California Forever: The Startup Building America's Next Great City

California Forever has raised more than $1 billion and assembled nearly 70,000 acres in Solano County—over 100 square miles—to build a new city and industrial hub. The holding is about five times Manhattan’s size and two-and-a-half times San Francisco’s, giving the project unusual room to combine housing, factories and waterfront industry.

The project’s first major industrial bet is the Solano Foundry, pitched as America’s largest advanced-manufacturing park and a way to reunite Silicon Valley R&D with production. Its argument is that U.S. manufacturing cannot match China through labor volume, so robotics and AI must raise output per worker while keeping factories close to Bay Area engineering talent.

Shipbuilding is being positioned as a national-security business, not a side project. California Forever says its 6.5 miles of deep-water waterfront could accommodate shipyards on the scale of major U.S. facilities, while giving the Navy and commercial builders badly needed West Coast repair and production capacity.

The strategic case for West Coast shipbuilding rests on the vulnerability of relying heavily on East Coast and Gulf yards during a Pacific conflict. Sramek argued that disruption of the Panama Canal could severely complicate moving ships between the Pacific and existing yards, making additional Pacific-side capacity materially important.

California Forever is not planning an industrial park with nearby suburbs; it wants a walkable city for as many as 400,000 people built around the industrial base. The residential model deliberately looks backward—traditional neighborhoods, public squares and children walking to school—even as the factories and shipyards are meant to use cutting-edge technology.

Sramek’s broader diagnosis is that California’s decline is largely self-inflicted because the state stopped building enough housing, infrastructure, energy and industrial space. California Forever is designed as a proof-by-construction response: rather than lobbying for abundance, it is trying to create one large place where housing, manufacturing and infrastructure can be built together.

The project’s real ambition is to make Solano County a new Bay Area production center, not merely a housing development. Sramek is betting that Northern California’s enduring advantage is its concentration of AI, robotics and engineering talent, and that giving those workers nearby factories and shipyards could restore part of the industrial ecosystem Silicon Valley once had.