Episode Transcript

CARDIFF GARCIA: Hi, I’m Cardiff Garcia, and this is The New Bazaar. 

Today’s episode requires a backstory because it is about a massively bold, ambitious project to erect an entire new city in California, from scratch, about a one-hour drive north of San Francisco, on what is right now mostly pastures, empty, some farmland.

The company that wants to build this city is called California Forever. It bought about 70,000 acres of land in Solano County starting in 2018. Now that’s about the size of two San Franciscos or one and a half Miamis.

And I’m simplifying a lot here, but what California Forever wants the city to be is two things. First, an urbanist walkable city of about four to 500,000 people, zoned for density instead of suburban sprawl, and with housing to rent or buy that’s affordable to middle-income families. And it’s also going to have cool amenities, and it’s going to be located in a place where you would just not expect to find it.

Two scholars of urbanism, including the economist Ed Glaeser, have described the plans for this new city as, quote, “Unlike anything the United States has seen before: exurban in location, intensely urban by design.”

I know that might sound like an exaggeration, but it’s really not when you consider that the city, again, is starting from literally nothing.

The second thing that California Forever wants the city to be is a tech manufacturing center with new factories making actual physical stuff, including a big shipbuilding operation, and a place that creates lots of new jobs and businesses and tax revenues for the people that move there and for the surrounding communities.

As you might guess, a project like this is immensely complicated. You got to figure out transportation, engineering, logistical issues, waste disposal, how to attract people and businesses to the city in the first place, how to navigate the politics of Solano County and the nearby towns, figure out how city governance is going to work.

And above all, you have to figure out how to build something new and urban in California. A state that obviously has lots of great stuff but is also a place that’s known for its NIMBY politics, its high taxes, the fact that it’s zoned so heavily for suburban sprawl and single-family homes. And where to get anything done, you have to pass endless regulatory environmental reviews, figure out the water situation, negotiate with unions.

Now I’m going to lay my cards out on the table here. I am rooting for this project to succeed. I find it hard not to. I think the country needs more experiments like this and that a lot of states, not just California, need to discover, or in some cases rediscover, the virtues of making it easier to create new housing and businesses and build factories, attract people and just do stuff generally.

And even if this project doesn’t work out, at least the rest of us get to learn the valuable economic and social and political lessons of what works and what does not work.

But just because I’m rooting for it doesn’t mean it’s going to work. I also have a lot of questions and it just so happens that today’s guest is exactly the person who can answer those questions.

Jan Sramek is the founder and CEO of California Forever. He started the company in 2017 with the backing of tech investors and founders, including John and Patrick Collison, Laurene Powell, Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, and a few others.

Jan joins me in the studio for a chat and I can’t wait. Here it is.

Jan, welcome to The New Bazaar.

JAN SRAMEK: It’s great to be here.

CARDIFF: I want to start with a very basic question. Why do this in California instead of somewhere where it’s known to be easier to build stuff? Why not Forever Texas or Nevada Forever, Florida Forever, whatever. You might be halfway through to building Austin 2.0 by now if you’d chosen some other place. So why do it in a place that’s known for the thicket of regulatory barriers that seem to exist all across the state?

JAN: I think we put it in the name. I mean, we call it California Forever for a reason. And I think it’s because the state is worth fighting for fundamentally.

I was at a conference the other day and you’ve got all of this negativity about ‘California can’t build anything.’ And I’d actually been to a bunch of these. I said, “You’ve got all of this talk about the issues of the state, yet the future is still being invented in California.” It is increasingly not being built there, but it is being invented there.

And I think to me, growing up in Eastern Europe, California was this symbol of optimism and opportunity and the place that could do anything. There was nothing like it in the world. And so when I got there, I was kind of surprised by — it felt like I got there 20 years too late for that. But I think it’s worth fighting for.

And I think there was a moment during COVID when a bunch of people left to go to Texas or Miami or other places, but I would say 60 or 70% of them have come back. And they’ve come back because they’ve realized what makes the place special. And they’ve come back with a different attitude, which is to fight to make the state work again. And we are part of that.

CARDIFF: It’s an interesting quote you just said, that the future is being invented there but not built there. You’re trying to make it so that it’s both.

JAN: Exactly. It was all of this discussion about the end of Silicon Valley during COVID, and you look at the industry today — 90% of the AI market cap, 95% of the AI market cap, is basically in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and really in San Francisco. It’s on 49 — ninety-five percent of the market cap in AI in America is on 49 square miles in California.

I think it’s a shame for the middle class in California that we invent all of these wonderful things, and then when it comes down to creating 1,000 jobs or 2,000 jobs to actually build them, we ship it to other states.

I think it’s a problem for the country. I mean, you’ve got lots of reasons for why I think it’s very dangerous to separate the place where you invent stuff from the place where you scale it and build it.

And I think for much of the last — I mean, I think the 21st century was made in California in terms of computers and the internet and entertainment and Hollywood and aerospace and shipbuilding, all of the things that define America. Many of them have been invented in California.

And I think there’s a natural propagation of you invent a thing in Silicon Valley and you start building it there and you scale it. And then when it’s kind of being deployed broadly, you can build those factories all over America.

But I think seeing California as that’s where you do the software and then it gets built elsewhere is creating a very dangerous structural imbalance in the country.

CARDIFF: It is unfortunate. It also seems to be kind of self-imposed through the—

JAN: Entirely self-imposed.

CARDIFF: —the tangle of regulatory burdens there.

My second basic question then is why take this specific approach of erecting an entire new city instead of doing what might be more conventional, but possibly have a bigger payoff, which is fighting the politics of the state and trying to undo a lot of the NIMBYism directly through the regular political process? Why try to do this specific thing instead of getting involved that way?

JAN: It’s both, and actually, the backstory to this is before I thought of building a new city, I spent a year working on infill. So I spent a year working on how do we build more in existing cities. For example, this was in 2016. One of the ideas I looked at very seriously was it was very clear we would get self-driving cars. And so I looked at, well, should you go and buy all of these office parks and residential buildings all over the peninsula in Silicon Valley that had lots of parking? Because if you need less parking, maybe in 10 years you can build a second tower or you can build a second office on that land.

And unfortunately, I was more depressed at the end of the year than I was in the beginning because it was not an issue of space. It was an issue of politics.

And I think there were two insights. One was there were already lots of people who were fighting the YIMBY fight. I mean, the California YIMBY coalition was really started in 2015, 2016. And I felt that would make a difference, but it wouldn’t be enough.

And then the second is you can’t build factories in existing cities. You need open land, you need more space.

And I learned some pretty shocking things during that work. If you ask people what proportion of California is urbanized — if you count everything, highways, parking lots, shopping malls, houses, offices, everything — most people think that California is about 15 to 20% urbanized. Of the hundred million acres of California — 105 — they think about 15, 20 million is urbanized. It’s five and a half percent. I think Delaware is like 35. I think Georgia is 11 or 12. California is way less urbanized than anywhere else.

And there is no city in the history of the world that’s been successful, a superstar city, that has solved the affordability problem without some outward expansion. It’s never happened anywhere in the world.

And you see that right now in places like Austin where they had a massive run-up in prices, in rents and home prices during COVID, and then they started building. And much of the building actually wasn’t in downtown Austin. It was building apartments, by the way, and houses at the edges of the metro area. And as a result, they had 20% decline in rents and home prices are down as well.

CARDIFF: I think you also had another estimate that something like only 2 to 3% of California is walkable, right?

JAN: That’s right.

CARDIFF: Walkable in the way that I think some of the cities that you’ve lived in in the past have been walkable in Europe. I think you were in New York for a bit and San Francisco, right?

JAN: If you use the standard of what would be considered walkable in DC, where we are sitting right now, which I think is a walk score of about 90-plus, it’s only two to 3% of neighborhoods in California. Which of course means that those are exactly the neighborhoods that get bid up because there’s a huge amount of demand for it. And so you’ve got these bidding wars.

I mean, right now in San Francisco it’s completely insane. What the AI boom is doing is there are apartments that used to rent for $4,000 two years ago that are renting for $8,000 right now. We had 100% increase in rents. These companies haven’t even gone public. So imagine what’s going to happen to rents in the Bay Area and home prices when these companies go public.

And so you need an outlet. And for a sense of scale, we are proposing to build 170,000 new homes on about 15,000 acres. That’s more homes than the city of San Francisco has built since 1950.

So you need both. I feel vindicated in that assumption because if you look at how many homes we were building in California in 2016 when I started, it was 80,000 homes per year. Government reports were saying we need to be building 200,000 to 250,000 a year to solve the housing crisis.

So we’ve had 10 years of fighting, 10 years of massive fights, legislation on the front page of The New York Times constantly. After 10 years of fighting at the state level, has housing production gone up or down? Down.

Because we’re building 80,000 homes a year, but of those basically zero were ADUs, and now about 30,000 are ADUs. And those ADUs, most of them are never someone’s home. They are—

CARDIFF: ADUs are accessory dwelling units. These are basically an extra house on someone’s backyard—

JAN: Someone’s backyard, exactly. And some of them are actual housing units, but a lot of them are offices, guest houses, extra space in the house.

And so housing production is down.

And then the last number is when I started the company, the average home price in California was $550,000. And Jerry Brown famously signed a package of 23 housing bills to “end the housing crisis” in 2017. Home prices today — average home price in California — is almost a million dollars. They’ve doubled in 10 years.

So whatever it is that we’re doing in terms of infill only is not working, and we need some new tools.

CARDIFF: I’ve read a lot of your past interviews in preparation for this chat. I’ve read a lot of the materials that California Forever sent me and everything. If I had to guess — okay, and here I’m purely speculating — some of the actual reason for why you’re doing it in California is also more personal. You just fell in love with California and you’d rather do it there, and you simultaneously missed some of the walkability of the places where you’ve lived before, including in your youth. And your idea is to bring the benefits of that to the place where you love, but which doesn’t have any of it basically. That too bold of me to say?

JAN: No. No.

CARDIFF: Because I still think there’s a good case for other people at least to do something like this, but in the places where you could get a city like this built really quickly, and I think you’d get the big agglomeration benefits of it quickly and everything. You’re doing it in California. I think a lot of your investors are also based there. They probably have a deep love of California and hate the sort of political environment that stops the building there as well. It seems a little bit more than just, “It’s too bad that the future’s being invented there but not built there,” even though that’s part of it. This seems more personal.

JAN: Oh, hundred percent. That’s a big part of the rationale.

The reason for why the personal matters is part of why I love California is the outdoors and the beauty and the climate and all of the things that make it special. But part of it is that spirit and that openness to innovation. As someone who didn’t get there until I was 27 years old, I kind of found it profoundly sad that we were strangling this really unique ecosystem that evolved there by our failure to permit people to build factories and housing.

I mean, you have literally — the whole world is trying to replicate Silicon Valley. And all we had to do was build more housing and let people build offices and factories. There was capital waiting on the outside, and we were not doing it because I think that combination of what happened there is really, really unique.

I mean, it’s happened only a handful of times in history. I mean, Florence, Paris, London, New York, Chicago, and Silicon Valley — that’s kind of it, maybe Los Angeles. I think when this whole explosive mix happens and works together, it’s rare. And when it goes out, sometimes it just goes out. I mean, Florence is a beautiful place to visit, but it’s no longer the creative or cultural capital of the world.

I think America is a story of immigrants coming here for the best parts of what make the country work, but then bringing with them the best parts of the worlds that they lived in. I mean, that’s the story of how the country was built, right? Whether you look at architecture or art or cuisine, food, whatever it is. It’s the story of bringing the best parts of what you’ve experienced somewhere else here.

And that’s how it felt to me, where I thought it was a shame that California — which is, I think, maybe the most beautiful place on earth in terms of geology and climate and all of it — the parts of the state where we were building in the Central Valley and elsewhere, we were building very indistinct subdivisions and kind of standard housing developments, if you want.

And I just thought it deserved more. The greatest innovation engine and wealth creation engine in the history of the world should create a spectacular city that’s going to stand for thousands of years the way that Paris does and London does and New York, I think, will.

CARDIFF: I want to ask about the economics of this project, which I find totally fascinating. One of the selling points is about the agglomeration effects, the potential agglomeration effects.

I could see this going in one of two ways. One is the proximity to San Francisco most obviously, which right now is about a 50-minute drive away, I think. I’ve asked some people and they say, “Well, but yeah, if you build a whole new city there with traffic and everything, might be a little more. It’d be closer to an hour and a half, two hours, something like that.” But the proximity to San Francisco, to Silicon Valley, to a lot of universities and big companies and everything, that could be one possible source of agglomeration effects.

The other is if you do succeed in turning it into a manufacturing center, then the concentration of people within the city itself. But by itself, 400,000 people is not huge. That’s not a massive population. You get bigger agglomeration effects in something like San Francisco itself or New York or whatever. So it could either be the agglomeration effects of the proximity to those places if you turn the city into essentially another neighborhood of those cities and you have a lot of commuters, or it’s the people inside concentrated in an industry and they work in the city itself.

But then it really seems like it has to be concentrated in just a couple of industries because if it’s more of a multifaceted place, it’s not really enough to get those agglomeration effects. So which of those two is it? Is it the agglomeration effects of the manufacturing jobs that are created there, or is it the agglomeration effects of the proximity to the cities nearby?

JAN: It’s both, and they feed on each other.

I think the reason for why you can get the first manufacturing company there in the first place is because they want to be close to Silicon Valley. And that’s the same for the second company and for the third, and eventually you get the flywheel spinning.

But I think the way I think about it is before I started this, I went on this two-and-a-half-year tour of the history of cities and urbanism and real estate development and California land use and so on. And I think the story of new cities — the ones that succeed, other than the ones that are founded because there’s a port or they found a mine or some natural resource — you’ve got those. Then you’ve got the ones that are on some kind of strategic logistical point, like Chicago was on rail and water. You’ve got the ones that a government by mandate creates, notoriously places like Brasília and Canberra and so on.

And then it’s really a story of ones that extend existing network effects instead of building new ones. So I think part of the challenge if you build it in the middle of the desert in New Mexico is how do you get people there?

Whereas for us— by the way, it’s not just San Francisco. We are halfway between Sacramento and the Bay Area. And so you’ve got 12 million people who live within 70 miles of the site, and the city is exactly in the middle. And so you’ve got proximity to all of those people — UC Davis, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF, Google, Apple, OpenAI, Northrop Grumman has a facility in Sunnyvale, you’ve got national labs, Lawrence Livermore. And so it isn’t one particular thing. It’s proximity to all of them. 

And you could commute from the city to any one of those places. Unfortunately today people do. In Solano County, 70% of the people commute out of the county for work. And most often that commute is like an hour and a half, which is what we want to fix by bringing jobs locally.

But I think the value proposition to any company that’s moving there, or even to a person who’s moving there, is not you’re going to go there five days a week. It’s if you put a facility here, you have access to all of these places. And so if you need to come down for a meeting in Menlo Park once a week, that’s totally fine and you can do it. And by the way, you can particularly do it now that you have self-driving cars, which fundamentally changes the calculus of the region.

And then in terms of agglomeration effects, I would think of it as it’s agglomeration effects with the entire region where the region is very short of factory space, of residential space, and of high-quality space in general.

And so if you can create a place where people and companies and homebuilders have permission to build and build quickly, then all of that pent-up energy in the system — of all of the companies that thought of starting a factory there but they put it in some other state, all of the builders who wanted to build more housing but they couldn’t — kind of happens there in that place, and then it can feed on itself and grow.

But I think it’s the combination of the two. And then we do want to have a relatively narrow focus within the city, which is why we’ve picked manufacturing and shipbuilding as the two areas.

CARDIFF: Yeah. It’s interesting, the selection of manufacturing specifically. The shipbuilding part I kind of understand. It looks like the infrastructure for that would be pretty easy to get up off the ground relatively, right?

In terms of manufacturing, you mentioned, well, we have to get the first few businesses to go there in the first place. The immediate question I would ask then is why wouldn’t those businesses’ first choice be the places where the network effects are already proven to exist in San Francisco or in those other cities? So how do you attract them to come to the new city instead of them just saying, “Well, let’s try to get the proximity advantages where the proximity for sure exists.” This is a long shot as they might see it, at least unproven. Why go to your city in the first place?

JAN: Because it’s actually the closest proximate place that they can go to.

So you can’t build a new factory in Menlo Park. First of all, the cost of the land is completely insane, which makes it infeasible in the first place. But even if you could, there’s just no available land that is big enough to build a factory. There’s no manufacturing parks left anywhere in Silicon Valley or in San Francisco.

CARDIFF: Manufacturing — we’re talking about like tech manufacturing?

JAN: Tech manufacturing.

CARDIFF: Batteries, EVs, stuff like that?

JAN: Exactly. Drones, components, that whole wave of manufacturing that’s coming back, largely done by startups, most of whom — or many of whom — are funded in Silicon Valley and in El Segundo.

In Silicon Valley, you can’t do it. You can do a little bit of it in places like Fremont in the East Bay, but even those are running out of space. And then even if you could build a factory there, how are you going to get the workforce?

You can have a really good-paying job by any standard in America that pays $120,000 a year. A home in Palo Alto is $4 million. Even a home in Fremont is $2 million. So it becomes really difficult to afford it.

In Solano County right now, the average home price is probably $550,000, $600,000, and we can come below that with the product that we want to build. And so you’ve got a different level of affordability.

And then in Southern California, we’ve got this incredible cluster at El Segundo in LA — kind of Hawthorne, El Segundo, Torrance — where all of the new companies are getting started. But even there, there’s basically no industrial space left. It’s completely built out. And again, homes are a million dollars-plus, and in the nice neighborhoods more than that. And so again, it’s very difficult to go and employ 500 people there to work for you.

California has run out of spaces where to do this. And so the actual choice that companies who are coming are looking at is, do I build it in Solano where I can get in a car in Menlo Park in the morning, be in the factory in an hour and a half, and come back home and see my kids for dinner? Or do I put it in Ohio or Texas?

CARDIFF: Those places are your competitor then, not Menlo Park or whatever. It’s the other states.

JAN: Exactly. I think it’s about setting up the supply chain in the optimal way.

And I’ve used the example of a company raises $20 million to do R&D there in San Francisco. Then they raise $100 million to build their first factory that’s going to employ a couple hundred people. And then they raise a billion dollars to build a factory that employs 1,000 people or 2,000 people. All of those make sense to go into Solano.

If they then become really, really big and they’re building the equivalent of a gigafactory that’s going to employ 10,000 people, where you’ve really nailed down the production process and the product and you’re really just stamping them out, that probably still makes sense to go to Ohio or Texas or one of those other states.

But I think the companies would actually get to the gigafactory stage and get there more quickly, and we would have less companies die along the way if they could dial their production facility and do it in close proximity because that’s what makes it possible to have a really tight integration between R&D and the factory floor, which is how Silicon Valley historically worked and which, by the way, is exactly how China works.

How China works, from my understanding, is all of the cutting-edge R&D stuff happens in Shenzhen where you have these deeply integrated ecosystems. And then once they figure out how to do something and they want to go make a million of it or 10 million of it or a billion of it, then they go and essentially do it in a city that becomes focused on making that one thing. But the early stuff is all in the same place.

CARDIFF: Here’s a tension I was trying to resolve as I thought about this project. On the one hand, it’s a hugely ambitious thing. We haven’t really seen anything like this before, especially in terms of the kind of city that you want to build totally from scratch. I think there are examples of other kinds of cities that have been sort of master-planned in the past.

So it’s hugely ambitious in that regard. But when I think about the size of it — 400,000 to 500,000 people eventually, and it’s going to take some decades for the whole thing to actually be up and running and functional where we see what it’s going to be — California has a population of, I think, around 40 million people. So it’s only about 1%. It seems to me like if it were just to stop here, that would almost be not ambitious enough.

It has to serve as a template for other places to be able to replicate this, for this to truly have a massive difference on the California or the national economy. You see what I mean? 

It can’t just be, okay, it worked great, took us 20, 30 years, whatever, to get the city. It’s awesome. And even that was hard. But it also just doesn’t scale anywhere else.

It almost has to scale for this to sort of be this big positive story that I think you’re trying to tell. So help me resolve that tension there. Is this the massively ambitious thing that I described to the audience before, or does it have to be able to scale for this to be a truly radical transformative thing for the economy?

JAN: It’s a bit of both.

I think us succeeding — and particularly if we can get in and break ground in the next year or two instead of taking five years going through permitting — I think it will be a milestone or a turning point in California.

My thesis when I started working on this in 2016 was that the set of restrictions and kind of anti-growth attitude in California would get worse for a few years, but at some point people will get fed up because too many factories close, their kids can’t buy a home, their friends are leaving because they can’t afford to retire in the state, and so on. And at some point people say, “Okay, all of these laws that have passed were well-intentioned, but we’ve created this layer cake where there’s just too much. We need to simplify this again.”

I kind of expected it to happen in 2020 or thereabouts. I would say COVID delayed it, and it’s happened. But I think it happened in 2023. I would say the state has been on a pretty radical path of making it easier to build, and that has a broad buy-in, I would say, across—

CARDIFF: And not to interrupt, but the YIMBY movement has notched up some gains there in the last few years.

JAN: Exactly. They have. And a lot of things help, right? And I think it’s a bipartisan issue. I mean, you have people on the left and on the right writing about it. Tyler Cowen is writing about state capacity libertarianism, and Ezra has Abundance, and Derek Thompson and Marc Andreessen wrote “It’s Time to Build.”

And so my model is whenever the left and the right agree on something in America, there’s a deep profound truth at work in the middle because it’s so rare. So when they do, it’s probably true.

CARDIFF: People are pissed, by the way. All across the country people are pissed about housing prices.

JAN: They have to be!

CARDIFF: They can’t build anything. It was about time that this sort of thing took hold.

JAN: And that was my model. My sense was these laws are very hard to change because you have entrenched special interests who are fighting it. And so you need to get people really, really angry. And you could feel the beginning of it in California in 2016, but it wasn’t bad enough. But then it got bad enough, right? When average home price goes from half a million to a million dollars in six years, people are going to get pretty pissed.

That happened. And I would say even our project, I think, already has been kind of a thermometer for the trends. I mean, when it first came out a couple years ago, it was very controversial and people didn’t know what to make of it, which I understand. It’s a big bet. We bought the land secretly. People hadn’t seen the plan.

But the attitude has completely shifted. And today I think it’s pretty widely accepted that there’s massive support for this in California.

And what I hoped would happen, which is beginning to happen, is I very much felt that if we could do it and we could do it in California, it would open the door wide open for everyone else doing it anywhere else.

CARDIFF: Cuz then you have no excuse.

JAN: Yeah. You have no excuse.

CARDIFF: If you pull something like that off in California. Right.

JAN: And there has been a wave of these other people working on this that’s happened in the last couple years. It’s still early days.

And I would also say I think what we’re doing works at our scale, but it also works at the scale of you building 500 acres at the edge of an existing city and you just want to make it more walkable and build it faster and make it better, or even for reform in existing neighborhoods.

We basically have taken everything that the state legislature has passed in California in the last 10 years — we have minimum density, we have emphasis on transit, we have missing middle housing, we have mixed uses, ministerial approvals, small-lot [unclear] — and we’ve put it into the plan.

And so if we can start building and it’s an incredible place that people love, it’s going to be much easier to go into existing neighborhoods and simplify the zoning code, for example. 

CARDIFF: We can use it as a model. 

JAN: You can use it as a model. You can say, look, because the average city in California has 50 different zoning districts, which creates incredible complexity and cost. We have four.

And so if we can build a great place and people come in and are like, “This is amazing,” then it’s much easier for existing cities to say, “Hey, if they can do it with four, why can’t we simplify it over here?”

Another example is a big barrier to building walkable urbanism is the width of the streets because a lot of cities have been taken over by fire departments, which love having massive trucks, and so they want these massive streets. If you have massive streets, you can’t create a place that is actually pleasant for humans to be in.

And so if we can show that you can build a 30-foot street and it can be perfectly fine and the fire department is fine with it, then it’s easier for everyone else to do it everywhere else.

So I hope that we get replicated, but also that we can replicate it not just in terms of new cities, but also in terms of better new neighborhoods and then in terms of reform in existing neighborhoods.

CARDIFF: There’s one other interesting economic tension I want to ask you about, which is the relationship between, on the one hand, this is a kind of master-planned, start-from-scratch city where you and your team have to make a lot of decisions upfront about what’s going to go where, what the city’s going to look like, where the infrastructure is and all that, versus letting the city evolve organically; letting markets work, letting builders build where they’re going to build, and letting the businesses that are going to go there and find advantages to being there and all that stuff, letting people buy and sell houses and move in and move out and all that stuff.

How do you think about that? Because I don’t think you’re going to run this place like a communist dictatorship, right? I think the point is to put in place the forces that allow it to evolve organically. But how do you actually do that? Because right now you’re still in the top-down planning stage. How do you transition to a more bottom-up environment?

JAN: Yeah. It’s a question that I thought about a lot because my worst nightmare when I started working on this 10 years ago was I’ll spend two decades of my life working on it and then it will feel completely soulless like some of the kind of master-planned communities where you go in — and I know some people love them, but—

CARDIFF: Like cookie-cutter everything.

JAN: Cookie-cutter, everything looks the same. It doesn’t feel organic. It doesn’t feel like a real city. The places that I love are places like Georgetown and the West Village and Charleston and Savannah. And many of them, by the way, have been master-planned, but with a different approach.

And so I spent a lot of time thinking about this. And where I landed on it is I think planning since about the 1900s in America has gone in completely the wrong direction, which is we want to plan the city the way that the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 in New York planned the grid, or the way that O’Farrell planned the grid in San Francisco in 1847, ’48.

Or Alain Bertaud, who I respect a great deal — who wrote Order Without Design — talks about it, and he probably put it the most eloquently, which is the goal of city planners should be to plan the best possible street grid. You take care of all of the infrastructure — the power, the water, the sewer, transportation — so people can get from A to B. You can have a little bit of a light touch between here is where industry goes and here is where housing goes and this is where we have the highest intensity of uses. And then you can have a little bit of touch in terms of giving the design some harmony and some range so it’s not completely free-for-all.

Because I don’t think you want complete free-for-all. The reason why Georgetown or Savannah are charming is that there is an order. The styles are a variation within a range, whereas Houston is a free-for-all, and I don’t think any of us would say that it’s the best city in America.

I actually have, by the way, as an aside, urbanists love dunking on Houston. I hate when they do it because Houston is the place where the American dream is more alive than almost anywhere else in California, which is just the reality because they let people build and that’s where you can still buy a home. Now, I think you can do better on architecture.

CARDIFF: Good that you saved that. We’re going to get a lot of emails from Houstonians who are going to get mad at what you just said. (CHUCKLES)

JAN: I love a lot of what Houston stands for. I think you can do better on architecture, but I think you want something in between a free-for-all of Houston and a completely sterile community. And it’s a hard choice, but we’re trying to land there.

But the bottom line is what we do is we plan the best possible street grid and some rules about where things go, but then we want as much of it to happen organically within that as possible. And that’s a hard challenge.

But the measure for us of how to measure it is we want to imagine that if you’re in the city 50 years after it’s been built, it feels like Georgetown or it feels like the West Village or it feels like Savannah. And that’s a high bar, but I think we can get there.

CARDIFF: I want to ask you about the alignment between your investors’ investment, your investment in this, and positive outcomes here.

This is a variation on a question I think you’ve already gotten in the past, which is less interesting to me, which is your investors are all these Silicon Valley tech billionaire types — oh my God, how are they going to rip everybody off? Whatever. I get it. People ask these questions in the normal course of business.

You had a pretty good response to that, which is, well, we tell these same people all the time to stop investing in social media stuff that hijacks our attention and to build something real. Well, this is actually something. This is literally a concrete thing to build, right?

And that’s fair. But I also think it’s fair to ask about how it is that if your investors end up making a lot of money here, at least it’s because they built something that people really love and that they really like. So describe that alignment. If your investors make a lot of money on this, it’s because they sold what exactly?

JAN: It’s actually a question that I’ve had a lot of discussions with people about in the county locally. And I think the scale of ‘you’ve got one developer who’s building the whole project’ can be intimidating.

Of course, to be clear, we are going to build the horizontal infrastructure and we’ll build some of the vertical structures, and then we’ll have lots of other people come and build.

But I think the alignment is the fact that we don’t succeed unless we build a fantastic place. A good example that I always use is if you have a builder who comes into a town and they buy 200 acres outside of the city to build some houses. They promise that they’re going to get a company to lease the space in the office and they’re going to build a coffee shop and then the park is going to be great.

And then they build the houses, they sell them, and then two years later the road starts cracking and the company never materializes and the coffee shop closes down — they’re fine. They’ve sold all of their houses, they’ve made the money, and they are gone.

For us, we have 170,000 homes to sell, which is going to take decades. And so if we do a really crappy job on the first few thousand, or even the first 20,000 for that matter—

CARDIFF: Nobody’ll move there.

JAN: Yeah. If we say there’s going to be jobs and there’s no jobs, if we say there’s going to be great retail and there’s no retail, if we say that we’re going to solve transportation issues and then there’s traffic, we just can’t sell any more homes.

And so by just the sheer volume of what we are doing and the overall investment that we have in the project, the only way that we succeed is kind of the same way that any other company succeeds, which is we have to make something that people want, that is really popular, and that endures for a long time where people want to be and the companies want to be there.

And it goes to the investor question. If you look at the history of new cities and how they’ve done generally as businesses, there’s a lot of failures through that process. And part of that reason is it often takes 20 years for these places to become self-sustaining and to really start making money because it’s just such a big outlay to buy the land, spend years entitling it, and then we have to go and build water treatment plants and sewer treatment plants and all of the infrastructure.

And then you probably, by the way, if you want to build walkable neighborhoods in the early days, you have to subsidize schools, you have to subsidize retail, you have to subsidize the density. And so it’s got this really deep J-curve until it comes out.

And in the long term, it can be a really good investment, but that’s part of the reason for why I raised money from the people that I did, which is I wanted to have as investors people who deeply cared about California and who cared about it for reasons that are deeper than money.

And that’s not the case if I went to a bank and tried to get a loan, which of course I wouldn’t have gotten, or if I went to some—

CARDIFF: Twenty-year loan.

JAN: Or do you want a private equity firm as the people who own it, who need a kind of return in seven years, or do you want someone who can hold it for a long time?

And the other thing that I would say — and I’ve said this in all of these situations — is there are so many easier ways to make money. I was a trader at Goldman. It’s a lot easier to make money doing that than doing this. Even for the investors, you look at the run-up in the AI valuations that are happening right now. This is a really, really difficult way to make money. We’ve been at this for 10 years.

And the other part of it is when I talk to the investors about the project — I mean, you mentioned Laurene Powell Jobs. Do you know how many times Laurene Powell Jobs has asked me about ROI? Zero. The things that I get asked about are, “How are the schools going to work? How do we make sure that it’s affordable to the people who work there? How is economic opportunity going to work? How do we make sure that we broaden the opportunity as much as possible?”

And so I think that there’s a real value to having investors who care about it for reasons other than money.

Look at a lot of the neighborhoods in London, actually. If you go to London, a lot of the beautiful neighborhoods that have been built, part of the reason for why they are beautiful is that a lot of people cared about them because it was families who built them. It was the original landowning families that built them, and they really cared about it.

And I think for all of the people who are involved in this — and this doesn’t just apply to the investors, it applies to our team as well — it’s a legacy project. And I think the idea that you have high standards because people’s identity has now been associated with this, and whatever we build is going to be a reflection on everyone who was involved in this. And that’s not just the planning team and our full-time team, it’s also the investors.

CARDIFF: One hundred seventy thousand houses, I think you said, or housing units will be built, right? Is it that you’ll partner with developers on building those, and then you’ll sell those piecemeal, one by one? Do you lease out the land, and somebody else builds the houses and sells them? How does the factory part come into play here, the shipbuilding operation? Where does the eventual revenue come from?

JAN: So we operate in that sense very similarly to other large-scale real estate development projects. And so we are the master developer. We have the process and permitting process and environmental process working with the community. We are going to get it permitted. We’re going to build the horizontal infrastructure — water, sewer, roads — and then we are going to build some of the vertical ourselves.

And so we are going to build some of the homes, we are going to build some of the factories, and then to other homebuilders and companies, we are going to sell land. In the case of building homes, all of the homes — if you buy a home, you buy a home. It’s not on leased land or anything like that. You buy a home, you own it.

And then for offices or factories, it depends on what the company wants to do — buy it or lease it. But the revenue comes in the form of us selling land, leasing land, or selling homes or leasing factories. And it’s very similar to any other development.

CARDIFF: That makes sense. Is the budget going to be enough? Are there any budgetary pressures? Because I know in the materials that you guys had sent, you’d raised, I think, a billion dollars at the beginning of this. Sounds like a lot, but this is also a big project. If you get up close to the edge of that, can you raise more? How does that work?

JAN: Yeah. I mean, we’ve funded the company to take it through buying the land and through permitting it, and we can raise more money if we need to.

There is going to be a J-curve, as I mentioned, where the company is going to invest money in infrastructure and have to spend more money on sewer plants, water treatment, infrastructure, and eventually the first homes. And it will take a few years to get into profitability. Eventually, it should become profitable, and then it can fund itself from operations, basically like any other company.

The period of being able to see this through is longer for this than for most other companies. And then the other part of it is it’s a big number when you look at the overall construction impacts of that, but our funding is a component of it. For example, a lot of it is the homebuilders who might come in, and they buy lots, and they build homes, or it’s companies that come in and build their factory, and they are financing the build-out of the factory.

The key thing that I’ve learned when I studied new cities and similar things in the past is you have to have long-term patient capital, and you have to have equity capital. You can’t load it up with debt. When you do that, bad things happen. And we’ve avoided that.

CARDIFF: I want to ask about the political environment in California right now and how you’re navigating that.

The other day, I was watching an interview where Ezra Klein was interviewing the other California gubernatorial candidates, and he asked Katie Porter about California Forever specifically. And she acknowledged that California has a big NIMBY problem. She said she was open to something like California Forever, but that she had questions. And then she said you guys had not called her back yet.

So my question is, are you going to talk to her and the other gubernatorial candidates? And how are you engaging them generally?

JAN: Yeah. I mean, I was actually in the room, and Katie and I spoke afterward, and she’s—

CARDIFF: Oh, you already talked to her?

JAN: She’s coming to visit the site. Soon, I hope. We’ve had other candidates who actually come in and visit the site. So we’ve had a few of them on the site.

And I think housing was already a large issue in the last election, but in this election, I would say it’s the defining issue. And so the candidates have— I think there’s differences between them in terms of approach, but I would say it’s the most pro-housing set of candidates that we’ve ever had in California for an election. And so I’m looking forward to working with whoever gets elected.

CARDIFF: The outgoing governor, Gavin Newsom — I would’ve thought that this would be somewhere in his sweet spot. He’s talked a lot more in recent years about building. I think he’s cited also the Abundance movement from Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and a lot of others as well. What’s been his disposition towards California Forever, and have you talked to him?

JAN: I’m not going to comment on specifics, but I would say we’ve worked really closely with the administration in California on bringing employers. They have been fantastic partners.

And so there are a lot of big site selections that are happening in America right now for major shipbuilding facilities, major manufacturing facilities. And we’ve worked really closely with, for example, his Office of Economic and Business Development, which is called GO-Biz in California, and they have been incredible partners over the last two years.

I really feel something has shifted in California in the last two years. We’ve had companies, and we’ve had national brokerage firms who handle these national searches, there’s five of these big firms in the US that handle— company who want to build a factory, and they come to them to help with the site selection, and they go to all of the different states.

We’ve had many of them come to us and say what we are seeing right now, especially with regards to Solano County, is completely unprecedented. And we’ve never seen California be as open for business, as willing to work with people, and as motivated to bring manufacturing and shipbuilding to California.

And so stay tuned, but they’ve been really good partners.

CARDIFF: I would assume that a project like this has a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem where it’s not proven yet, and it’s risky. The outcome’s very uncertain. So if you’re a politician, it’s like, “Ah, do I want to associate myself with this if in three years it doesn’t work out or something and then it blows up in my face?” But then if it does work out, then everybody’s going to be on board, saying they were your best friend and it happened because of them or whatever.

You almost have to sort of prove yourself first, and then everybody will get on board, and then it’ll maybe take on some momentum. But I’m just making things up here. Is that sort of your assessment, too?

JAN: No, I think that’s accurate.

I mean, what happened when we introduced the project two years ago is there was, of course, a tremendous level of skepticism, right? It was, “Who the hell are these guys? What are they doing? Can they really plan a great city? Can they really bring the jobs here? How are they going to work with the community?” And I understand it.

And all we said at the beginning is, “Hold on, hold on. We get it. You have lots of questions — transportation, water, urban planning, how is it all going to work? Just keep an open mind, and we’re going to go, and we’re going to prove it.”

You’re concerned that the plan isn’t going to be more kind of … a lot of the YIMBY/Abundance crowd in the early days was very skeptical that we were going to say this is going to be walkable, but then the plan is actually going to be to build McMansions.

And we delivered a plan, and then we delivered a more detailed plan. And I would say that the YIMBY/Abundance movement is 90% supportive because they’ve seen us deliver on it, and in those documents, we committed to it.

For example, we are the only large project in the nation that has a minimum density, not a maximum density, but a minimum density. We’ve tied ourselves to the mast and basically said, “We cannot build McMansions. We’re not allowed to do it.” And then won a lot of people over.

Similarly, I would say there’s a big labor, construction labor, question in something of this scale. It’s on an unprecedented scale in California. And six months ago, we announced that we signed the largest labor construction agreement in American history with both the building trades and the carpenters. That’s a big, big deal anywhere in America, including in California.

CARDIFF: The deal is that the building on the site — the factories and all that stuff — will be done by the workers in these specific unions.

JAN: And all of the unions that cover basically the full spectrum. The majority of the work in the city is going to be done by union labor.

And that was a big deal in California. Not everyone would make that commitment, and we made it.

And then people had skepticism about can you really get companies into Solano County? Because for the last 40 years, the county has just been bleeding employers. And actually, the county lost five major employers in the last six months. People were like, “Well, nobody has been able to bring companies here. You guys are going to fail as well.”

And we said, “Okay, let us prove it.” And we’ve been able to bring to the county and to the state at this point over a dozen employers who’ve come in and said, “If you make it possible for us to break ground here on a reasonable time horizon, we will come and invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Solano County.”

And so I think we’ve taken all of the objections and all of the concerns that people have had to the project, and we’ve kind of knocked them out one by one and just done the work, done the work locally.

And so now we have 60% community support when you look at polling locally in Solano County. And then I think the kind of statement that Katie Porter said at the debate is a reflection of the fact that we’ve done the work, and it’s no longer some billionaire pipe dream. It’s actually a real company with excellent people working on it hard for two years to come up with what I think is by far the most ambitious city plan in America in 100 years.

CARDIFF: What’s the “if” part of the “if you make it possible to start building there, we’ll commit to it”? Is the “if” part that you still have environmental reviews to go, that you still have to negotiate with the local towns and cities in Solano County and surrounding Solano County?

What are the big barriers between where we are today and your goal of breaking ground in 2028? Because we haven’t talked a lot about just progress, right? We don’t have time to get into all the little mini back-and-forths, but what are the big ones that you still have to get through?

JAN: Yeah. I mean, I think that the majority of the project — essentially everything excluding the shipbuilding — is getting permitted by annexation into a local city called Suisun. And Suisun is a great example of a city in California that has a very young population, a very young council, young set of leaders in terms of city manager, assistant city manager, and the staff. And I would say it’s the best example of Abundance in California, period. It’s a city that’s just embraced it and said, “We’re going to create jobs, we’re going to create homes, and we are going to explore the annexation.”

CARDIFF: Let’s say Suisun — I think about 30,000 population, not like a big place, right?

JAN: Exactly.

CARDIFF: From what I understand, in the past, they’ve tried to do things to boost city revenues and to grow. None of it worked. The idea here is that they would annex part of the land that California Forever has bought, and then, in doing so, they would agree with you that it’s possible to build in accordance with the zoning code that you’ve established before. Is that how this would work? Something like that?

JAN: So Suisun is one of the oldest cities in Solano County, but it’s only four square miles. And the reason for why it’s four square miles is there are three cities in there that have expanded over the last 40 years to about 40 square miles. They’ve basically been much more aggressive than Suisun in terms of annexing land around Suisun.

And so Suisun has been locked into place for 50 years, unable to grow because they kind of only could grow east towards Travis Air Force Base. And if you do that, you need a massive project because you need to kind of establish a buffer around the base and then grow beyond that, which hasn’t been possible until someone owned all of the land.

CARDIFF: I interrupted you there, but the Suisun annexation makes it possible to do some of the housing building that you want.

JAN: And the manufacturing and so on.

And so the timeline now is they have said they would publish what’s called a draft environmental impact report in California — which will be 20,000 pages of environmental analysis — sometime this summer. And then I think it will come back to the council for a final decision sometime this winter.

In California, there are a couple of other steps in terms of county commissions that have to approve it. And you’ve got a possible long litigation window where people can sue the environmental analysis, and you can spend a few years in court. And that puts you for a breaking-ground date in 2028 or something like that, depending on how long the lawsuit lasts.

What the companies are saying is we need to break ground on factories or on shipyards in six months, nine months, or 12 months. And so we need to compress this timeline and do more of these approvals in parallel, so we can break ground, because if you can’t do it in California, we have to put it in another state, because we have customers who need the products. Many of them are building things for shipbuilding or for drones and aerospace, and they have investors, and they need to go. They can’t just be waiting for California.

CARDIFF: Nerve-racking. Waiting on a bunch of lawsuits from the state.

JAN: Yeah. And so California has done this. For example, we do have a way in which, in California, we basically say this is a priority project, and we are going to process permits in parallel.

For example, the basketball arena for the Sacramento Kings went from an idea to opening its doors in 26 months. The Apple headquarters was approved by Cupertino City Council, I believe, in October of 2013. They were moving dirt in February of 2014. Same for the football stadium in Inglewood, same for the Warriors arena in San Francisco.

And so we do have a way to do these projects quickly. And what’s happened over the last few months is a real coalition in California between labor unions, local community leaders, the public, and companies who want to come saying, “If we can do this for sports stadiums, surely we can do this for middle-class homes and job-creating facilities.”

So I think that’s one of the questions that’s happening right now in California.

CARDIFF: This is long-term thinking here, but in the future, how do you prevent a kind of devolution into NIMBYism? What if this works out and people move in, and then some of the people who move in are going to own their homes, and then they’re the ones who are like, “No, we don’t want any more expansion though, this is done.” Even though let’s say the city is walkable, beautiful, lots of people move there, and then they’re the ones who start fighting for a different zoning code. How do you prevent that?

JAN: It’s something we spend a lot of time on.

There’s a favorite cartoon about NIMBYism in America I have, which is two people are sitting next to a freeway and they’re looking at a billboard and on the billboard it says “200 new homes for sale,” and one of them turns to the other and says, “We’re hoping to buy the first one and then shut down the construction on the other 199.”

Two answers: there’s a planning answer, and then there’s a cultural answer.

The planning answer is it’s part of the reason for why we are approving the entirety of the city at once. And so we have an unusual set of approvals where, for example, the environmental work isn’t for the first 20,000 homes, it’s for the whole city. The development agreement, the zoning code — it is for the entirety of the project. And at approval, those get approved, and they stay in place for 40 years.

And that matters for a few reasons. It matters because of what you said, so you don’t have people protesting it. It also is what allows us to actually get companies to invest in California because the unpredictable planning and business climate is one of the biggest issues for these companies.

So part of how we’ve gotten them to commit to want to come to California when historically they haven’t is we’ve said, “Yes, you’re taking a bet on a new unproven location in Solano County, but you’re not just solving your question of where do you put your next factory because we’re going to give you the land for the first factory and then we’re going to have reserve land around it where you can grow for the next 20 years. And that land has already been pre-approved and zoned.”

And so you know that if you want to build the next factory, as long as you meet a set of objective standards, you can build it. You don’t have the risk that the city council changes, and they don’t like you anymore, and you won’t be able to expand, and you have to go look for some other site.

And by the way, you know that you’re going to have housing for your employees because there are 170,000 homes that have been approved next to it, and we have a big incentive to build them and to rent them and to sell them.

And so this kind of approving the entirety of the project is what gives the companies the confidence to come. It’s what prevents the NIMBYism you talked about. It’s what gives the community predictability of what they can expect. And it’s what allows us, by the way, to subsidize walkable urbanism.

Because in the beginning, when you have an open field and a bunch of row homes, the natural inclination of what every developer wants to do is to come in and say, “Oh, why don’t we just build some single-family homes and eventually the density will grow in?” It never does. Once you establish the place as a suburban place, it never becomes urban. Everyone says it, but it never happens.

You have to start at a higher density in the beginning. And the only way to do it is to be willing to sell the homes at a much lower margin and to be able to subsidize retail. And the only way for us to put in more money and lose more money is if we have the confidence that we can make some of it up as the place gets going and we can continue building into it.

So that’s the planning answer.

And then very quickly, the cultural answer is we want to market the place very heavily and set a culture of this is a place for people who are excited about the idea of living in a place like this. They are excited to be part of the story of building the first major new city in America.

I’ve certainly felt sometimes like, I wish I could live here 100 years ago and see the country being built. And I think there’s a lot of people who want that. And I think attracting people who are builders, who care about building, who want to work in construction or manufacturing, and who are excited about the idea of getting things built is part of the kind of implicit social contract that will hopefully make this be a place that wants to build for a long time.

CARDIFF: One last question about how this is going to functionally work, and then I have a couple of personal questions I want to close with. In terms of the provision of local services, is this city going to have, I don’t know, a new mayor, a new city council? Does it depend on the provision of those services — firetruck, police, whatever — from local surrounding towns, and then they’re going to have to scale up if suddenly there’s a half a million people in an adjacent town? How is all of that going to work?

JAN: All of that comes with the annexation into Suisun. So all of the public services are going to be provided by the city of Suisun. So the governance is going to be the city council. The city council of the city of Suisun is going to have a larger city that they’re going to govern. They make all the decisions. They have a city manager, they have a fire chief, they have a police chief. Those departments will have to grow.

The way that the financing for this works is essentially we have to build all of the facilities — the new fire stations and police stations and equip them and buy the cars and buy the trucks and so on. And then the property taxes and the sales taxes from the development pay for the ongoing operations—

CARDIFF: To hire new folks.

JAN: And to hire new folks, exactly. Many, many new folks.

And then the part of the entitlement documents that will come out this summer is a full fiscal analysis that basically shows that not only will the city pay for all of that, it will also pay to improve the level of services in the existing Suisun, for lots of technical reasons that we can get into.

Lastly, there are some services that we would provide, but that’s more like subsidizing the early retail, or we would have kind of an internal district within the development that provides services like water and wastewater, but that’s a public utility essentially.

CARDIFF: You’ve been at this for almost a decade now, and even before then, you spent a couple of years, as you said, studying the nature of building a new city and whatnot. You’re not that old. You only have a few grays on your head, probably more than when you started.

JAN: (LAUGHS) A lot more. I had none when I started.

CARDIFF: But this has taken up a big chunk of your life at this point. This is very much, and in many ways, your life’s work. I’m wondering how you processed the ups and downs of a project like this, knowing that you staked your career essentially on one company, one project. It’s not like a company that then does eight different things or whatever. It’s like this one big thing. I’m just curious to know how you manage that personally.

JAN: It’s a lot easier now than it was in the beginning. I mean, in the beginning, it really felt like a crazy idea. It was just me and a PowerPoint deck basically. And when I first tried to raise money for it, nobody would invest. And so the only way that this got off the ground is I had to put everything that I had into it, and I had to borrow from everyone who would lend me money personally to get it off the ground.

If you look at my credit score report, there’s a massive tank in 2016, which was the getting the company maxed out all the credit cards.

CARDIFF: Wait, can you tell us who was the first mover on this? Who was the first investor to say, “Yeah, I’ll do this”?

JAN: Yeah. Patrick Collison was the first one, and then—

CARDIFF: Not surprised.

JAN: And then Charlie Songhurst was the second one, and they were really great.

I think the hardest part right now is balancing the desire to show that we can do this on a reasonable timeline and actually get going, and not be on the 15-year California standard process, but then not pushing it so far that you break the relationships and the trust with the community.

And I think in the early days, for example, we tried to go a little bit too quickly, and that scared people because they didn’t have the time to look at it and get to know us and process it. And so it’s this constant balancing between the long-term vision, but then the impatience to get it done, but not pushing it too far. But I’ve gotten better at it over the last couple of years.

CARDIFF: Anything that, looking back now, you would’ve done differently?

JAN: I think we would have taken a bit more time in the beginning to establish trust in the local community. I think what I didn’t understand in the beginning is if people don’t know you and they haven’t spent time, they’re not hearing anything that you’re saying.

So what happened in the beginning is, in some sense, what we are saying we’re doing hasn’t changed that much in the last two years, but the receptivity to it is totally different now. And part of it is the country has moved in a different place, and California has moved in a different place, but part of it is if people don’t trust that you’re going to do what you said you’re going to do, and they don’t know you as a person, they’re not really hearing what you’re saying.

And so I think before we came in and started talking about this is the plan and this is how it’s going to work and this is how the water is going to work, I would have probably taken six months and just get to know the people better and establish trust better before we started talking about it because I think that was what created some of the controversy in the early days.

CARDIFF: Sounds like that would be — this was my next question, but it sounds like you already answered it — that would be your main lesson to others who wanted to pursue a similar project as this one. Unless you have a different lesson, you would also want to share, or maybe 10 other things.

JAN: I think I probably could come up with 10.

I think trust and relationships matter a great deal in something that’s local. And I think some of it is because people have been disappointed before, and they don’t want to be disappointed again. Solano County is a place where a lot of people have come in with promises, and they said they’re going to do this and this and this. None of them invested a billion dollars before they knew whether they could do it. So that’s what we said. We said we are committed. We didn’t option the land. We didn’t just come in with an idea. We really are here to stay. But I think some of it is trust.

I would say the other main lesson that we’ve learned is, one, they have to understand where you’re coming from. Another mistake that we made in the early days is we talked a lot about the project. I never wanted this to be kind of about my idea or me in any way. And so I was a little bit shy in the beginning about telling the story of why I was working on it.

The mistake is when you don’t do that, people will fill in with their worst fears. And so it’s part of the trust thing. They have to know who you are in order to trust the company. And so I would’ve told that story more aggressively. Here’s who I am. Here’s why I’m working on it. I didn’t grow up with wealth. My mom was a school teacher. My dad was a mechanic. I was the second person in my family to go to college. All of those details matter to people, and I didn’t really do that in the beginning.

The final piece is for something as complex as what we’re doing, you can’t convince people about it, at least not in the beginning, through digital ads and videos and TV ads and flyers. It doesn’t work.

The thing that we’ve seen locally is basically everyone goes through the same emotional journey, which is, “What is this? Why are you doing this?” And then they have the same 20 questions. How is the water going to work? How’s the governance going to work? How are you going to get transportation? How are you going to get the jobs there?

And if you answer them and you answer it earnestly and you say, “I don’t know,” if you don’t know, then there’s 20% of people who don’t want to build anything anywhere near them ever. You’re not going to convince them. But 80% of people will be open, or they will be supportive. But you have to have a human being deliver the answers.

And so the situation I think for us locally where dramatically the buy-in increased is I went and I had coffee with a thousand people and we had a team that did it with thousands of other people and we had ambassadors and we literally did house parties and we would just go into people’s homes and we would say, “Here’s what we’re doing, and ask all of your questions.”

I think for something really, really complex, you have to have a human explain it in a human way.

CARDIFF: I think this is a pretty good place to close. Jan Sramek, the project is California Forever. Thanks for being here.

JAN: It was a pleasure. Thank you very much.