Jan Sramek: California Forever - Building the Next Great American City

Austin Tunnell

Jan, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast and get to talk to you in person, or at least virtually.

Jan

Same here, looking forward to it.

Austin Tunnell

So you are building the next great American city with California forever. And you've received a lot of press and it's something I'm really excited to watch unfold as you know, like I run in these circles of building new walkable neighborhoods and have seen some really amazing developments, but your vision is massive. And it really isn't just, a neighborhood, all there's that too. It really is at the kind of the scale of a city. And I think it's exciting to me for multiple reasons, but one of those reasons is that it's kind of drawing national attention to the way that we build today and also some of the problems that we need to solve as America for the future, whether it's manufacturing, shipbuilding, which we'll jump into. So to get started for anyone that might not have heard of California forever or just isn't quite sure what it is, can you talk about what is California forever? What is the scale of it? What are you trying to do? And we'll kind of jump into those details as we go.

Jan

Yeah, for sure. So California forever is a company that I founded at this point almost 10 years ago. And we are building, as you said, next great American city. So we're building a major new city in California. And to do that, over between 2017 and 2023, we've acquired nearly 70,000 acres in Northern California. So that's just over 100 square miles in a place called Solano County, which is this really, really interesting and unique region of Northern California. It's about an hour north of San Francisco. It's about half an hour east of Napa and about an hour south of Sacramento. And so it's really where this Northern California mega region kind of comes together. And it's a fascinating region because between that area from Sacramento to San Jose, there's 12 million people who live there. And Solano County is right in the middle of it. And so if this was a state, it would be the seventh largest state in America and we're building a major new city in the middle of it. hundred square miles is about two and a half times the size of San Francisco, about five times the size of Manhattan. So it really allows us to think at a big scale. There are three main components to what we're building. So when I say a city, I mean everything that you would expect to find in a city. So that means jobs, culture, entertainment, and obviously neighborhoods and homes. The three main parts are the Solano Foundry, which would be the largest advanced manufacturing park in America, the Solano Shipyard. We own about a six and a half mile stretch of the Sacramento Deep Watership Channel. And as you might have seen in the media over the last two years, we've kind of realized that we can't build ships anymore. And that's a pretty big deal for the global superpower. And then we building these incredible neighborhoods around it. And so we building a what I think is the first major walkable new city in America built in a century, the first major city built in half a century. And we can get later into details on what that's going to look like. But I think overall, it's in some sense the most controversial and the least controversial or oldest business in California. I mean, you have people building artificial intelligence and robotics and

Jan

genome editing and what we are building is what this country has been doing for the last 250 years, which is to build new cities.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, that's a, mean, the scale really is kind of mind boggling and something that's so interesting that you're really bringing into this is this idea of jobs, which kind of allows for a different scale. You know, a lot of these, new urbanist or traditional neighborhood developers, know, you might be doing infill within a city and that that's great. I'm very for that, but it also limits the amount of scale that you can do. Cause you can only get so much land. Then when people do greenfield, you know, new development out where there's land, it's very hard to get to that. kind of minimum viable place of a real viable town. And so you end up being a commuter community or, maybe you can attract if you're super successful, you can attract enough businesses to be retail, to be some, you know, some restaurants, a few things like that, you know, a seaside Florida, which is extremely successful, but you're kind of a, tourist community. I'm not saying that's, that's bad, but, where you, what you're doing is you're really are focused on jobs and not just kind of a few jobs, but real ship, shipbuilding and manufacturing. And while we won't spend Like a ton of time on this. think it's really interesting if you, if you touch on both the ship building and the foundry and kind of why, I mean, you even hinted at like, Hey, we can't build ships anymore. And I mean, the statistic that you throw out that what, what is it China and Island and China has produced more in one year than we have since world war two.

Jan

That's right. That's right. It's crazy. I think, yeah, I mean, to how you began that question, I think we very much see ourselves as continuing in this tradition of new urbanism that started with Duwani and Seaside and other people over the last 50 years or so in America. But obviously doing it at a different scale, at a city scale, and jobs is a key component of it. I think In terms of the two main components of it, so the Solano foundry is basically going back to what Silicon Valley used to do. And so I learned the other day that Lockheed Martin employed 35,000 people in the city of Sunnyvale in the sixties, 35,000 people in the Bay Area. And so this we've kind of forgotten it in the last 20 years because it's been all software and AI and so on. But this was the manufacturing Mecca of America when kind of planes were high tech. And it was also the shipbuilding mecca of America during the Second World War, when we needed to quickly build ships. There were six major shipyards in the Bay Area and they employed 220,000 people. The Bay Area built the Liberty ships and other ships that really won the war in the Pacific. And then what's interesting is that legacy and tradition had been kind of eroded and lost through

Austin Tunnell

Wow.

Jan

over regulation and lack of land and lack of affordable housing. But obviously, in the last 10 years in particular, high-tech manufacturing has been coming back to America and that's really been supercharged in the last five years under both the Biden and the Trump administrations. And what my view on this was 10 years ago when I started the company is, really California would need a place to build at a massive scale. And that applies to homes as much as it applied to factories and offices. I didn't think about ships 10 years ago. I mean, we've been fortunate in that we own the best place for that. But really it's building an outlet and the missing piece of an innovation ecosystem for the Bay Area where right now we invent these incredible products and design them in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. But then we need a place to build them. And right now we don't have that. And so that's where the Solano Foundry comes in. And then on the ship building, Yeah, I mean, it's really become a major topic in the country in the last two years, which is when we started looking at it, because as I mentioned, we own six and a half miles of waterfront on where the Sacramento River meets the San Francisco Bay. And it's been long designated in various government reports as the largest remaining vacant industrial kind of maritime industrial site on the West Coast. And so when shipbuilding became a big thing in the country, I started calling people up and saying, you guys all talking about how you're going to build hundreds of ships. Where are you going to build them? We have like 10 shipyards left in the country and they are 10 % of the scale of the Chinese and Korean yards. So where are we going to build these ships? And we seem to have a fantastic site for it. And over the last really year and a half, and especially year, it's become clear that it is a unique site. If America really does get back into the business of shipbuilding, which I think is still a big if, I think there's a lot of discussion about it, but most of the major investments haven't been made yet. Then this place is going to make all kinds of sense, particularly because most of the shipyards in America are on the East coast and in the Gulf. And of course the threat is in the Pacific and you can't get ships in and out of the Pacific without going through the Panama Canal. If you're trying to get to the Gulf or the East coast.

Jan

And in a conflict, the first thing that happens is the Panama Canal is going to get shut down one way or the other. And so then you can't get back in and out. And so that's where the shipbuilding effort comes from.

Austin Tunnell

You know, think, I think it's worth touching on, you know, I think a lot of people in the U S can, this is something people can get behind and it really isn't a political thing, which you've talked about, you know, you've kind of got the abundance agenda on the left and I don't know what you would call it on the right, ready to build, the build agenda. but I think it's worth touching even a little bit on kind of your personal story here growing up in the Czech Republic, you know, after the wall falls down and you're, you're growing up in post-Soviet, you know, Eastern Europe and, and how that

Jan

The bill is a general.

Austin Tunnell

How has that shaped your perception? And also upon moving to the US, how has the perception of the US lived up to kind of your vision growing up and your ideal ideas of it? And then also how has it not?

Jan

Yeah, I I think Hollywood has been the CIA's most successful operation for sure. Best money that we spend as a country. Jokes aside, Eastern Europe in the 90s, at least in the early part of the 90s, was deeply enamored with America for obvious reasons. And Hollywood culture and the portrayal of the country as it was in the 90s really seeped through the culture. So that's what I grew up kind of watching and consuming.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah.

Jan

And the eighties and the nineties was a deeply optimistic time in America and in California, right? California was very much at the cultural vanguard, but in a different way than it is today. Today, you look at a headline about California and more often than not, it's about homelessness or it's about people can't afford to live here or the energy crisis. But in the eighties and in the nineties, it was the California dream and it was the place that could build everything. And it was the place that was producing all of these incredible companies, including actually physically building the products in the US. And so that's the vision of California that I had growing up. And I always wanted to come here. And then I finally made it out in 2013 when I started coming out here and then moved in 2014. And I realized within weeks of arriving here that I got here about 20 to 30 years too late. And so the California that I moved to was the was a place that still dominated in the digital world more than ever. I mean, this was the time when the iPhone had just come out and Facebook and Airbnb and Dropbox and Uber and all of these companies are being built in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley. But I get here and then I think four months later, there's protests because people are throwing rocks at Google buses. And then the soaring homelessness and the whole world is trying to become Silicon Valley. whole world is trying to, mean, states all over America are setting up innovation clusters and the Silicon Prairie and their Silicon Alley and everyone is trying to get these good paying jobs into the state and into the city. And in California, people are upset that Google is hiring. And I'm like, wow, like that's bizarre, right? And so you start going down this rabbit hole. And what became clear is that We've built a place that was unable to build anything in the physical world. We couldn't build homes. There was a cap on the amount of office space that you could build in San Francisco. Almost every city in the world, every city in the world is trying to get as many companies as physically possible to come and build offices there because those companies pay taxes. Their employees eat in local restaurants and they shop in local shops.

Jan

And that's how you build a middle class, right? The big companies bring the capital into the city and then that capital gets spent. And by the way, those people are the people who fund the museums and the concert halls of the culture. That's how cities have been built for 250 years. And San Francisco just decided, we've had enough. We don't want that here anymore. It was just really bizarre experience. And so that's kind of the primordial soup from which California Forever was born, which is think sometimes it's easier for an outsider to see how insane something has become. And that was the experience that I had. I kind of, think I arrived at exactly the perfect time in California to have that initial experience. And then the other component of it, for example, was prior to coming to California, I had this good fortune of, a series of scholarships to go to some good schools in some of the best urban cities and towns in the world. And so I lived in the old York, in the old Cambridge, in the UK. I lived in London and Zurich and then in Manhattan. And then I came out here. there's parts of San Francisco that are really wonderful and walkable and parts of Berkeley. But the majority of California is not walkable at all. it was kind of... I actually did this. I looked at how many zip codes in California have a walk score of at least 90. which is what I would define as actually walkable. And I think it was less than 1%.

Austin Tunnell

my gosh. And that's in San Francisco.

Jan

That's in all of California. In San Francisco, I would expect it's higher. It's meaningfully higher. But even all of San Francisco isn't really walkable by my standards. mean, as you know, walkability is a lot of things, right? It's about safety and it's about is the road actually narrow enough to be pleasant? You take a place like Soma in San Francisco, which people call walkable. I don't think it's walkable. You have these massive blocks. The roads are really wide. Safety is very low. There's no retail. It's dangerous at night.

Austin Tunnell

Right.

Jan

And so we had created a state where less than 1 % of neighborhoods were walkable. And what that meant is the people who lived in those 1 % of neighborhoods was the 1 % because they got bit up and the only people who could afford them were those people. And I felt that it was kind of profoundly sad.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah. You really have hit an interesting time in moving here in California forever. Not just kind of on the, we need more walkable neighborhoods. We need more housing in that movement, whether it's the Yenby movement, but, just kind of also in a political thing of people realizing we need more housing and there's this housing shortage and people can't afford homes anymore, but also this, this, um, cultural, uh, what would you say it like kind of acceptance, this idea of weight, a realization. We can't build anymore. And so you're kind of hitting it on multiple fronts of like, we don't really know how to build anymore in the U S and it's not just California. California really is, is might be one of the, you know, best examples that people use, but whether you're in Oklahoma or, or, you know, Georgia, the, the time to build anything is now extraordinary. And I think people are kind of looking at that saying and saying, okay, A lot of laws and regulations and things we've created have been for good reasons, but also a lot of them have not. And people are starting to question that and rethink, like, we've got to figure out how to build things again. And, and it seems like you're hitting the right time because I can't remember when did you first announce California forever? How many years ago was it?

Jan

mean, we announced it in 2023, but that was seven, that was almost eight years in the making. so, yeah. I honestly, I mean, the first year I was just gathering courage that this wasn't completely insane. Yeah, it kind of is. Yeah. I look, I mean, like it's, it's insane. I would say now it's, now it's pretty real. Two years ago, it was very insane, but even two years ago, it was pretty insane. Two years ago, it was

Austin Tunnell

Right, you'd been accumulating land.

Austin Tunnell

I mean it kind of it is insane, but I mean in the best way

Jan

nowhere near as insane as two years ago, we had raised a billion dollars and we own the Hampton Square miles and, we'd assembled the beginnings of a team. But I mean, nine years ago, it was just yarns crazy idea and a PowerPoint presentation or not even that. And so that was a lot more crazy. But yeah, I mean, I think I had this really unique. I when I moved here, we just we just sold a small company and I had a lot of time. And so I had this it kind of became interested in the problem of how did we get here in California? And then I became obsessed by it. And so I had this unique win and I didn't have kids and I didn't have that much responsibility. And so I had this really unique opportunity to just go and read 500 books about the history of California and the history of cities and real estate development and architecture and urbanism and transportation planning and SQUA and zoning and why do we have zoning and how does kind of that whole thing work? and The more I read about it, the more depressed I became because I saw the beginnings or I saw the reality which later, when people later started writing about abundance and so on. But that was very clear, even if you looked at it eight years ago, because what I was looking at is I was looking at, okay, what would it take to massively increase production of offices, factories, housing in California? And even in 2013, 2014, 2015, as I was going on this intellectual journey, it was very clear that we had created this kind of layer cake of mutually interlocking regulations that will make that very, very difficult. And so we have been lucky with the timing and that kind of the amount of time it took us to assemble the property has been roughly the amount of time it took for this to became to move from being kind of a red flashing light to orange flashing light or something to just a red

Jan

hot piece of priority for California and for the country and get in a position to do that. And obviously it helps that it's become a bipartisan issue, right? You have Mark Andreessen writes, it's time to build in 2020, which was, I think Mark first invested in 2017. So it was three or four years later. Tyler Cowen starts writing about state capacity in 2020, 2021. And then Mark Dunkelman and Yoni Applebaum and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and it really has become a red hot issue in the last year but it's kind of funny seeing that after working on it for 10 years.

Austin Tunnell

I imagine. Let's get into the city neighborhood itself a little bit. So you've got 70,000 square 70,000 acres. How is that roughly divided between like how much land is set aside for kind of the city itself versus the manufacturing and shipbuilding and open space and all that.

Jan

Yeah, mean, we put up a couple of maps that might be a good way to show it.

Jan

Perfect, you should be able to see my screen now.

Jan

So, tell you a bit more about the site maybe upfront. So the green area here is all of the land that we own, about 70,000 acres, halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. What's really interesting about it as well is it's really the best place to build in this whole region for a few reasons that I want to run through quickly. It's the least productive agricultural soil. within 200 miles. It's the least ecologically valuable. This is all according to official government reports, basically. The entirety of the site where we're building is 25 feet more or more above sea level. And so from a flat and resilience and sea-level rise perspective, it's a unique place. You can see here that it's surrounded by water on two sides, and the rest of it is grasslands. And so from a fire risk perspective, it's outside of all of the kind of urban forest interface, which is where the California wildfires happen. And lastly, amazingly in California, there isn't a single active earthquake fault line that runs through the entirety of the 70,000 acres. So kind of as table stakes, it's a really, really interesting place to build. In terms of what we are building there, if I'll pull up a slightly different map. The three main components are the foundry, the shipyard, and then we'll be calling Solano Living, which is the downtown and the neighborhoods. So the rough layout right now is the Solano foundry is about 2,100 acres. That's closest to Travis Air Force Base on the west side of the community. The shipyard is obviously down here on the Deepwater Ship Channel. And then up here, we have the Solano living piece, which basically consists of a downtown, which is about a square mile. This purple area is what we're calling the Maker and Manufacturing District, which is really modeled on these old warehouse districts that existed next to the downtown 100 years ago. And then over time, they become place for small making and manufacturing and restaurants and lofts and entertainment and nightclubs and music.

Jan

And then the yellow are mixed-use neighborhoods. We have a couple of smaller downtowns that you can see here. And then we have a central park that runs around a seasonal creek for the middle of the community that is really modeled on Golden Gate Park in San Francisco or Central Park in Manhattan. It's about 1,400 acres, so bigger than both of those two. And then for sense of scale, the Solano Foundry and Solano Living, which are being built now, as part of an expansion of an existing city called Susun out here by kind of connecting it to Susun. That area is about 15,000 acres, which is about half the size of San Francisco. And then it's being designed for up to 175,000 homes. And so that's about half the population of San Francisco. And so roughly speaking, it's basically half the size of San Francisco, half the population of San Francisco. I think what the difference is, that San Francisco has a very uneven density. So you've got very high density in the downtown and then very low density on the west side. We have a much more even density between three and six stories, eight stories in the downtown throughout the entirety of the city.

Austin Tunnell

Gosh, it's such a nice, nice scale. usually say like, I really don't think cities need to go over. mean, I often say like three to five stories, but eight stories in the downtown. That's, that's, that's great. You know, but a whole, whole city and kind of neighborhoods being in that three to five story ranges is really wonderful. What would have been some of the top inspirations for you? Obviously you're working with designers and stuff like that, but this is, this is your vision too. and of course you've lived abroad and things like that, but what have been some of the different, maybe, inspirations or ingredients that you've pulled in from, from different places.

Jan

Yeah, I mean, think at a, one of the benefits of kind of spending seven years assembling the land is that you have a lot of time to think about what you're going to build there. had a lot of time to do that. And so I came into it with a very strong perspective on what we would want to build. I would say it's inspired by very traditional American neighborhoods with some European influence. And so to me at a smaller scale,

Austin Tunnell

I imagine, I imagine.

Jan

at the level of what this place might feel like, where there's, when there's 50,000 people living there or a hundred thousand people, I think about places like downtown Charleston or downtown Savannah. Or then even you kind of go up, there's old neighborhoods in Chicago, like Wicker Park and Backtown and Lincoln Park. You've got places in New York, obviously Brooklyn and West Village, many of the neighborhoods in places like Philadelphia and Boston. really good examples for rebuilding. And then, so we start with this traditional, traditional urban American, it's a grid. And so the urban plan is it's a classic American grid. The European influence on me is basically what you just said, which is I don't think that generally speaking, there's much of a reason to go over six to eight stories. I think it's really fun to visit some of the high rise cities in the world. I like to visit them for a weekend. lived on I lived on the 51st floor in Manhattan for a year and there was a great experience because I had been excited about it my whole life. And then I did it. And the first month I loved it, the first four months I liked it. And after that, I was like, this is a fun thing to do over the weekend, but you can, you kind of start to see all of the downsides of, of kind of high rise living. And I think there's profound evolutionary psychological reasons for why. We like to live at a scale where you can see the street and you can talk to someone on the street, even if you're kind of looking out of your window on the fifth floor. And so to me, the European influence is you look at places like Barcelona or Paris or even London, which really only have high rises in the business districts, largely speaking. They still have average densities and vitality than most American cities, even the ones that have massive high rises could dream about. so that that human scale and human perspective was very influential. We did learn a couple of, we did take inspiration from places like Barcelona and Tokyo in that we have a system of super blocks in the city. And so maybe we'll look at a plan to do that.

Austin Tunnell

Great. I'll link to these in the, in the show notes too.

Jan

Let me pull one up.

Austin Tunnell

While you're pulling that up, what kind of density are you looking at in aggregate across the, not the entire project, but in say, Solano living that kind of yellow area you had showed across that, like what kind of units per acre is it? Cause it's about 400,000 people, 175,000 units or something like that. Is that right?

Jan

It's about 175,000 units. Yeah. So we are looking at, I believe the average density comes out at about 20,000 people per square mile, which is somewhere between San Francisco and it's, I think it's just shy of San Francisco and just, it's between San Francisco and Boston, basically.

Austin Tunnell

Okay, yeah.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah. And actually another interesting example, when I just happened to know off the top of my head is Paris is 50,000 people a square mile, but like Amsterdam is more than the 16,000 people a square mile. so Paris is way more dense than Amsterdam, but Amsterdam is extreme and just Dutch cities are extremely walkable with a more kind of gentle density. and so that's, that's cool that you're right. You're right in that, in there and that kind of gentle density range.

Jan

Yeah, I mean, it's actually a really interesting example that you bring up. I think it's actually something that I learned from Andres Duane, or a talk that he gave. He articulated it, I thought, the best, who, obviously, one of the founders of new urbanism in America and built Seaside and Alice Beach and others. Paris is this incredible city to visit. And even American housing advocates and EMBs and urbanists You go for a weekend and it's spectacular. But if you live in one of those apartments for a long time, and particularly if you try to have a family, it's much harder, right? There's a trade-off between the public room and the public room. And you get these smaller units and they don't have that much light. And it's very hard to get a little, even like a mini-yard to have your kids run around. And so that's one extreme. And then the other extreme is these incredible... master-planned ex-urban communities built outside of Dallas or Orlando or other places where you have these incredible houses and they have great entertaining spaces and they have gyms and they have these massive yards and tall ceilings and the private space is wonderful. But the moment you try to get out of your house or your kids do to try to go see their friends, you're sitting in your SUV on a highway. I think that medium density around 20, 25,000 people, maybe 30,000 people per square mile, I think is a real sweet spot that you find in some of these places that we are inspired by. And that's what we try to replicate here. And so what that means is 30, 40 % of the units end up being in row houses where people can have a yard. It's a small yard, but it's a yard that's big enough for your kids. mean, I have a... I have a four year old and a two year old and a little baby. And so I think a lot about how do you design for families and how do you make the city friendly for families? And that's much harder to do in Paris than it is to do in a place like this. In terms of the urban plan, let's actually have it here now.

Jan

So what you see here is you see the street grid and we have a grid that someone called the Tartan Street Grid the other day, which I thought was a really good name, but basically these white lines are what we call movement streets. And you would call them boulevards otherwise. They run every half a mile and they are the main arteries of the city, but they are not arterial roads. They are urban... Boulevard type of streets. And so if you look at the cross section, they have a Rapid transit lane in the middle. They have a car lane They have a bike lane and they have a great pedestrian realm But it's still only two lanes in each direction for cars and one of those is dedicated to transit And they are still fantastic streets to be around and you would put larger buildings around them But then inside each of those half a mile by half a mile Area we basically have a super block or two superblocks. within the superblock, you still have a very fine of streets. But they are inspired by, to your point about Amsterdam, they are very much inspired by those Wooner type of slow streets in places like Amsterdam or Delft or other parts of Netherlands, where you can drive your car to your house, but you're going to be driving it for that last piece of it 10 miles an hour. And so your kids can play on the street and you can sit on your front stoop and you don't have someone blasting by at 40 miles an hour and kind of ruining the safety and the ambience of the neighborhood. And so I think those are the main influences and we've we've kind of cherry picked the best parts of urbanism from different places and then put it together. But I think put it together in a really thoughtful and coherent way where it all works together.

Austin Tunnell

I think it's so cool. You're pulling the Wooner streets in which for anyone listening, it's really a shared street for vehicles and pedestrians because in the U S we are really focused on, this idea of sidewalks. If you want to walkable community, you must have sidewalks. I'm not saying sidewalks are bad. lot of communities need sidewalks. Sidewalks can be great. And a lot of the new urbanist communities in particular have sidewalks. It kind of makes sense to the American, the American mind, but when you actually design it well and you design it right and you push the traffic, you know, to every half mile, you know, not arterials, but, boulevards, whatever you want to call it. And then you design the street, right? You really can share those streets. And there's a lot of benefits where it's not, unsafe. I live in a new urban, a new urbanist community in Oklahoma city. And it's wonderful. now we do have sidewalks and almost all the places except for some pedestrian only lanes, but To your point about driving 10 miles an hour, you what have they done design wise? Of course, the houses are, you know, kind of right up on the sidewalk. Maybe there's a little landscaping buffer. The streets are narrower. And then sometimes there's parallel parking on a lot of the streets. I drive through through here at 10 miles an hour. And that's like, that feels fast in my old neighborhood, an old historic neighborhood in kind of the urban core of Oklahoma city, but really a suburb in terms of typology, know, 7,000 square foot lots. Um, and the homes are kind of pulled back from the street. people would fly by at 40 miles an hour or even people driving the speed limit quote unquote at 30 miles an hour is incredibly fast when you're going through like a neighborhood street and you're to your point, you know, your kids are playing in the front yard and you're just kind of going, my gosh. And you see people driving by at 30 looking at their phones. So, so design really matters for creating just that, that safety. And you know, that's something I think that a lot of people do not associate with when we talk about cities and density is this idea of one families and safety. I love that that's a real priority for you. And of course you've got young kids, I've got young kids. it's, you know, it's on your mind, it's on my mind. But how have you thought about what are some of maybe the other things you're thinking about in terms of being a place for

Austin Tunnell

families and it's kind of like once you create a place for families it's for everyone. I don't know if you think like that but I kind of think like that.

Jan

I think that I told my team when we hired the planning team and we hired the kind of extended collaborator team, urban design firms and so on, one of the first goals, maybe the first goal I gave when people say, well, what does it mean for the city to be walkable? I said, this should be the most city friendly or kid friendly city in the world. And your eight year old should be able to walk to school alone.

Austin Tunnell

I love that.

Jan

I, to your point about kind of if you design it well for families, you design it well for everyone, I think that kids are an indicator species. So in biology, you have this concept of like, if this species comes back, it indicates that the ecosystem is healthy. And I think if you design it, well, in particular, if you design a place that's great for kids, it's guarantees to be great for old people as well.

Austin Tunnell

Hmm.

Jan

I mean, lot of the mobility challenges, safety challenges, legibility challenges, like accessibility issues are very similar. If it's great for kids, as if it's greater for older people. mean, I care about kids, but also my dad is 84. my dad has mobility challenges. And so I think what it would take for. To design a city where he can get easily out of the front door and go and see a friend and sit in a square and have a coffee and have a social life without getting in a car nonstop. So I think that's the starting point. I think more broadly, we've been really unfortunate in America in that the urban blight that happened and the kind of urban flights that happened in the 60s really branded cities as cities are dangerous, cities are where young people go, and then you move to the suburbs and you're a family in the suburbs. Because I think that... I think a well-designed city and a safe city is just so much easier to have kids in. mean, just the amount, as I said, we have three toddlers. The amount of time that I want to kill myself just dropping them into the car seats, like in and out and in and out and in and out. And you want to plan, you want to plan your day and, and take them somewhere. And like this 15 times that you have to do it. It's insane. and like, if you have, Particularly if you have, I mean, my wife often takes them somewhere and like you have one mom with two or three kids and a stroller and then like putting the stroller and like this constant movement is completely insane. Whereas I compared it to when during COVID, I wanted to experience Chicago because even though it has a bad reputation now or a mixed reputation, it's one of the original boom cities in America. It's also one of the few cities that managed to keep kids in the neighborhoods. And so we lived in Chicago and back in backtown. And every morning I would wake up and I would take my two old daughter and I would strap her onto me and we would go and have coffee. But once we moved to the suburbs and I had a car and I have to put her into a car and then drive to a coffee shop because it was too far or it wasn't safe enough, I stopped doing it. And so we would get a nicer coffee machine and make it at home. And that little difference is the difference between you knowing your neighbors

Jan

and your kid being friends with the other kids because they see each other every day in the morning at the coffee shop versus living in your own home. I think, I think it takes a village to raise a kid. think it does. I think the nuclear family was a terrible, terrible idea that we kind of perfected. And you talk to people today and you ask them, what do you miss? And there's so much that people talk about. I missed the small town feeling and I miss the sense of community and If people spend their lives in cars, particularly with kids and driving back and forth, you can't form a community when you're all sitting in a car on a freeway. You can completely form a community when you're all walking or when you're all sitting on a tram or something and get to know each other a little bit and like see the actual humanity of the other people. And so to me, how do we design for kids? We start with physical safety. Sorry, we start with walkability in terms of physical walkability. Wide sidewalks. I specifically told the team, you have to design the sidewalks so that two mams, each of them with a double pram can pass each other when they pass the sidewalk. We put schools in the middle of each of the neighborhoods. So most American subdivisions.

Austin Tunnell

That's awesome.

Jan

you take the least valuable piece of land by the freeway, the word is noisy, and you put the school there. And it kind of makes sense because if everyone is driving the kid to school, they have to have it off the freeway. But if you look at the design of each of our neighborhoods, there's a retail street that happens in the middle of the neighborhood. And then we didn't put the school on the retail street, obviously, when we put it a block or two blocks away next to a park. So you can think through. How do you design the life to be easy for a young parent? Well, you design it so that if dad or mom are coming back from work and picking up the kids, they can go, they can pick up the kid, they can stop at a playground, they can go to the local shopping street, they can pick up the groceries and they can go home. So you do that component of it. We really think through the programming in the parks. Another thing that I American cities or developers, There's a toxic pattern that happens where cities tell developers they want really big parks, which means the parks are very expensive in terms of the amount of land. But then what the developers do is they say, OK, I'll give you a big park. And then the big park is basically just a bunch of grass.

Austin Tunnell

Leftover land.

Jan

which is leftover land, like again, in the middle of nowhere, you can't get to it. Most American parks in new cities are way too big and way too under-programmed. You want lots and lots of tiny, tiny parks in the middle of the neighborhood with active programming, with really good quality. mean, you have kids, know this. Your park can be the size of like two or three building lots. But if you've got a playground and a couple of benches, and ideally it's next to a cafe, That's exactly the experience that you want. And so we try to really think through what is it like to live here and how do we make it not just convenient, but magical for everyone who lives there.

Austin Tunnell

The, these examples you're giving are so good and so real, just to give a quick couple of anecdotes. You know, we live in this walkable neighborhood and since we've moved here, you know, and it's still, it's just a neighbor. This is not, you know, part of a, I mean, it's within Oklahoma city and right near downtown, but you know how these things are, it's pretty self-contained for now. And there's not like a ton of options, but there's still a coffee shop and a taco shop and a brewery and multiple playgrounds and parks. I literally hang out with my kids more, uh, because it's just so easy. to hang out with them is like, let's just walk to the park. Let's just go walk and get an ice cream. Why don't we go check the mail together versus when you're in the house, I'm like, what do I do with them? I don't really like just, you know, playing dolls together or something. And I didn't know how to hang out with them very well. And now we can go out and I see some, they know more people and we're still getting to know people. I know more people. It's, so real. of the things we don't have. And so it's like very real to me is this is schools. And I'll give you an example. You know, it's Christmas time. So all these Christmas shows and stuff are one and a half year old son. He's in like a mother's day out program. They did of course, like a a little Christmas performance or something. I couldn't make it, but this place is, I don't know, 20 minutes away. Um, and so, and of course it's a one and a half year old. So the performance is probably 60 seconds, you know, and it could be so much fun if you were walking there, you know, and then you're, it's kind of an event and they perform for 60 seconds and you hang out and you walk home. That's great. Could be super fun, life-giving neighborly. But when you're driving 20 minutes till in the navigating traffic, parking a parking lot, kind of come into this, you know, building, perform 60 seconds and then go home. You're kind of like, well, that was draining. know, it's just, it's just so different in the decentralized nature of what you're talking about. Many small parks. that's something I'm quite passionate about versus just a giant park. And those can be great too. Like your central strip running through is amazing. Yeah.

Jan

What is this?

Jan

we are you one of those in the city that you can go to and you put the big like running paths and biking paths into it, but no 100%. And I think people like to think that a a commute is a commute and what matters is the amount of or like the travel distance. What matters is that it takes 20 minutes to get somewhere. But that's not what I mean, that's one of the things that matters. But it matters what's the experience, right? You walking with your toddlers to go see a performance for 20 minutes in a wonderful neighborhood, whether you're to run around and they're going to look at the trees and you get a walk and you get some exercise. Maybe you stop stop along the way and you buy a cup of coffee or an ice cream. That's 20 minutes spent with your time with your kid. That's like actually enjoyable experience. 20 minutes of like, strap them in a car seat, they cry, then you drive, then you strap them out and then like there's traffic and then you have to find parking. it's still spending time with your kids and I try in my life to remind myself of it and make the most of it, but it's not the same. Like the experience of all of the time matters a great deal. And I also think it matters for grownups, by the way. This is not just the kids. You've had all of these articles that have come out in the last 10 years on the loneliness epidemic. and people don't have enough adult friends and they move out. And I think so much of this is downstream of urban design, so much of it. One specific example that I think about a lot is there's some kind of a constant. It's a function of the amount of time and it's a function of the quality of the transportation or the experience of moving, if you want. Where if you live within... It depends for different people, like somewhere between zero and 20 minutes. And ideally it's a walk or a bike ride or something from your friends. You can actually do quite easily the, Hey, what are you doing? Do you want to come over for dinner?

Jan

Once you move outside of the distance, and I particularly feel in the Bay area, which is very spread out and we have friends who live all over, you just don't make those invitations. It's just like, you have to set it up and it's like a thing that's on your calendar. and I, I feel like so much of the decline in friendships and experience, like, yes, part of it is the phones and social media and whatever it is, but part of it is just, you need to take out the friction.

Austin Tunnell

Mm-hmm.

Jan

And if you do that, then you have all of this. And it's the same, like, even if your friends drive over and it's a 25 minute drive, it's like, well, we need to get the kids down. And I know I don't want to have a glass of wine because I need to drive and I need to get home. Like all of the spontaneity that makes community work. just think work is much better in a place where that resembles the communities as we used to build them, which makes sense because we spent. 10,000 years building cities and we kind of figured out how to do it. And then about a hundred years ago, we basically took all of it and we threw it to garbage.

Austin Tunnell

Well, I could talk about this part for another hour with you, because I'm completely with you on so many of these things and really excited just to hear, you express these things in this way and that these kind of values are instilling themselves into California forever, because I really believe a lot of these things are downstream of urban design and architecture. And when I say architecture, I mean that very broadly. People usually think style or something. But it's like whatever we build. we, we imbue our values into whatever we are building, whether we know it or not, or intending or not, there are values there. And in architecture in the built environment, those values are kind of like. Manifested in the physical world, imprinted on society, shaping people's daily lives, not just for a year or two years, like a piece or, you know, a piece of artwork that you can go in and see. It's like, it's there and will shape things for not just decades, but probably hundreds of years. And so, so. Designing and building and developing downstream of values is just incredibly important. I'd like to talk a little bit. go ahead.

Jan

There's a really quickly, there's a great quote that stuck with me on this, which was, which I heard years ago. I don't even know who said it, but it was something like we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

Austin Tunnell

so our favorite building culture quote I've got a print on here is Winston Churchill. He says something very similar. First, we shape our buildings thereafter they shape us. And he said that right after. Yeah, right after World War II. Yeah, it's so good. It's so good.

Jan

You know, that might be the code, actually, I might misremember it. Exactly. It's that idea. like, it's, and then the beautiful but also the dangerous part is they shape you in a way, for most people, it's like that. It's like that story about fish in the water. It's like, you stop noticing it. You forget that the buildings are shaping you and

Austin Tunnell

100%.

Jan

I I remember like we, I made it a point to move around every year for basically 10 years that I was working on this to just experience different neighborhoods. And there were oftentimes when I would move to a different neighborhood or different city and literally my phone would pop up a notification and it be like, are you okay? You've stopped walking. literally it dropped my color. or my exercise, it just went down dramatically. And you would just look at this curve and it was like this and then just went down and then continued. And it was just a physical manifestation of how real that is.

Austin Tunnell

That's true. We, we learned to just accept, accept it becomes reality to where we don't notice it anymore. Question it. I'd like to hear just a little bit and talk a little bit about kind of structure and even development. so you guys, California forever and your team, you guys are approaching this as land developers, horizontal land developers. Is that how you are? I mean, obviously you're the master planners and all that in terms of shaping all that, but is that kind of the structure that you'll you're, you're doing? You'll be selling off. Lots installing infrastructure. Like how are you thinking about the actual developing of this project?

Jan

Yeah, so we are the master developer. So we've acquired the land. We're going through the design and the permitting. We've created a very permissive and flexible code on what can go vertically. And so we can work with different vertical builders. will also, so we'll be permitting it. We will install, we'll build the horizontal infrastructure. We'll build the schools. We will build the amenities. We are also going to end up doing some of the vertical development. How much of it? will probably vary over time and for different reasons. But definitely, our goal is to be a platform where lots of other builders can come and build. Particularly, I would love if we could use the scale that we have to enable lots of small builders to come and build on the platform. One of my nightmares is that I'll spend 10 years of my life working on this. And then we'll build something that feels very cookie cutter, like an urban subdivision, if you want. And I think one of the few ways that you can get true diversity of a city that feels very organic is that it's made by many different hands. And that means many different architects, but also many different builders. And so what I'm excited about is if you look at the forces that have pushed small and medium builders out of the market, it's often the unpredictability of it and the cost of entitling land. It's just too complicated. And so if we can entitle a city where you can build 175,000 homes and we expect to build that over 40 years, that's really a place where a small sized local construction company or a home builder, or even someone who moves in from another part of the country could say, this is a place where we can go and we can buy two lots and we can build them and we can rent them or sell them. And then we know We know that we're going to have another two and then another two. And if we want to take five, we can take five then. And you can kind of design your business for the predictability of knowing that you can keep building here for 40 years. I mean, the build out is longer than the career of most people. And so this is a place where you could start a construction company and run it or building company and eventually retire on it. So that's something that's very important to us.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah. And it's a cool mission. Come, come help, come help build America's next great city. know? Uh, so, so you're, I imagine you'll be thinking, is there, you know, phasing it? Um, how are you thinking about, and you might not, you know, obviously all this is unfolding and constantly changing, I imagine, and updating, but is it like, Hey, we're going to start with the shipyard or manufacturing. We're going to start with housing kind of, how are you thinking about those three components? How are you starting it? How are you phasing it? kind of.

Jan

Exactly.

Austin Tunnell

And I'll get to the main point of the question is this idea of like a minimum viable place, like an MVP of place where there's enough housing to support a school, a little bit of retail, stuff like that. that's, that's the hardest part for these projects is kind of getting to that minimum scale. And then once you get to that, everyone wants to, you know, build their live there, all that, but how are you strategizing around that?

Jan

Yeah, so we think that given how it's looking right now, it's very likely that they will kind of all break ground at the same time. And there's going to be companies coming in, certainly in the foundry, possibly in the shipyard at the same time as we are building the residential piece. It's also possible that actually for a long time we'll have more jobs than we have residents because it's much easier to build a factory that employs and faster. to build a factory that employs a thousand people than to build a thousand homes and all of the infrastructure for it. But even if that, but I didn't know 10 years ago that that would be the case, right? And so the reason for why I had the conviction and have the conviction that I do is there is such a shortage of housing in California that our problem of kind of overcoming the cold start is quite different than if you're trying to do this in most parts of the country. For example, there's a subdivision that built kind of traditional suburban homes, no retail, just classic subdivision on the east side of our property. I think the moment they opened in 2021, they sold 80 homes on the opening weekend.

Jan

And then on the, this is on the East side and on the West side of our property in cities of Furfield and Vacaville, there's very active construction. They probably put out a thousand homes a year, something like that between multiple projects. And so we don't have the issue that you might have if you're trying to do this in the middle of, like, if you're trying to build a new city in the middle of West Texas, you have the demand problem. We don't really have it in the same way. And kind of any. Any, Kind of, if you build reasonable quality homes in this area, you're going to find an audience, but we don't want to just do that. I think the question, the challenge that we do have is, how do you get people to want to live in a row home rather than a big single family home in this location? Where most people, when they move in here, want to get the bigger piece of land, the traditional single family home. And to me, that comes down to amenities. And so that comes down to people. People want to live in walkable neighborhoods, but you have to amenitize it appropriately on day one, because there needs to be something that you can walk to. Now, the good news is I always tell the team, I mean, one of the obvious markets for us is just parents of young children or people who are about to have kids, who kind of moving out from a small apartment in Oakland or San Francisco, and they want to get a little bit more space, but they also want to retain their lifestyle. And people think that amenities means like you have to have a full-blown set of urban amenities. You know this from your own experience. If you have a walkable neighborhood and you have two coffee shops and one is pretentious and one is Starbucks, and then you have a pizza place, a Thai place, a bar, an American restaurant, and maybe one or two other things, ice cream parlor, you kind of have the minimum viable cluster of what you need.

Jan

And in the context of the scale that we have, we can afford to subsidize that on day one. And so part of the reason for the scale that we're dealing with, and also part of the reason for why we've gone to the city and said that is approving the project, this place called Susun City, is we have to have an approval on the project kind of upfront, is we can subsidize the early phases in terms of amenities to create that kind of density and vibe and energy in the first phase that people want to live in a place like that. And so I think that to us is the kind of core inner starting point for the...

Austin Tunnell

That's, that's great that you can afford to do that. Cause like you said, it might not, you know, quote unquote make money, but it ultimately makes everything more valuable and, and, and so much more attractive to people. you guys thinking from like an investment perspective, you know, obviously as you sell lots, you'll be able to afford to do new infrastructure, things like that in future phases. Are you thinking about holding on to any of the assets, know, commercial building, something like that long-term as the master developer, you know, cause it's going to be way more valuable in 10 years than it is today. And then also kind of for sale versus for rent, not particularly, not necessarily just you holding for rent, but for sale for rent. And then also you guys as developer kind of holding things long-term as an investment.

Jan

Yeah, so on the second question, we have a huge focus on home ownership, enabling home ownership for people. And so we definitely want most of the units to be for sale. And I think within that, we have a focus on enabling home ownership and we have a focus within them on starting to build starter homes again. Whereas, you know, one of the challenges in the industry right now is it's just become much harder to find those. And I think part of that is We've kind of changed the goalpost on what a starter home is. You hear these stories of I moved to California in 1970 and I was able to buy my first home for $80,000. What is left in that discussion is that first home was 1,100 square feet. It was a single-family home, but it was 1,100 square feet and it was a... With one bathroom, exactly. And I understand why in a single-family context it's very hard to make the numbers work.

Austin Tunnell

With one bathroom.

Jan

But that's, think that's another area where the medium density product really shines because the bedroom, the bedrock of workforce housing for kind of upward mobility in America for 200 years, where these medium density row house neighborhoods, where some of the row houses would be kind of a single family row house. And some of them you would divide up into three or four flats and each flat was 900 square feet, 1100 square feet, 1200 square feet. and you can sell that separately. And that's the new starter home. And I think that's an incredible starter home for a young professional or someone having one or two kids. And then you can eventually build some equity and move into another type of product. So we have a huge focus on that. And then, yes, we will over time end up retaining some of the commercial or some of the industrial or even rental properties. I think... We think a lot about kind of incentive design. How do we design this whole thing where we are really aligned with the success of the community overall, both in the context of the specific project that we're doing and then the community more broadly. And I think what having, I think one of the biggest benefits of being able to do a master development at the scale that we're doing it is that we are massively invested in the long-term success of the community. I mean, people ask, Well, how do we know that you're going to do a good job on the parks or the retail or the schools or fixing the roads or something like that? And I always sell well, because if we built 5,000 homes and we sell them and then the road starts crumbling and we never built the park that we promised and the retail doesn't work and there's traffic, we are completely screwed because at that point we have hundreds. Okay, great. We've sold 5,000 homes. We have 170,000 homes to sell or rent. And we can't do that unless people really love living there, unless they can get there. And so I think that there's a lot to be said for, I think this combination of a large scale master developer that creates a system in which smaller vertical builders can come and build might create a really, really unique place that does very well. Austin Tunnell (01:00:56.096) Yeah, you've really got a great. Setup. I believe this too, how important it is to have this kind of long-term mindset and even, you know, the, the, long-term mindset and patient capital behind it that has time to kind of produce the most valuable thing it possibly can. And it's just what you're doing is such the antithesis of how most development projects and developers are done. Like you're really, you're just not a conventional developer in that sense. know, w it's, it's a very different. process and mindset you are bringing to this. We're at our hour. So I'd love to hear, mean, I could keep going. I've got a bunch of questions, but we'll just have to talk again sometime as this thing unfolds, which is super exciting. Where are you in the process? You've mentioned breaking ground. And of course I never gave anyone dates for when I'm breaking ground. You never know, but kind of where, where do you, you think? And then also how can people follow along and support you guys in any way? Jan (01:01:53.868) Yeah, so where we are right now, I I think I can show a map that might actually help with that. So when we first introduced the project two years ago at this point, it was originally proposed as an unincorporated community. You're looking at it here in Solano County. And some of the early controversy was people saying, We don't want an unincorporated community in Solano County. We have a tradition that all of the Grove should go into cities and you guys should really be a part of the city. And we said, well, do any of the cities want us? And two of them put up their hand and said, yeah, actually, we would like to have you in. And so the way the project is being permitted now is through an annexation into this incredible small place, small town called Suisun City. And so Susun is one of the oldest cities in Solano County out here. But over time, it's kind of got boxed in by Fairfield on the west side and on the north side by the Air Force Base over here. And then this is a marsh that you can't build in. And so they haven't had anywhere to grow. And so what we've done is we've partnered up with them and they are now basically expanding out here and then annexing the project as it was proposed. in this area. And so that process is that process has been going on now for working with them for close to a year. And they they've just accepted our application a couple of months ago that has all of these much more detailed zoning and specific plan and master plan and investing maps. And then they just kicked off the environmental work scoping session for it. And so I think that the draft environmental document is expected in the middle of next year. And then the final hearings on approval of the project would be in the winter of 2026. Austin Tunnell (01:03:54.924) And then you would be able to permit after that, to pull a permit after those final approvals. Jan (01:04:00.75) There's one more step in California. It goes to a local commission called the Local Agency Formation Commission. It's basically two of the mayors and two of the supervisors from the county. then once they've we can pull permits. Austin Tunnell (01:04:12.61) From Solano County, and so soon, okay. Austin Tunnell (01:04:17.996) Wow. This is so cool. It's so inspiring what you're doing. How can people follow along and support you? Jan (01:04:25.966) Best place is probably x.com. So follow me at Jan Sramac. I think in terms of supporting us, there's been a really interesting thing that's happened over the last three or four months where I think the abundance and build movements have both kind of adopted us as one of their kind of favorite projects. And I think I think there's an opportunity for urbanists, for people who care about any of these causes, urbanism, shipbuilding, manufacturing, kind of America showing that we can build at a big scale again. There's an opportunity for California Forever to be one of the projects that kind of breaks through and shows how we can do that next year. And part of that is just going to be public opinion. It's about what people say, what people write. But My hope when I started this 10 years ago, coming back to something you said at the very beginning of the conversation was that if we could do it at this scale in California, which is the hardest place to get something like this permitted. And then if we could get it financed and pull together all of the components that you need to make a walkable community work, that's going to make life infinitely easier for everyone else who's building. Whether they're building something on this scale or smaller. from a 20 acre project that is walkable to a 500 acre walkable neighborhood anywhere in the country. And so I'm hoping that we can kind of break through the inertia and figure out some of the barriers to doing stuff like this. How do you finance a development where not every home has a two car garage? Like I think we can work out a lot of the permitting, zoning code, institutional infrastructure questions. and then hopefully enable many, many, many other projects like ours all over the country. And so that's what I hope we can do in 2026. Austin Tunnell (01:06:24.438) I think that's why I get so excited about what you're doing is it doesn't just feel like it's relevant to California. It really feels relevant nationally on kind of multiple, multiple fronts. So, loved getting to talk to you. Thanks so much. Keep up the great work. I'll be following along and hopefully, you know, in a couple of years can have you back on and get an update. Jan (01:06:43.672) for sure. In a couple of years, you should come out to Solano and we'll do a... Well, two things. We should do it in person, number one. You should come to Solano and we'll do one from the ground breaking. And number two is I have a huge level of admiration for the work that you guys are doing and the beauty of the architecture and the design. And so I will be calling you to come and build in Solano. Austin Tunnell (01:06:45.996) That sounds great. I'll do it in person. How about that? Austin Tunnell (01:07:04.412) well, thanks. We w we would love to. saw that, know, Mike is spring it too. So we've been talking about his kind of mass stone and post-tensioning and it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. Jan (01:07:08.286) That's true. Jan (01:07:13.528) For sure, this was great fun. Thanks Austin, thanks for having me. Austin Tunnell (01:07:16.054) Yeah. Thanks.