The futuristic US city being planned by tech billionaires

Real estate corporation California Forever has a bold vision to create San Francisco 2.0 but can the developers convince sceptical voters to see the light? Josh Marcus investigates

- Josh Marcus

A group of tech billionaires has a bold plan to beat the cost of living crisis in San Francisco: build a whole new city from scratch. But the group faces an uphill battle this November to convince locals that it’s time to create SF 2.0.

The plan is the brainchild of Jan Sramek, a tech entrepreneur and former Wall Street trader. Growing up in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s, America represented a place of unbridled hope. His country was in the early days of defining its new, post-communist era, and the US was a vision of what the future might hold.

“To me, the US was always this place of optimism and opportunity,” Sramek told The Independent. “We just defeated the Soviets. The economy was doing well.” That made Northern California, which was becoming the centre of the nascent dotcom world, “the most optimistic place in the most optimistic country in the world,” he added.

Sramek eventually moved to the Bay Area in the 2010s, and by then, the picture looked considerably different. The tech economy was still booming, but San Francisco was becoming one of the most unaffordable places in the nation to live and struggled with a growing population of unhoused people. Residents of the Bay Area began pelting private buses for Google employees with rocks. The social fabric was clearly beginning to tear.

Something had to change to keep the Bay Area’s diversity, cultural openness and economic dynamism. Sramek thought he had a key part of the solution: build a new city from the ground up, reversing decades of sluggish construction in the Bay Area. Since 2017, Sramek and a group of blue chip Silicon Valley investors, operating under the name California Forever, have been pursuing a plan to construct a new city on farmland in Solano County, between San Francisco and Sacramento.