Project

California Forever

California Forever

California Forever

New Towns · California

New Towns · California

California Forever

California Forever is a test of whether California can still turn world-sized ambition into a place people can inhabit.

California Forever is a test of whether California can still turn world-sized ambition into a place people can inhabit.

California Forever is trying to build a new city in Solano County.

The plan stretches far beyond another housing development. Over the coming decades, it calls for more than 170,000 homes in walkable neighborhoods, a major advanced manufacturing district, a new shipyard, schools, parks, shops, and the civic infrastructure required to support a city of up to 400,000 people.

California knows how to produce ideas that reshape the world. Its companies have changed how people communicate, work, travel, learn, and entertain themselves. The state has had a much harder time turning that abundance into enough homes, infrastructure, and complete communities.

California Forever places that tension on one piece of land.

Its neighborhoods are planned around slow streets, bike lanes, greenways, local schools, shops, and public spaces close enough to become part of daily life. The industrial side of the project is equally central. Solano Foundry and the proposed Solano Shipyard are meant to make the city a place where people can build lives and manufacture things again.

The scale is difficult to comprehend because America rarely attempts projects like this anymore.

That may be the clearest reason to follow it.

They’ll open businesses, start institutions, adapt buildings, establish traditions, and make thousands of decisions that no founding team can script in advance. The streets and blocks will need enough structure to hold the city together and enough flexibility to let it grow into somewhere its earliest plans couldn’t fully predict.

California Forever’s name makes that time horizon explicit.

The city is expected to develop over roughly 40 years. Many of the people involved today may never see its final form. Their work is to establish a foundation sturdy enough for future generations to keep building on.

That makes California Forever one of the country’s most consequential citybuilding experiments.

Its future remains unwritten. So does the larger question surrounding it: whether a state famous for inventing what comes next can still build the physical places where that future will happen.

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California has spent decades inventing the future. California Forever is asking whether it can still build somewhere for that future to live.

California has spent decades inventing the future. California Forever is asking whether it can still build somewhere for that future to live.

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Building America independently documents people and projects worth following. Inclusion does not imply endorsement of or affiliation with Building America.

Building America independently documents people and projects worth following. Inclusion does not imply endorsement of or affiliation with Building America.