Utopia or Sprawl? Tech Group Pushes Plans for New Solano County City

For years, Solano County residents wondered who was secretly spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up family farms in their community. The rumors swirled: was Disney planning a new theme park? Was it some sort of Chinese government land-grab? In August, the mystery was solved: the New York Times reported that a group of tech moguls including billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and were making the purchases as part of a plan to build a city from scratch, on 50,000 acres of agricultural land. They’ve now gone public, under the name California Forever, and are promising to bring benefits like good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space. But many questions remain. In this hour of Forum, we’ll talk to the group’s CEO as well as one of the local lawmakers raising concerns about the plan.

Guests:

J.K. Dineen, Bay Area housing reporter, San Francisco Chronicle

Jan Sramek, Founder and CEO, California Forever

Catherine Moy, Mayor, Fairfield

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