California Forever Future City in Solano County Put on Hold

Silicon Valley’s plans for a start-up city are on hold.

The East Solano Plan — a proposal backed by a roster of technology billionaires to build a city of up to 400,000 people on farmland about 60 miles from San Francisco — is being delayed at least two years to study the project’s impact on the environment, the company behind the development said in a statement.

The proposed city was meant to be a walkable urban community in a rural corner of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is now home to sheep farms and windmills. Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who came up with the plan and is now the chief executive of the company behind it, pitched it as a way to build significantly more housing, something California badly needs, in a short amount of time.

The company’s investors, a who’s who of Silicon Valley, included a number of billionaires including Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective.

But the proposal created tension in the area. California Forever, the company driving the development, spent years buying some $900 million of farmland without revealing anything about the identities of its backers or plans for a new city. As its land holdings grew and surrounded Travis Air Force Base on three sides, neighbors and members of Congress feared it could be linked to foreign spies.

The company further alienated neighbors by filing a $500 million antitrust lawsuit saying that a group of farmers who had refused to sell their land were colluding to raise prices. Despite being locked in an expensive legal battle, those neighbors had no idea who was behind the company until The New York Times revealed it last year, sowing fear and mistrust that only seemed to grow.

Last week, a report commissioned by Solano County estimated the full project would require tens of billions in infrastructure investment but warned that details about the development remained so vague it was hard to assess its full impact. While most large projects often go through years of study, the report noted that “this was filed with the County only a few months after the public became aware of intentions of the proponents.”