Building Freedom’s Forge 2.0, on 100 SQM an hour north of Silicon Valley

Episode Overview

• Jan Sramek, CEO of California Forever, presents the vision for building a new, master-planned city in Solano County, California, designed to address the state's housing crisis and declining manufacturing base.
• He argues that California is "worth fighting for" and outlines how this new city can serve as a model for future development, combining walkability, affordability, and economic opportunity.
• The presentation details the historical planning precedents for the project, its strategic location on land with low agricultural and ecological value, and its core economic purpose: to co-locate R&D from the Bay Area with advanced manufacturing and shipbuilding.
• Sramek outlines key features of the urban plan, including pre-approved permits to enable rapid construction, a focus on walkability with a grid of "superblocks" and "slow streets," and integrated sustainable infrastructure.

Key Concepts

• California Forever: A project to build a new city from scratch in Solano County, focused on walkability, affordability, and re-establishing California's manufacturing prowess.
• Strategic Location: The chosen 69,000-acre site is poorly suited for agriculture and has low ecological value, making it an ideal location for new development within the Northern California mega-region.
• Dream, Design, Build Framework: The new city is positioned as the "Build" hub for the Bay Area's innovation economy, which currently "Dreams" in SF/Berkeley and "Designs" in Silicon Valley but outsources most physical production.
• Historical Precedent: The project is rooted in past regional plans from the 1950s (Army Corps of Engineers) and 1970s (Association of Bay Area Governments) that identified this specific area for future large-scale, planned development to prevent sprawl.
• Walkable Urbanism: The city is designed around a grid of "superblocks," featuring fast "movement streets" for transit alongside slow, pedestrian-friendly "woonerfs" (living streets), ensuring most residents are a short walk from amenities and transit.
• Onshoring Advanced Industries: The plan includes a "Solano Foundry" for advanced manufacturing and a "Solano Shipyard" to address the significant deficit in U.S. shipbuilding capacity compared to China, creating a domestic hub for industrial innovation.
• Wholesale Permitting: California Forever is completing all major land use entitlements and permits upfront, allowing future builders (from large companies to individual homeowners) to get approvals in months, not years.

Quotes

• At 01:04 - "I'd gotten here about 20 years too late for the California that I wanted to live in. And for a little while, I got pretty depressed about that reality, but then decided to work on it." - Sramek explains how the contrast between the California dream and its modern challenges motivated him to create a solution rather than leave.
• At 07:12 - "We cannot catch up to China without co-locating production with R&D. Solano can be America's Shenzhen." - This quote summarizes the core economic and geopolitical mission of the new city: to create a powerful ecosystem by linking the Bay Area's innovation with large-scale domestic manufacturing.
• At 14:40 - "All of these are not really exclusive zones. They are more like flavors... You can build any type of housing in any of those zones except in the industrial zone." - Describing the city's flexible, mixed-use zoning approach, which avoids the rigid separation of uses common in suburban development and promotes a more vibrant, integrated community.

Takeaways

• To revive industrial competitiveness, co-locate R&D and manufacturing. Creating a feedback loop between design and production within the same region can accelerate innovation and strengthen the domestic economy.
• Solve permitting challenges at scale to unlock development. Instead of project-by-project approvals that take years, pre-approving entitlements for an entire city or large district creates the certainty and speed needed to attract investment and build quickly.
• Design cities for people first by prioritizing walkability. A street hierarchy that separates high-speed transit from slow, safe local streets, combined with integrated schools, retail, and green spaces, can create a high quality of life where walking and biking are the default modes of transport.