proximity to existing infrastructure, including rail and fiber, makes the location appear to be a master-planner’s dream.
There are complicated issues to be addressed, such as the inability of the two rural highways, 12 and 113, to accommodate the additional traffic that will come with the development, as well as the need to replace the bridge crossing the Sacramento River at Rio Vista.
It will be interesting to see how this project will progress in the new Abundance era of swinging for the fences. Maybe, just maybe, it portends a whole new ballgame in the Golden State.