By John Gittelsohn, Bloomberg
California Forever, the proposed futuristic community backed by billionaire venture capitalists, is now billing itself as a manufacturing center a year after local opposition forced it to withdraw plans to incorporate a new city.
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The project’s organizers said Thursday that they plan to build the largest advanced manufacturing park in the US, calling it a bid to reclaim California’s legacy as a center for defense industries from aerospace to shipbuilding. The Solano Foundry, a 2,100-acre (850-hectare) tract, will offer proximity to Silicon Valley while providing more affordable housing, land and labor than elsewhere in the Bay Area.
The announcement is the latest sales pitch by the massive planned development between San Francisco and Sacramento, which has struggled to win regulatory approval as well as community support. California Forever consists of 68,500 acres of rolling farmland assembled since 2017 at a cost of more than $900 million. Backers include venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, former Sequoia Capital Chairman Mike Moritz and social-impact investor Laurene Powell Jobs.
“We don’t have real estate investors. We have technology investors,” Andreas Lieber, general manager of industry and technology for California Forever, said in an interview about the venture’s backers. “They are basically in the middle and the forefront of this.”
The Solano Foundry aims to reverse years of deindustrialization in California, which has increasingly ceded its manufacturing leadership to states such as Texas and other countries, said Jan Sramek, chief executive officer of California Forever. Companies including Anduril Industries and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. have moved manufacturing to other states, citing California’s high costs and regulations.
“It’s time that products designed in California were made in California,” Sramek said in an interview. “That’s when California is at its best. It’s time to bring that back.”
Models for Solano Foundry include China’s massive industrial complexes that churn out advanced products such as drones and electric vehicles, Lieber said. California Forever’s proximity to Travis Air Force Base and a planned shipyard enhance its attractiveness to developers of aircraft and maritime vessels, he said.
With bipartisan support for boosting US manufacturing, an effort championed by President Donald Trump, Silicon Valley firms such as Meta Platforms Inc. have identified the $1 trillion defense budget as a key source of revenue. In addition to defense, the Solano Foundry is seeking tenants in disciplines such as artificial intelligence, robotics and energy. Many products could have civilian as well as defense applications.
“There’s a whole new wave of product development in these sectors and beyond that is originating from Silicon Valley and scaling from here,” said Lieber, who worked as an executive at Postmates, Pinterest and other e-commerce firms before joining California Forever last year.
California Forever emerged from secrecy in 2023 and Sramek has trumpeted its goals for 175,000 homes and 250,000 jobs. But last year, he withdrew his initiative to incorporate a new city, which would have required a public referendum. The current plan is for the unincorporated land to be annexed by nearby Suisun City.
The next step in California Forever’s development process is to publish an environmental impact report as soon as next year with construction potentially beginning in 2028, Sramek said. Building out the master-planned community is slated to take four decades. The site is about 80 minutes by car, in good traffic, from Silicon Valley. It’s only about 10 minutes by electric aircraft, a potentially common travel mode within five years, Sramek said.
He envisions a city, not a bedroom community, and likens it to Irvine, a Southern California master-planned city of 300,000 built around a university where there are more jobs than households. Sramek said he will reveal the names of the first industrial tenants in a few months.
California still has 1.2 million manufacturing employees, more than any other state, according to the state Economic Development Department. Texas is second with 970,000 manufacturing workers.
But Silicon Valley has shifted from a chipmaking center to a software and design hub. Designed in California by Apple was the title of a 2018 book by Jony Ive, Apple Inc.’s former design guru at a time the iPhone maker manufactured almost everything overseas.
Now the state is often derided as a place where nothing can get done, a reputation symbolized by its high-speed rail project, which is much delayed and over budget, Sramek said. Trump announced Wednesday that he pulled funding for the rail line.
Sramek said he hopes Solano Foundry will help turn around that narrative, a viewpoint echoed by real estate brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., which is managing leasing for the site.
“We believe that Solano Foundry is one of California’s strongest opportunities to revitalize its manufacturing sector and bring more manufacturing jobs to the state,” said Joel Woodmass, an analyst with the brokerage.
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