On one side of the gravel road, a prairie's worth of grass stretches toward distant wind turbines. On the other side, scattered eucalyptus trees dot the otherwise empty fields. All this nothing lies an hour north of San Francisco, far from the nearest subdivisions and schools and strip malls. It's a specifically Californian kind of empty.
But in Jan Sramek's eyes, it's full. Where others see only blue sky and dusty farmland, Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader, sees row houses and apartments. Art galleries and sushi bars. Bike paths and parks. A vibrant, bustling, energy-efficient community with all the charm of a 19th-century village — and all the fiber-optic internet and self-driving cars of a 21st-century megalopolis. Sramek sees the city of the future. He sees California Forever.
"Downtown would be here, where the highways cross," he says, pointing to his right. Only 37, he's dark-haired and tall, standing next to his gray Tesla Model Y, arms outstretched, his vision materializing before him. "And we're putting a second downtown closer to Rio Vista," he adds, gesturing toward that town, invisible in the distance.
Sramek pauses. There's no futuristic city before him, no urban utopia. Only 50,000 acres of scrubby real estate. It might, he realizes, seem a little crazy.
"It's a lot less crazy than when I had the idea in 2017," he says. "You always have doubts."
Those doubts, as it happens, are widespread. The revelation that a mysterious investor had quietly become the largest landowner here in Solano County, a sparsely populated swath of small towns and fertile fields wedged between Napa and Sacramento, caused an uproar among the locals. Things only got more heated when Sramek, backed by a who's who of Silicon Valley billionaire investors, was outed as the driving force behind California Forever. Opponents of the project accused Sramek and the tech tycoons — including the LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen — of using "strong-arm mobster tactics" to bully locals out of their land. They've assailed Sramek at public meetings and are fighting a ballot resolution that would rezone the property to accommodate his vision.
Development, be it residential or commercial or industrial, is always a battle between past, present, and future. Some interests favor the status quo; others lobby for change. The problem is America is in urgent need of change. There's not enough housing to go around. Cities are trapped in a doom loop. Sramek believes that the only solution is to build a shiny new city on a hill — and that he's the guy who has the juice, and the land, to get it done. "We are tied to the mast," he says. "You'll move here, right?"
Such unwavering confidence helped forge Sramek's reputation as a financial wunderkind, someone who set out at an early age to be the European equivalent of Peter Thiel. But to those who know him from his days in London and Zurich, California Forever represents a strange and unlikely new chapter in Sramek's short and not entirely successful career. The question is not just does Sramek, working with an impressive team of urban planners, have the answer to what ails America's cities. The question is also: Does he really have a shot at building it, where all others have failed?
In England, back in the early 2000s, Jan Sramek was a name to conjure with.
He was born in the Czech Republic and grew up in a small town called Dřevohostice. His mother was a teacher, his father a mechanic. His grandparents worked in the local steel mill. In 2004, at the age of 17, Sramek bailed on all that. He enrolled in boarding school in the city of York, in England, and two years later took 10 A-level exams, the British university entrance tests. Sramek got A's on all 10. Nobody takes that many A-levels, let alone scores A's on every one of them.
A-level exams are a crucial part of Britain's socioeconomic infrastructure — ace them, and they're like the chain that pulls a roller coaster uphill, a mechanism for upward mobility. When a working-class kid from Eastern Europe did it, the feat earned a mention in the national press. For years Sramek was a role model for other English kids with aspirations. His name would pop up on forums where students discussed strategies for getting into their dream universities. Only have three weeks to ace an exam? "Jan Sramek says it can be done. You have to focus and be disciplined." If Jan could do it, maybe you could, too.
The A-levels got Sramek into the University of Cambridge — which he left after just a year, for the London School of Economics and "the City," the square mile of London that's Europe's answer to Wall Street. "Party boy Jan is youngest Rising Star in Square Mile," one tabloid reported. While in school, he kept busy launching his own business ventures. There was AlphaParties, which he touted as the go-to organizer for parties at some of London's glitziest establishments, though Sramek claimed that he himself never drank or smoked. There was a careers website called Nicube. But his main focus was the internship he landed in London with Goldman Sachs.
In a 2008 blog interview for a series titled "Tycoons of Tomorrow," Sramek said he slept only five hours a night. His role model, he said, was Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and early investor in Facebook. Asked what motivated him, Sramek responded, "racing against myself." His advice for other budding entrepreneurs: "See everything in terms of risk-reward, almost like a trade. Determine your entry, exit and stop loss. Know when to get out." He was 21.
All the Goldman interns hoped to convert the entry-level position into a full-time gig. Sramek actually pulled it off. In 2009, he became a trader on the firm's emerging-markets desk. In his spare time, he cowrote "Racing Towards Excellence," a bro-ish self-help book. The next year CheatSheet reported that Sramek was being mentored by "several of London's most powerful hedge fund managers who are clearly grooming him for the very top." New York magazine ascribed to Sramek a "cocksure arrogance." This very publication called him a "prodigy."
Maybe it was a little early for all that. "It was a bit of cart before the horse," says a friend of Sramek's from Cambridge who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There was a lot of attention around this guy, but he hadn't really delivered much in the real world." Jonas Rave, a colleague at Goldman Sachs, says Sramek was charismatic and confident. "It's the curse of the gifted child who's told from an early age that they're amazing," Rave says. "There's a lot of early success that makes you believe you can do anything."
Sramek left Goldman after a bit less than two years — a tenure so short that internet trolls and a few fellow bankers cocked their eyebrows at what might have gone wrong for the wunderkind. His managers, though, back up Sramek's account that the decision to leave was his. "He was a very gifted, high-potential employee, but he had very ambitious goals," says Guy Saidenberg, a former Goldman partner who oversaw Sramek's division. "I think he was a bit frustrated at the speed he was being promoted and given responsibilities."
Sramek moved to Zurich, where he followed in the footsteps of many former traders: He tried to launch a hedge fund. At first he planned to use a technology-guided "Moneyball" mentality to improve traders' batting averages. But after testing the software with actual users, Sramek and his cofounder pivoted. Now it was an education startup. They changed the name from Erudify (as in, perhaps, "to make more erudite") to just Better.
Better did not live up to its name. Sramek's next venture, a kind of supercharged version of Evernote called Memo, got him noticed by Silicon Valley. The investor Marc Andreessen described Memo as "when ideas have sex." But it failed to procreate, and Sramek found himself out of ideas. So at 30, after five years of working on failed startups, he did what Europeans often do when they can't find a way to succeed on the continent. He set out to reinvent himself in California.
Sramek had spent years reading about the Bay Area's success as a hub of jobs and innovation. But when he finally moved there in 2015, he found longtime residents protesting Google buses. San Francisco was attracting the smartest people in the world, paying them egregious amounts of money, and building precisely no places for them to live. So they were fighting over the existing housing stock.
"As an outsider, it was easy to see how we messed up the housing market here in a really profound way," Sramek says. "Instead of everyone getting excited about good-paying jobs, it was: Yeah, good-paying jobs, but we're going to be displaced."
The most pleasant parts of Bay Area cities, the kinds of places young people and young families might want to go, were prohibitively expensive. "My girlfriend and I were making good money, and we struggled to live in Hayes Valley," Sramek says, name-checking what's arguably the cutest neighborhood in America's cutest city. "It was a tournament with a fixed number of slots."
So Sramek started reading — in two years, he claims, he devoured 500 books about urban development. (You can do the math and decide for yourself whether that sounds plausible.) The standout, he says, was "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Sramek, like generations of readers before him, was taken by Jane Jacobs' emphasis on the value of vibrant, diverse streetfronts and the need to mix residences with retail. He traveled the world, studying the most popular neighborhoods in the most vibrant cities, from Atlanta and Phoenix to Copenhagen and Barcelona. "I'd just walk them for two days and see what worked," Sramek says.
Sramek exudes a specific kind of brainy charm. He's good-looking and speaks English with a slight Eastern European accent; he wears brown suede desert boots and sports a suitably weathered black Goruck GR1 backpack, an emblem of techy, tactical coolness. He's also a quick study. Embracing the ideals of the modern city, he decided that what is needed is cheaper housing (to reduce inequality), solar power and wind farms (to reduce carbon emissions), and more densely populated, walkable neighborhoods (to support shops and restaurants, create jobs, and reduce commute times). Yet it's hard to build places like that nowadays, thanks to a host of zoning and land-use rules designed to protect the environment and promote public input.
Sramek's new business idea was pretty far removed from his youthful grindcore mindset. Forget software startups; in the real world he'd do real estate. Sramek thought he'd build in the interstitial and vacant spaces in cities. Planners call that infill, and it's a fashionable idea in urbanism — supplying the "missing middle" between single-family homes and bulky apartment buildings. There was only one problem. Bay Area cities have created a process for permitting new buildings so byzantine, slow, and expensive that if the great New York builder Robert Moses were alive and trying to work in San Francisco, he'd be more Power Broken than Power Broker. Sramek's idea got nowhere. So to take his mind off his troubles, he went fishing — literally.
An avid angler, Sramek had been spending time on the waters of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the northwestern corner of San Francisco Bay. To get there, he and his girlfriend would drive through Solano County, dotted with a mix of old farms, strip malls, half-empty downtowns, and industry in various states of disarray. On one fishing trip, Sramek noticed an empty diamond-shaped space between Travis Air Force Base and the town of Rio Vista. To make his point, he calls up a satellite view of the land on his Tesla's screen — which is a bit disconcerting, given that he's driving.
"You can see that it's the only yellow patch on the map," he says. On the satview, everything around the empty diamond is the beige-gray of city or the lush, irrigated green of maintained land. It seems like the middle of nowhere — until Sramek zooms out. "It's in the middle of everywhere," he says triumphantly.
The yellow diamond is between San Francisco and Sacramento. Between Silicon Valley and the ski-and-sun resorts of Lake Tahoe. It's the geographic center of the Bay Area megaregion. And it's almost as big as Toledo, Ohio.
That was the key that unlocked the problem Sramek had been struggling with. The way to solve the housing crisis that's killing Silicon Valley, he decided, wasn't with small-bore infill. "It was never going to be enough," he says. "But what if you could build walkable neighborhoods on a greenfield site?" Why fix an old city like San Francisco, in other words, when you could build a brand-new one an hour north in Solano County?
As he leans against the Model Y, looking out at the wide, flat space his company owns, Sramek's eyes unfocus a little. "This is not a good place for a subdivision," he says. "It's not connected to an existing town. It doesn't have jobs. It doesn't have entertainment or retail." It becomes something only if you bring in thousands of people, homes, jobs, shops, schools, and houses of worship. "You have to want to build it at that scale."
Sramek named his new company after Flannery Road, a gravel road running across the site, and convened a top-notch team of urban planners to assist him. "Jan has a pretty extraordinary vision for seeing this opportunity and putting it together," says BH Bronson Johnson, the project's sustainability engineer, who has worked on big urban projects like Treasure Island in San Francisco and Google's since-canceled Sidewalk neighborhood in Toronto.
Sramek was certainly thinking big. The idea was to provide homes for Bay Area techies and jobs for Solano County. But he couldn't convince anyone to invest in the project. So he took out a loan and bought the first bits of the yellow part of the map himself. He won't say how much the loan was for. "It was a lot of money," he says. "If this didn't work, I would've been in deep trouble."
That loan also paid for feasibility studies on the site. The engineering analysis concluded that it was the ideal place to build a new city: too lousy to farm, no tectonic activity, high enough to withstand even the direst estimates of sea-level rise. Armed with the detailed studies, Sramek made another run at wealthy investors. "I think I wore people down," he says. "They would say, 'This is a good idea, and here are 150 reasons it won't work.' And I would take them one by one. At some point, people run out of questions. And then they invested."
Sramek impressed the titans of Silicon Valley, just as he had charmed his way into the upper echelons of high finance in his college days. "It's really about investing in the people behind those big ideas," says David George, the partner at Andreessen Horowitz handling the firm's investment in California Forever. "Jan is a man on a mission, and a student of history, geography, and what makes cities special."
With the help of some of the biggest names in Big Tech, Sramek was able to acquire the land he needed for California Forever. Now all he needed was permission to build something on it. But that, he soon discovered, might take California forever.
In 2022, Marilyn Farley started hearing rumors. Farmers in Solano County were getting pressured to sell their land.
A retired city councilwoman, Farley was no stranger to fighting out-of-town developers. Way back in 1984, a local group named the Solano County Orderly Growth Committee formed to block a San Francisco developer who wanted to build a new city, from scratch, on mostly empty land near Travis Air Force Base. To keep others from trying the same thing, the committee — which Farley would join a few years later — passed a ballot measure to prevent virtually any development outside of Solano's seven existing cities. That rule, which remains on the books, is the biggest obstacle to Sramek's plans for California Forever.
Alarmed by the rumors of a new development, Farley set out to investigate. She found the agenda for a closed meeting of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District that suggested the agency was negotiating a land sale to a mysterious entity called Flannery LLC. But an attorney who had worked on the deal wouldn't tell Farley anything — they had signed a nondisclosure agreement. "It was all very perplexing," she says.
The land purchases roiled the county. Given the site's adjacency to an Air Force base, Solano County's congressman took his worries to the national press. Was this, perhaps, an effort by China to gain a foothold?
The frenzy forced Sramek's company, Flannery Associates, to finally reveal itself. Over the past half-decade it had quietly spent $900 million to become the largest landowner in the county, stitching together 140 properties. When a handful of landowners refused to sell, Flannery took them to court, accusing them of colluding to force the price higher. In response, the landowners claimed that Sramek had pitted family members against each other as a tactic to strong-arm farmers into selling their land.
If Sramek had been hoping to win over the locals, he was off to a bad start. He had effectively staged a secret land grab with stealth funding provided by some of the world's wealthiest tech barons. "We understand why that looks, on the surface, odd," he now concedes. But he points to another California visionary who secretly bought up land before unveiling his dream of Tomorrowland. "When Disney was building Disney World, that's what he did," Sramek says. "And you all love Disney World."
Forced into the open, Sramek shifted his strategy to one of transparency. He released a preliminary plan, began personally answering emails from concerned citizens, and met with Farley. She describes him as cordial, though she was immune to his charisma. "I feel like he has his mind made up," Farley says. "He knows what he wants to do. He has money, and he's used to getting his way."
Things got even uglier last November, when Sramek attended a public meeting about the project at the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum. The audience tore him to shreds. Why did Sramek buy all that land in secret, they demanded. Why should they trust him? One person who attended said Sramek sounded like Lyle Lanley, the con artist who sells the town of Springfield a monorail in a classic "Simpsons" episode.
To others, Sramek came across as unapologetic and arrogant, treating Solano as an engineering challenge instead of a real place. "A lot of these founders and investors speak very logically," says Sam Houston, a Vallejo resident who was also there. "It all makes sense to them. But this is more than just logic. This is where people live."
The more experienced members of Sramek's team weren't surprised by the backlash. "Having been to hundreds of community planning meetings in my career, what I have seen in Solano County is absolutely common," says Gabriel Metcalf, the head of urban planning for California Forever. "You've got to go and take your lumps. You've got to be willing to make the argument."
Sramek realizes he screwed up. "I didn't want this to be about me," he says. "I didn't do a good job of telling the story." And if he can't undo the damage, there may never be a California Forever. To get around the anti-development law Farley's committee helped pass in the 1980s, Sramek is pushing a ballot measure that would rezone his property. He has tried to appease locals by agreeing to invest in Solano's battered downtowns, and he has moved his wife and two young children to the area. He's also begun playing up his working-class roots. Whether Sramek has the Midas touch may, ironically, come down to whether he can master the common touch.
But those moves have failed to allay the concerns of many local leaders. Rep. John Garamendi, the congressman who was worried about a Chinese government invasion, still isn't on board. He says the newest version of Sramek's plan doesn't account for the water and roads and schools that California Forever's 50,000 residents will need. Like many locals, Garamendi continues to distrust the larger motivations of Sramek and his Silicon Valley investors. "What he's doing is a scam," Garamendi says. "He's not going to build a city. He's taking 16,000 acres, maybe 20,000 acres, and getting it rezoned. Then he's going to sell that land to somebody that is a developer."
If California Forever has an existential problem, it's not that it's too ambitious, or that its investors are rich hypocrites who would never trade their 10 acres in Atherton for a row house in Foreverville. It's that the project, despite its lofty claims, isn't really a city. It's a glorified subdivision that's designed to look and function like a city.
Drawing from Jane Jacobs, Sramek and his team of urban planners have created an idealized version of modern urban living. There are townhouses and affordable condos in place of single-family homes, and cozy little coffee shops on the cobblestone streets, and bike paths to everywhere. There's even a "warehouse district," a neighborhood full of the kind of buildings that, in an organic city, would have been repurposed from their industrial-era uses into artists lofts and cafés and boutiques. Everything in California Forever is imagineered, a simulacrum of a city. And because it doesn't have a job base to speak of, the people who live there will have to drive to and from work each day, just like all the other suburban commuters. Sure, they'll have bike paths at home. But outside of Foreverville, they'll still have to rely on highways to get to the real cities.
California Forever may be a subdivision, but it's precisely the kind of subdivision America needs right now.
But here's the thing: California Forever may be a subdivision, but it's precisely the kind of subdivision America needs right now. Rather than slapping up a bunch of energy-sucking McMansions or soulless lots dotted with cookie-cutter houses, Sramek is trying to create something that's both vibrant and sustainable. He may not be able to create jobs in the middle of nowhere — but he can create affordable housing and car-free streets and neighborhoods that are friendly to commerce and community and kids. Dismiss him, if you will, as another plundering, technocratic developer intent on making millions for himself and his technocratic investors. But at least his blueprint for plundering would help solve the housing crisis and reduce inequality and protect the planet.
The folks who live in nearby towns like Fairfield and Vallejo, Sramek points out, aren't against development in principle. After all, subdivisions are already springing up on the edges of what is now Sramek's property. One of those projects, One Lake, is a seemingly typical collection of houses a mile or so from Travis Air Force Base. The first hint that it's different is the blocky apartment building on the edge of town — affordable housing that was part of the deal to get One Lake built. The larger difference is obvious as soon as Sramek drives his Tesla past the "Welcome to One Lake" sign. There's a lake — an artificial one. And on its shore is a gorgeous café, all glass and exposed wood beams, called Journey Coffee. It's a coffeehouse, maybe bigger and airier than one you'd find in Austin or Cambridge, but with a similar menu; the seasonal special is a "minty mocha latte."
It's a Tuesday morning, and Journey Coffee is full. There's a half-hour wait just to get a bacon-and-egg sandwich. Young folks are clicking away on laptops, moms are meeting on the terrace, their labradoodles greeting other coffee drinkers as C-17s cruise the sky over Travis. The patrons are, visibly, from a bunch of different backgrounds. "My wife is Indian," Sramek says. "I've never been to a place that has more genuine integration than Solano."
The point, Sramek says, is that lots of locals in Solano would seek out what he's trying to build: a dense, climate-friendly, aspirationally class-blind town full of shops and schools and children. A charming place that lots of different people can afford. But that's the tragedy of America today. Places like California Forever aren't being opposed by the people who are desperate for a place to live. They're being opposed by the people who already have a place to live and don't want anyone else to live nearby.
"The people who have been opposed to it —" Sramek pauses, trying to choose his words carefully. "When you look at them," he says, "they all look the same."
So who's that? Your basic white boomer NIMBY?
"Yeah, I mean, you said it," Sramek says. "I'll just say it's not a particularly diverse coalition in any measure. It's generally a 70-year-old Sierra Club type. The only thing they care about is the open space behind their house."
It's a harsh critique — the idea that the same privilege that sent white people scurrying to the suburbs a half century ago is now driving the opposition to affordable housing. And it's a strange argument to hear coming from a former Goldman trader and a darling of Silicon Valley. If Sramek is a technocrat trying to impose his will on the good progressive people of Solano, he may well be more faithful to their ideals than they are. Yes, he's not from around here — just like he wasn't from London, or Zurich. But if Europe didn't work out for him, well, maybe he can bring a bit of Europe to California. And given the doom loop facing American cities today, that might not be the worst thing.