A lot of folks love California, with almost 40 million living in the state these days. Sure, I love the natural beauty of the beaches, the redwood forest, even the desert but I would not live there. One of my brothers lives in SOCAL and just to get around you have to reenact the old SNL sketch ‘The Californians’ where many convos’ begin with ‘Well, you’ve got to take the 105 to the 405 just to avoid the traffic to the …”. Traffic is hell in and around the big cities like San Diego, LA and San Francisco to name a few.  And let’s not even talk about property values and rental prices!

California Forever is not a tee shirt slogan of locals there. Instead it’s a private real estate development company that has purchased on the QT over 50,000 acres of agricultural land in Solano County for almost a trillion dollars. The company’s backers include venture capitalists and many Silicon Valley investors like the founder of LinkedIN, and founders or co-founders of companies like Sequoia Capital, Stripe, GitHub and Y Cominator. The site is about an hour on a good day drive northeast of San Francisco and is planned for a new development that would have a potential residential population of 400,000 residents over an area about two thirds the size of San Francisco. It would have a solar farm to feed electricity needs to the project, public parks, homes and commercial pads. Critics have claimed the initial designs (Mediterranean architecture, streetcars) were unrealistic and some compared the whole idea to the futuristic city of The Jetsons.  The land is right by Travis Air Force Base which has lit a fire from nearby residents and politicos who wonder about security issues with the project being so close to the base, water supplies to support the new city (much drought has been seen in the area) and lack of mass transit to get there.

Basically, the billionaires are buying out the farmers to build a utopian city, much like what folks thought Daybreak here was going to be once completed. The developers say it will offer walkable neighborhoods in a 78-square-mile site but much will have to go to the voters in the long run to make the area a reality as a new city with new housing opportunities. California has the same kind of housing shortage we face here in Utah. In 2023 housing affordability in California reached a 16-year low, with only about 16% of homebuyers able to purchase a median-priced single-family home, as per data from the California Association of Realtors. As of 2022, the population of Daybreak, Utah was estimated to be just under 44,000 people. When that project was announced there were plenty of naysayers, but it’s proven to be what homeowners wanted and Daybreak is a raving success, with more of it planned in future expansion.