This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
JAN SRAMEK:
By the standards of the rest of the world, basically every city here is a new city. And many of them are pretty recent. I mean, you look at Columbia, Maryland, or Irvine, California. They are 60 years old. And you can find pictures of—they looked like cow pastures 60 years ago. And today they are these bustling places. So there’s actual examples. It’s not rocket science. It literally isn’t. I mean, we are not trying to invent a reusable rocket that lands. We are not trying to invent AI. It’s become non-controversial to say that we can invent software that’s as smart as humans or smarter, but somehow a lot of people today are saying, “we can’t build some houses and factories and a sewer line.” I mean, we’ve known how to do this for 5,000 years.
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens, if in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way. What we can possibly get right if we leverage technology like AI and our collective effort effectively.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields—AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.
REID:
These conversations showcase another kind of guest. Whether it’s Inflection’s Pi or OpenAI’s GPT or other AI tools, each episode we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.
ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
REID:
While I currently call Washington State home, I grew up in California, studied and lived there. California is the epicenter of tech, an agricultural stronghold, and has breathtaking and diverse landscapes. If California were a nation, it would be the country with the fifth-largest GDP in the world. Yet, for the first time in history, more people are moving out of California than moving in. In 2022, California experienced a net loss of over 341,000 residents according to the U.S. Census.
ARIA:
And one of the major contributing factors to this trend is housing. The average cost of a single family home in California is more than double the national average. And while I consider myself the proud East Coast host of the Possible Podcast, California indeed has a lot to offer. But unfortunately, these offerings are increasingly only available for the most wealthy. Our guest today has a plan to change that.
REID:
California Forever is a real estate development corporation that aims to address the state’s housing crisis and house 400,000 residents in Solano County, just northeast of San Francisco. To be fully transparent, I’m an investor in the company.
ARIA:
The project is not without its concerns and controversy, and we’re not going to shy away from any of that in the episode. We have both an investor and the leader of the project here to dive into the details. Jan Sramek is from a small village in the Czech Republic. He studied mathematics and economics at Trinity College, Cambridge and the London School of Economics. Jan started his career in finance, but left to found Better, an education company that helped workers acquire new skills. Now he’s the CEO of California Forever, and he can’t wait to move into the first house in the new community he is working to build.
REID:
Here’s our conversation with Jan Sramek.
ARIA:
Jan, so lovely to meet you. You don’t know this, but since the moment Reid told me about this project, like, I basically wanted you on the Possible Podcast because I was so excited about it. And I know that like sort of walkable cities is not the only part of California forever. And so we will get to all of the amazing components, but walkable cities is something for me that is so important. I choose to live in Brooklyn. You know, whenever you’re on vacation, it’s like, “oh, let’s go to Rome, let’s go to Paris, let’s live in the downtown and just walk around.” I actually feel claustrophobic when I cannot sort of walk out my door and go places. And so I want to start with you by going way back. Is there something about where you grew up that inspired you to imagine and build this new kind of city? Maybe it was things you wanted to keep about your hometown or things that you wanted to change about how you grew up? I would love to hear about that.
JAN SRAMEK:
Yeah, a lot of it was shaped by different parts of my upbringing, I think. The first 16 years of my life, I grew up in a really small town in the Czech Republic. And when I say small, I mean a thousand people. And it was a town that was super walkable in terms of walking to school and seeing our neighbors. But then getting to the closest city, which was about 50,000 people, was—you had to drive, and I didn’t have a driver’s license for a long time, and so I had to take a bus. And so it was really this combination of the accessibility and the sense of community, but then getting to a lot of my friends was difficult. And then between the age of 16 and 25, I, I got a scholarship to go to the UK for high school, and I had this accelerated eight-year experience of living in some of the most beloved towns and cities in Europe.
JAN SRAMEK:
I lived in the old York and the old Cambridge and London and then Zurich. And it was a, it was the time when normally you would get a, you would get a car, you would get a driver’s license. And so for, from the age of 16 to the age of I think 26, I didn’t own a car and I didn’t drive a car once—in a whole 10-year period. And it was just this completely bizarre experience now that I think about it. But it was really a magical sense of freedom and not having to depend on the car. And I think a lot of—a lot of that has influenced this project very heavily.
ARIA:
That’s amazing. I love it. So Jan, you obviously were involved in startups at a young age, you know, sort of the idea of doing things differently and being innovative is a part of your DNA. Then you worked in finance, but how did you, you know, sort of pivot to the housing and real estate world? Like why did you make that shift from the work that you used to be doing to what you’re doing now?
JAN SRAMEK:
It was a really personal story when I got to the Bay Area. I mean, I came to the Bay Area about 10 years ago. And this was, and was my first time visiting California after kind of 30 years of hearing about the, the place of opportunity and dynamism and the American dream and all of the innovation. And it was a really interesting experience because I loved the Bay Area for all of the reasons that everyone loves it. The innovation, the culture, the, the openness, the diversity, the natural beauty, all of it. But I got here at a really interesting time in 2013, 2014, when housing prices just started going vertical. And this is the time when people are throwing rocks at Google buses and people are struggling to get permission to build office buildings in San Francisco.
JAN SRAMEK:
And it was this crazy juxtaposition of, the whole world was trying to build its own version of Silicon Valley, and all that Silicon Valley had to do to capture that opportunity was to build more housing and build more real estate. And you had this wall of people who wanted to come here and companies that wanted to build here. And instead of new jobs being celebrated, they were ripping communities apart because they were pushing higher up the cost of housing. And so in, in the beginning it was just this kind of idle interest. And I, I kept learning more and more about it and where it came from. And then at some point it was just—it looked like we were about to engage in the greatest squandering of the economic opportunity in the history of mankind. And I thought it was really sad and I wanted to work on it. And then I spent about a year working on infill, so building more housing and existing cities. And that was a—and I realized after working on it for a year, that was going to be part of the solution and maybe the main part of the solution, but because we were missing 3 million homes in California, it wasn’t going to be enough. And that’s really where this idea came from.
ARIA:
That’s great. And so we actually haven’t even said what California Forever is. So I will introduce—and Jan, obviously weigh in—but you guys are trying to build a new city in Solano County that, like you said, is just a few hours from the Bay Area where we’ve seen, I’m going to, I don’t even have the number trillions of dollars of value created in, in just this like small area. And how can we make sure to continue on that prosperity? You know, this, this podcast is not called Possible for nothing. If, if everything goes right, like what’s the best possible outcome? Like when you and me and Reid and all of our friends move to Solano County and you know, we are there and we have local jobs, like what does that timeline look like? And then also like, are there phases and stages? Like is the first different from what’s happening a year later? Walk us through that.
JAN SRAMEK:
Well, the actual timeline was determined by my wife, who six years ago said that our firstborn child has to go to school in the new community. And we’ve been working backwards from it since then.
ARIA:
I love it.
JAN SRAMEK:
In all seriousness, she’s two and a half. So it’s actually a battle. We think we’ll have the first residence moving in in 2028, hopefully. Me and my family will be moving in the first house. That’s for sure. That’s an ambitious timeline by California standards. But anywhere else in America, this would be a pretty conservative timeline. And so the, the, the constraints really are regulatory and political rather than physically building it. The first phase would probably be about 5,000 residents. And you would expect a neighborhood that looks like some of the most beloved neighborhoods in America. Noe Valley or Marina in San Francisco, Georgetown in DC, West Village in New York.
JAN SRAMEK:
Think 2-story row houses, local shopping streets, streets that are safe enough for kids to walk to school. In the first phase we’ll, we’ll have a local shopping street that we’ll need to subsidize—5,000 people is not enough to, to support it, but we’ll subsidize it—and we’ll want a grocery store and a couple of coffee shops and one is pretentious and the other one isn’t. And we’ll have three restaurants and a place of worship. But, and then, and then jobs around it. And then it will grow from there. And I think the main change is that over time it will probably, in the beginning, it’s going to be a lot of row houses and over time there’s going to be more and more apartment buildings. But otherwise really follow the same path that so many cities in America have done before.
ARIA:
You talked about sort of building affordable housing in existing cities, and I think that’s perhaps what a lot of people would critique about what you are doing. They’d say like, this is all well and good, but like we have abandoned buildings. Like why aren’t we refurbishing them? And in every possible episode we invite AI into the conversation. So we asked Inflection’s Pi—you know, Reid is the co-founder of Inflection—and we said to Pi, what are the top ways that we can increase the amount of affordable housing in the U.S.? And I’ll quickly read Pi’s answers and then I’ll ask you what you think.
Pi:
Option 1: increasing funding for affordable housing programs and incentives for developers to build affordable units. Option 2: Relaxing zoning regulations to allow for higher-density housing in urban areas. Option 3: Encouraging mixed-income housing developments to create more diverse communities. Option 4: Providing rental-assistance programs to help low-income households afford housing. Option 5: Promoting homeownership opportunities for low-income households through programs like down payment assistance and tax incentives.
ARIA:
So why not pursue those?
JAN SRAMEK:
So actually two of those are ideas that we are very much pursuing. And so the building of diverse communities where you mix different types of things together; homes, shops, offices, and different income levels is basically what we’re doing. We’re just doing it on, in a new place. We have, as part of our commitment to the community, introduced a $400 million down payment assistance program. And it’s the biggest program of its kind in the state of California. The state has a program that’s $300 million—that’s for the entire state. We have a $400 million program just for Solano County, which is about 1% of the state’s population. And so I a hundred percent believe in getting people on the housing ladder and doing that. There was then a third idea, which was relaxing regulations to build in existing cities and build higher. And I think that’s going to be a huge part of the solution.
JAN SRAMEK:
And the California YIMBY Group and Federation has done incredible work in making that work. The last two ideas were really about subsidizing rental assistance and subsidizing affordable housing. And I think those are important paths of the solution, but it’s really difficult to subsidize your way out of the problem. And the biggest reason I think is that if you introduce a subsidy for rental assistance, mostly what happens is the rents just go up and all of the money goes to the landlords. We know how to make housing affordable, we just need to build a lot of it. And there’s really good examples. Tokyo, for example, in Japan has been growing. Japan has been falling in the population, but Tokyo has been growing in population. But my understanding is you can, you can get a pretty nice apartment in Tokyo, which is a major metro global city for a thousand dollars a month.
JAN SRAMEK:
They’ve just been building a lot. And then even closer to home, I would say a lot of the urbanists and housing advocates love to hate on Texas and Houston. And there’s a lot of things that are wrong in, in Texas and Houston that, that we should fix. But they do build. And if you look at the place where the American dream is alive—particularly for immigrants, particularly for first generation Americans—Houston has actually done a really good job. And so we think if we want to stand for these progressive ideals in California, we need not just talk about progressive values, we need to actually achieve them. And one of those is to build enough housing that people are not in this zero sum tournament competing for the same number of housing units and using subsidies to try to get ahead—which doesn’t work.
ARIA:
Jan I’m just so happy that you mentioned Tokyo, because I will tell anyone who will possibly listen to me about what’s happening there. And to your point, like there is a solution to homelessness, housing, prices, et cetera. And, and some of it’s sometimes simple, it’s a simple supply and demand issue. Obviously there’s so many other complex things that are happening, but to your point, if we have the same number of units and just subsidize, it’s, it’s not going to help folks.
JAN SRAMEK:
Imagine that we built a total of 5 million iPhones for the state of California and that was all. Like, you, you could subsidize them as much as you want.
ARIA:
Sure.
JAN SRAMEK:
But they would not be affordable. Yeah. It’s just wealthiest people would still buy them.
ARIA:
Absolutely.
REID:
I mean, one of the things obviously in creating new cities is the, the livability of it. The fact you design it from green, you design it walking you design it with a kind of a modern balance in kind of residence and accessibility and all the rest. And there’s the kind of the, the livability, which of course is essential to California Forever. But also there’s this interesting thing about the creation of jobs, the creation of, of economic opportunity, and how that economic opportunity then gets magnified for all of the local residents. Talk a little bit about that.
JAN SRAMEK:
Normally when people have tried to build new cities anywhere, jobs is the hardest part. It’s, it’s how do you get economic activity there? And I feel like we kind of playing the game on easy mode in that, because we building the, we’re building a city that’s 45 miles north of San Francisco we just don’t have a jobs problem. I mean, we are, we, we’ve come into a situation where California and Northern California in particular has spent the last five years shipping tens of thousands of good paying jobs to Texas and Florida because these companies can’t put them here. And all we have to do is build more housing and build more space, and I mean execute well and, and, and, and manage all of the partnerships. But we’ve had this incredible reception from companies saying, “if we can create a place in northern California where our employees can buy a home and we can build an office, or we can build a factory and we can build it predictably, and in a year instead of waiting five years for approvals and zoning and environmental impact reports and so on, we would love to stay in California.”
JAN SRAMEK:
I think this is a really unique opportunity, not just for Solano County and not just for the Bay Area, but for California as a state to keep all of these jobs in California. Instead of shipping them off to Texas and Florida, which I personally think is completely insane. I mean, we have the thing that every country, every state in the world is trying to have, and all we have to do is build more housing and factories and office space to keep them here. And we are not doing it and instead we shipping them off. Like it’s just insane. And I think this project is going to do an incredible amount of work in fixing it. And the beauty of it is that it also fixes this local issue in Solano County where I know so many young parents here who commutes two hours every day for work to Palo Alto. And if their employer opened a satellite office out here, they could have an incredibly better quality of life.
JAN SRAMEK:
They would do better work for the employer because they wouldn’t be spending four hours in a car. They could be more with their young kids. And when they have a meeting, they can still get to that meeting. And so I think this is a win for Solano County. It’s a win for the Bay Area. It’s a win for California. And I think it’s a win for America because the innovation engine that we have in Northern California is really special. And the fact that we are throttling it by not building up housing is just crazy.
REID:
Just because I think it’s one of the classic misconceptions, say a little bit about how this creates a lot of jobs that local—people who are local today will be able to do it. Some of it is they’re already working and they’re already commuting, but like, what’s the kind of like, “look, once this California Forever gets going, how is it that it’s like, “wow, I’m going to have multiple job opportunities?”
JAN SRAMEK:
Yeah, I mean we, a lot of it starts by us being really thoughtful about what industries we are trying to bring here. And from the beginning what we’ve said is, we want to bring industries that build on the existing strengths of the county and bring jobs that the people who are here can get. And there’s two really great examples. One is in advanced manufacturing and defense. The county has a really long and proud tradition in—there was a big Navy base here and they have one of the largest Air Force bases in the country. And across the country we are now doing more and more building of advanced manufacturing that’s co-located with Air Force bases. There’s a lot of it going on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at the Robins Air Force Base, at the Tinker Air Force Base. And so we want to do that here around Travis Air Force Base.
JAN SRAMEK:
And we have a couple of companies that we’ve announced a month ago. One is Hadrian that builds precision parts for jets and rockets and satellites. And another good example is Zipline that makes drones, and we have many more coming up. And the second great example is the county has a long tradition in agriculture and we are bringing in companies like Living Carbon, which makes trees that sequester more carbon and grow faster. And they’re looking at building a nursery for 10 million trees. Or Plenty, which builds vertical farms that can grow fresh produce all year round with, I believe, 99% less water and 90% less land. And a single one of these vertical farms produces more food than the entire 17 and a half thousand acres of the new community that we are building, because the place that we are building is, is this very marginal, poor quality land that doesn’t grow very much.
JAN SRAMEK:
And so we’ve really focused on bringing those kinds of jobs. And the last part I would say is just the construction of the new community and the solar farm that we are building around it. It’s about a $30 billion investment in just the construction phase of it over the next 15 years. And so that’s over 10,000 jobs in construction. All of those, or most of those would go to local Solano residents. And people sometimes kind of think of construction jobs as being temporary. Well, they are temporary if you’re building 200 homes. If you’re building a whole city, we are going to have people who will apprentice, work, become a foreman and a supervisor, and then retire on this city and never leave. And they’ll live in Fairfield, in Vacaville, or Rio Vista and have a 10 minute commute, 20 minute commute to work. I think it’s going to be a, an incredible place to live. And in fact, we hope that many of the construction workers, all their children will be some of the first home buyers in the new community. And I always feel that if you are a construction worker—and a lot of my family is construction workers or in construction—if you’re a construction worker and you’re building a school and your kids or your grandkids are going to go to the school, the school is going to look different. You just, you just care more. And I, I think it’s going to be a really great lifestyle for many of those people.
ARIA:
You know, I’ve given it away that I am so excited about this project, but again, there are critics and, you know, people who are being displaced are not happy about that. Farmers who have to leave their land, they maybe have been there for generations and they don’t want to give that up. And some people say that there might be a power imbalance between what you guys are doing and the local farmers. So how have you navigated those issues and how are you trying to make it sort of equitable for everyone?
JAN SRAMEK:
Absolutely. I mean, that was one of the key areas of focus for us from the beginning. And I will start by saying, no farmer needs to leave the land that they farm if they don’t want to. And so there are farmers who’ve, who’ve spoken against the project because they don’t want something to happen near them, but that’s not on their land. And in fact, we’ve been able to purchase this property because it is some of the worst soil for agriculture within a hundred miles. And in fact, we’ve purchased property from over 600 people. We’ve made—we’ve turned 600 people into millionaires. And what they’ve generally done, if they wanted to stay in farming, was to go and buy better land 20 miles north or 10 miles east. And they stayed in the community and, and most of them are really happy about it.
JAN SRAMEK:
They’re just not in the—not in the press. This is by far the best site to build a new city in probably the whole country. And I knew it because I spent a year making sure that it was. On the entire 17-and-a-half-thousand acres that we are building the new community—which is about half the area of San Francisco, maybe two thirds the area of San Francisco—there’s 21 people who live there right now, 21. And all of those people have long-term leasebacks. They will be able to continue living in their houses. Most of them are fairly old, some of them have life estates and they’ll be able to continue living there as long as they want. Or, if not, they’ll be, we have other houses on other parts of the property that we have, and they can absolutely relocate or they can get a new house in the new community.
JAN SRAMEK:
And so nobody will need to leave. And the people who’ve sold, they’ve generally sold for three, four times market value and, and made a lot of money in the process. And so this is not a story of displacing anyone. And then because of the power imbalance, I would say the process that we’ve chosen to follow is the most democratic way that I can think of, of building a new community in a place like Solano County. And so we are bringing it to the voters. It’s going to be on the November 24 ballot and every voter in Solano County, which is about 450,000 people is going to get a say in it. This is, this is as democratic as it gets. And we really excited about the support we have for it. And I think that’s also going to give us the mandate. I think if half the county says we want it here, then the path, the path forward is really clear.
REID:
You know, there’s so many different things that, that fire the imagination about what can be good, you know, for Solano, for California, for the Bay area, for industry, you know. How do you build a green walkable city that’s affordable, that has good job prospects, it’s like, you know, the place you’d want to live. What are the current most exciting developments? And then what’s the most common misconception if we haven’t covered it already?
JAN SRAMEK:
I mean, the current developments have really been about us delivering on a lot of the promises that, that we, that we, that we said we could do for the community. And this really becoming a grassroots community movement here in Solano County. And so there was a lot of skepticism about the plan when we, when we first announced it last fall. But we’ve said that we would bring employers. We’ve said that we would back local nonprofits. We’ve said that we would do things like bring training programs to the county and build a sports complex, which is badly missing here for kind of regional youth tournaments. And people have seen over the last few months that we deliver. We, we do the things we don’t—unlike many politicians—we don’t just talk, we actually get stuff done and get stuff, get stuff built or funded.
JAN SRAMEK:
And that’s really changed the conversation. And so now we have, I think we have 70 local businesses that have publicly endorsed the initiative. We have hundreds of people who’ve publicly endorsed it and put testimonials out and videos talking about how this is going to be great for them and their kids and grandkids. And over 20,000 Solano County residents have signed the petition to put it on the ballot. And so it’s become a movement and something that has a really broad community support. I think that’s the, that’s the biggest one. In terms of misconceptions, I would say it’s the idea that this cannot be done or it has never been done successfully before. And I think in particular, we have two really amazing examples in America. One is Columbia, Maryland, and one is Irvine, Southern California. These are both new cities that today have, I think a 100,000 for Columbia and 300,000 for Irvine residents.
JAN SRAMEK:
And they both started in the sixties, similarly to this community. They were both located between two major metro areas. Irvine was between LA and San Diego, and Columbia is between DC and Baltimore. And they both did the thing that we believe we’ll be able to do here, which is they’ve become job hubs. They, they have more jobs today than they have residents and they’ve become a place that has brought jobs to the whole area. And Solano is very similar. We are located between San Francisco and Sacramento. And I’m pretty confident that for, actually now, I’m pretty confident that right from the beginning we are going to have more jobs than we have residents, and that’s going to really improve the quality of life for everyone out here.
ARIA:
That’s fantastic. And so, you know, you were talking about this is—you put it on the ballot, you, this is a democratic process. You are involving the local people in deciding whether they want this and do they want a sports complex and do they want sort of all of these things, which is so fantastic. And one of the things is, Solano residents noted that there was a lack of regional public transit connections in the original plan. And the California Forever team heard the feedback and you guys incorporated that into a revised plan. One of the things that I think is sometimes a misnomer here is you are, “oh, you are getting rid of beautiful open farmland and you are sort of creating a terrible congested city.” So I would love to hear two things. One is, are there other things that people asked for that maybe you haven’t mentioned, where you’ve gotten community feedback? But also how is this going to be climate positive? How is this city going to be a really good city investment on the climate change front?
JAN SRAMEK:
I remember about a year ago we brought on a bunch of engineers to work on it, who would kind of be confirming the initial due diligence we did and starting to work on the planning. And there’s a big firm here in California, they’ve built everything of scale—Treasure Island, and Hunter’s Point Lucas Museum. And we told them about the site and what we want to do there. And, and they, they went away and they did all of their due diligence. And then I walked into a meeting with the CEO and he—I’ve never met him before, it was the first time I met him—and they’re based here in the Bay Area. And he walked into the meeting and he hugged me and he said, “I have never seen a site that is as good for building a city as this one. And I’ve lived here 60 years, I have done everything in California.
JAN SRAMEK:
I did not think that a place like this existed. You have the best site for building anything of scale ever.” And he saysYou have 60,000 acres that is not a single earthquake fault line running through them. The community that you want to build in the middle is the most resilient place in the Bay Area from a sea level perspective. You could have the aggressive sea level rise scenario and it would still not be flooded at all. You have no fire risk, you have no liquefaction risk, there is no hazmat risk on the site.” And he lives 40 miles away from the site. And he said, “this is one of those ideas that’s just been sitting there in plain sight and everyone’s been looking at it for 60 years and it never came together, but it is an incredible site to build on.
JAN SRAMEK:
It is the best place to build a new city in the country and in California.” And by the way, it’s not even just our idea. So in 1958, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Commerce Department did a study that they called the Future Development of the San Francisco Bay Area. And what they did is they mapped the demands for housing and industry and so on in the Bay over the next 60 years, and they predicted where growth would go. And I remember to this day when I was beginning to work on it, I spent about a year trying to convince myself that this was a bad idea. I listed all of the reasons why it wouldn’t work and I could, I tried to disprove this being a good idea and I failed. And one of the final steps in which I failed to prove this was a bad idea is I got hold of these maps and I was sitting there and they mapped it decade by decade.
JAN SRAMEK:
And so I’m opening the map in 1958 and then 1970 and 1980 and 1990, and you see Livermore grow and you see the peninsula grow and Silicon Valley grows. And I get to 2010 and I opened the map and I almost fell off my chair, because right in the place where I thought would be a good place to build a city, they had a city. And they thought it would start at about 2010 and then really explode in the 2020s. And so this is an old idea that a bunch of really, really smart engineers and people who worked for the government thought it was a good idea. And in some sense all we’ve done is taken it off the shelf and dusted it off and made it more sustainable and walkable, and now we’re going to build it.
ARIA:
Whenever I go to the Bay Area, I’m sort of shocked at how bad the public transportation is, and you are not the government. Like how do you make sure that Solano County and what you’re building is tied together with public infrastructure to these other places? So it’s not just creating more cars, traffic jams to our commutes, to your point.
JAN SRAMEK:
So it’s definitely something that we don’t control ourselves. But we, we definitely have a vested interest and a, and a pretty major seat at the table to making it happen once the community gets going. It starts with simple things, like, we expect that we are going to run a public bus service that we will operate from the new community to places like Bar, to places like Walnut Creek, to Sacramento—so we can kind of bootstrap it over time. And then the second part of it is bringing a major project here, like what we are doing, and employers—really gives the county much more of a seat at the table when it comes to regional decisions. And one of the issues with transportation improvements, part of why it’s much better on the east coast is that the areas are just much denser.
JAN SRAMEK:
Only cost is a public transport is a fixed cost investment and you need a lot of people to amortize it over. And right now Solano County is stuck in this local maxima, if you want, where there isn’t enough people here often to justify spending money on public infrastructure like transportation. And so by adding people here, adding businesses, and adding someone like us who has a vested interest in bringing public transit here—I think it’s a much better chance of that happening. But it will definitely require larger corporation across the region.
ARIA:
Mm-hmm.
REID:
You know, one of the things that I think a listener might think is, “oh my gosh, this, this makes so much sense, but is it really feasible,” right? Like, is this too much of just a, like, it’s huge of a project. Like you, you kind of, you imagine going from, you know, kind of modestly productive farmland to an amazingly green city with, you know, kind of good jobs and good good schools and, and you know, kind of walkable and, and, and, you know, all these other things. What, what does the path forward look like such that it’s actually in fact feasible—not just a, a nice presentation you’d put on a PowerPoint or on a wall?
JAN SRAMEK:
The high level answer is that in some sense, all cities in America—in particular—are new cities. I mean, it’s a pretty young country by the standards of the rest of the world. Basically, every city here is a new city. And many of them are pretty recent. I mean, you look at Columbia, Maryland or Irvine, California, they are 60 years old. And you can find pictures were they look like cow pastures 60 years ago. And today they are these, they are these bustling places. So there’s actual examples. And the, the other part of it is it’s not rocket science. It literally isn’t. I mean, we are not trying to invent a reusable rocket that lands. We are not trying to cure cancer. We are not trying to invent AI. It’s become non-controversial to say that we can invent software that’s as smart as humans or smarter.
JAN SRAMEK:
But somehow a lot of people today are saying, “oh, we can’t build some houses and factories and a sewer line.” I mean, we’ve known how to do this for 5,000 years. Practically speaking, it’s not that many moving pieces. And we do do this in America still. We do a lot of it in Arizona and Texas and Florida. There’s lots of—they often don’t call them new cities, we call them master-planned communities—but there’s lots of examples of places where there was no one living there 15 years ago and there’s 25,000 people living there today, or 50,000 people. And it doesn’t take that much. I mean, it takes a water treatment plant, it takes a sewer treatment plant. There’s already power there. Some other basic infrastructure like fiber, we build some roads we could all hook it all up together and then we start building homes and offices and factories and shops at the same time. And I think this is an example of what you would call a complex coordination company. There’s no one thing that’s a breakthrough, it just requires doing a lot of things really well, but we know how to do them.
REID:
One of the things I love about working with you on this is the fact that you study broadly and deeply. So some of the things we’ve covered is the deep, like, you know, kind of the Army Corps engineer’s history of California planning, you know, a stack of things that are already in this and you know, kind of like what does it mean for water and ecology and, and economics. Say a little bit about the breadth, like, you know, kind of whether it’s Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, you know, Estonia’s e-residency program. What are some of the things that as you look kind of broadly around the world and say, “what are the best things we can—that that, that we can learn from those that make things great for Solano residents, for Californians?” And, and the things that we can add in that are part of what could could make this kind of like one of the, you know, one of the amazing things that, you know, 20 years from now when people are looking around the world and said, what kind of amazing things happened, one of them happened in Solano County. What, what’s, what’s that breadth perspective with some lessons that are essentially local to us?
JAN SRAMEK:
Looking geographically across the world at, at attempts at building new cities of different kinds, I think the most applicable lesson is the value of building a place that’s really easy to do business in. And that doesn’t necessarily mean low taxes, and it doesn’t mean low wages. It just means strong but simple regulations and a really predictable and fast path permitting. And so I would say, in terms of governance, the only innovation that we are doing is we want this to be a place, the easiest place to build in California. And the way we are doing that is we are going to approve and study and do an environmental impact report for the entire city at once. But once that’s done, if you want to come here and you want to build a home or a factory or an office, you should be able to get a permit in 60 days and build.
JAN SRAMEK:
And what we’ve seen all over the world is if you create a place where people can predictably and quickly build, amazing things happen. The capital flows in, the jobs flow in. And so I think that’s the lesson geographically. The other part of it is actually more about learning from the past. And so the design inspiration for us is much more about going back to some of the most beloved neighborhoods in America, most of which were built sometime between 1860 and 1920, and taking those plans and adapting them and making them better. But there’s something interesting about building new communities where so much of it is Iterable, and we’ve been doing it now for 5,000, 10,000 years. There’s all of these timeless lessons that our ancestors have incorporated in the plans about how big do you make the buildings and how wide do you want the street to be so that humans feel safe on it?
JAN SRAMEK:
And what kind of architecture makes people feel welcome and safe and excited? And how do we lay the street and the parks? And in America, we kind of took a lot of it in the forties and in the fifties and we threw it out and we’ve been gradually rediscovering it for the last 20 years. And so I would say the other place where we went back to look for inspiration is actually history and looking at these old neighborhoods. And so when we, when we do—when we run urban design for the project, oftentimes what you will find on the screen is this is our plan and what it looks like in Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina and Philadelphia and parts of San Francisco—or even some of the towns and cities in Solano County. And there’s so much wisdom in those old lessons that we’ve taken.
ARIA:
It’s so funny, I went down a real rabbit hole last week with a Twitter thread that was just pictures of American cities in the forties and fifties. It was the Twin Cities, it was Toledo, it was parts of Boston. And you were like, “oh my God, like is that Prague? Like, what European city is that?” And it was to your point, it was just U.S. Cities that had been built in the late 1800s and early 1900s before we smashed some highways right through the middle. And we all need to go back there. It’s like we just need to get back to what we used to have. So, and a lot of the things you’re talking about is innovation, not in the sort of technical software sense, but it’s actually innovation in systems and innovations in partnerships. You know, you were talking about you know, you want to be able to build in 60 days. So what are the nonprofit and government sort of stakeholders and partnerships that are necessary to make this happen?
JAN SRAMEK:
There’s components—I mean I think the two main ones are a partnership with the Solano county, both the, both the agency and with the voters and the residents. And then the second one is at the state level and it’s really a partnership with the, with the state on building again and keeping jobs in California and making those investments. I think at a local level it really is: what we try to do with this plan is to build a new social contract. And what I mean by that is we have this unprecedented set of community investments. And to give you a sense, the plan calls for $500 million in community benefits between, during the buildout from zero to 50,000 residents. It’s a, it’s an incredible number. Then it calls for another $200 million of investment into Solano downtowns in the other cities. And a guarantee that we’ll bring 15,000 new jobs by the time that we get to 50,000 residents.
JAN SRAMEK:
And the way that we’ve been able to do that or offer that is to say, “we are going to have a really strong plan and it’s going to be approved by the voters, but once we approve it, we are going to make it really easy to build here inside this footprint. And by making it easy to build here, we are going to be able to bring employers and we are going to be able to use money to pay construction workers and to deliver homes more affordably instead of paying lawyers and consultants to spend years in court fighting over it, or getting approvals for every single building one by one.” And what that will do is it will create economic value, because we can build faster and bring better employers here. And then we’re going to take a lot of that value and we are going to invest it back in the community in the form of these unprecedented community benefits.
JAN SRAMEK:
And so I think that’s the main partnership. It’s the, it’s the partnership with all of the residents of the county with this new social contract that says, “we are going to make a place that’s easy to do business in and fast to build, and then we are going to take the surplus created by that and we’re going to invest it in all of the existing community.” And I think it’s really innovative. I think it probably, if this goes as well as we all believe it will, I think it’s going, I hope, I hope it’s going to become a model that gets replicated eventually elsewhere in the country.
REID:
One of the things that obviously is top of mind for a lot of the world is, you know, kind of climate change, green, et cetera. Say a little bit about how starting from scratch allows us to take all of the ideas and developments and technologies…what are your thoughts?
JAN SRAMEK:
We spent a lot of time putting together this incredible team of urban designers and engineers and sustainability experts to work on it. And it’s been incredible to learn from them what is possible. And I knew that we could build an extremely sustainable place, but it blew my mind what we can actually do. And a good example of that is—we now believe that this will certainly be the most sustainable city in America. We think it might be the most sustainable city in the world. We think now that we are going to have a negative carbon footprint because we are actually building a huge solar farm and we already have a big wind farm around the new community that takes out way more carbon out of the atmosphere than what will ever produce. And then in the city itself—and I mean, to me the best example is thinking about the circularity of the systems.
JAN SRAMEK:
And that means, for example, we’re building a district heating system, a district thermal system, and the way that we will reuse heat is you co-locate a sewer treatment plant or the water treatment plant, wastewater treatment plant next to the heating plant. Because it turns out when we have showers and do the dishes the water that you send down the pipes, there’s a lot of heat in it. And you can extract the heat and put it back in the system to heat the houses. More than that for example, data centers as you know, create an incredible amount of heat that right now we have to use energy to dispose of it. And so we are co-locating the data centers next to the thermal heating plant where you can take the heat off and actually get paid for taking it off, reduce that power consumption in the data center and provide cheap or subsidized heating for all the residents. And there’s so many of these examples that you can do if you’re designing a system from scratch with everything that we’ve learned. And I would say I get, I get more excited every month by all of the new things that our amazing design team brings us.
ARIA:
I mean, I would be telling everyone I know about this, it’s going to be really insufferable when I tell them about data centers next to sewage plants next to heating systems.
REID:
So rapid-fire, is there a movie song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
JAN SRAMEK:
I would say probably the JFK speech at Rice University calling for America to go to the moon. I still watch it every few months and it’s cliche, but I think it was a moment in the country and it’s just such beautifully written speech where he kind of put it in the, in the greater narrative of human progress. I think it’s really inspirational.
ARIA:
I love this. I love this patriotism from an immigrant to our country. It’s so fantastic.
JAN SRAMEK:
You know, you know what they say sometimes it’s the immigrants who are most patriotic. They, they chose to come here and—
ARIA:
Absolutely.
JAN SRAMEK:
Yeah.
ARIA:
Absolutely. Is there—what is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?
JAN SRAMEK:
I think what we can learn from other parts of the country and other parts of the world. I think we’ve become so tribal and polarized in the country that sometimes we discard it. And whether we like it or not, there are, there are, there are things that even people we disagree with do better than we do and we should be much more open about cherry picking the best ideas out of everywhere and then applying them. And so I think we would all do better if we ask what we can learn from other states and even other countries.
REID:
Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?
JAN SRAMEK:
I mean, clearly, I mean AI has just been amazing to watch. Beyond that and related to it, I would say energy. Cost of energy is such a component of economic prosperity everywhere and I used to be really excited about what I thought the solution would be would be nuclear. But given these advances in solar and batteries it looks like an unstoppable train that’s going to reduce the cost of energy for everyone. And it’s just been incredible to watch it. So I’m excited to see what happens in the next thing.
ARIA:
And to your point, it’ll be so helpful for the future of California Forever. Alright, final question. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity’s way in the next 15 years? And what is our first step to get there?
JAN SRAMEK:
I think we need to get better at producing more things more cheaply. And it’s actually a thing that the left and the right agree on. I mean, people have been talking about state capacity and supply side progressivism and, and building more stuff. And I think if we can figure out how to make housing, healthcare, and education cheaper, it’s going to remove so many of the issues that people have on the obstacles to prosperity. And if we do that, and given the advances right now, it seems pretty likely that people should, most people should be able to live to a hundred and have a pretty healthy life all the way till the end. And I think AI will make work less repetitive for so many people, both in—kind of across different professions, and hopefully more fun. And if we can do all of that, then I hope we can rediscover a lot of the sense of community that I think has been lost because people have been too busy, or driving, or anxious about making ends meet. And I’m really excited to see it happen.
ARIA:
Fabulous. Jan, I loved every minute of this. Thank you so much.
JAN SRAMEK:
Same here. These were fantastic questions. It was great to hang out with the two of you.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, Adrien Behn, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Julia Blystone and Little Monster Media Company.