Some say it was the Gold Rush and others the Golden Age of cinema, but no one really knows how the California Dream came about. Didion and Kerouac wrote reams on the subject; Steinbeck portrayed it as a place of boundless potential, replete with fertile valleys, an endless coastline, and trees far as the eye can see. Snap back to reality, and anyone who’s witnessed California’s warts can tell you that life there is just as much Grapes of Wrath as it is East of Eden. From pollution to homelessness to wildfires to drought, the Golden State has, by many measures, lost its luster, leading some to believe that, like the American Dream, California’s might also be fizzling out.

Few people have dedicated more time, money, and effort to resurrecting the state’s past glory than 36-year-old Jan Sramek, founder and CEO of Flannery Associates, the corporation with designs to develop a large tract of California’s Solano County into a town, so named California Forever, from scratch. Since 2017—with the help of billionaires Laurene Powell Jobs, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, and others of their ilk—Sramek has been secretly buying agricultural land, accumulating at least 50,000 acres to the tune of $900 million. His proposal is nothing if not ambitious: A walkable community (unthinkable by most in California) of an initial 20,000 homes—and eventually as many as 400,000 people—just northeast of San Francisco that includes its own roads, parks, schools, offices, restaurants, and public transit, with wind and solar farms to boot. “In California,” Sramek told reporters months ago when explaining the impetus for the idea, “we have dug ourselves into such a deficit in terms of housing. We can deliver a big solution to the problem.”

If you have any doubts about the feasibility of this project, you’re in good company. Plenty of ink has been spilled on the myriad obstacles sure to arise when it comes to permitting, water, traffic, weatherization, city culture, and environmental protection. That’s also to say nothing of the $510 million lawsuit Sramek filed back in May, accusing about 40 Solano farmers of price-fixing their land, which they’ve adamantly denied. However, the most daunting challenge for Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader whose surreptitious venture was exposed by The New York Times last August, will be procuring ballot approval from a community hardly predisposed to trust him.

The reason for this is simple: If affordable housing in the Bay Area is dying, then the birth of Silicon Valley was its grim reaper. When companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple first migrated to the region as part of the dot-com bubble of the ’90s and early aughts, they were riding on such an overwhelming wave of techno-optimism that it was hard to appreciate what damage would be left in its wake. It was a period of “irrational exuberance,” Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who predicted the subsequent crash, wrote in 2000, warning that the market was investing “too much in business start-ups and expansions, and too little in infrastructure, education, and other forms of human capital.” As the tech craze continued, the cultural consequences bore out: The gradual influx of well-educated and highly-paid workers led to the housing boom, the widespread razing of older developments, and the displacement of longtime dwellers in San Francisco, Oakland, and Palo Alto, fueling an epidemic of gentrification scarcely seen before in America. (Earning $104,000 a year in San Francisco now qualifies you as “low-income.”)

It’s unnerving to many that a coterie of tech billionaires, whose business escapades have contributed to California’s housing crisis, would now consider themselves uniquely qualified to fix it. But such is the god complex of tech titans, whose plagues and panaceas arrive and depart with Biblical cyclicity. For instance, where social media engenders and exploits the crisis of American loneliness, scores of mental health start-ups are now proffering chatbots and “virtual communities” to ease the pain. Where AI opened a Pandora’s box for plagiarism and financial fraud, tech entrepreneurs are now in a mad dash to develop software that can detect all manner of both, setting off what will no doubt be an AI evasion-detection arms race with no end in sight.

The ills of Silicon Valley, in other words, are not just iterative but recursive. Therefore, it’s reasonable to worry that California Forever will only exacerbate the problems it’s trying to solve. In the county’s largest city, Vallejo, the median house price ($515,500) and household income ($86,112) pale in comparison to those of San Francisco ($1.34 million and $136,689, respectively). It also remains one of California’s most racially diverse towns with sizable Black and Hispanic populations, as opposed to the Golden City, which has seen a marked decrease in Black residents, a possible harbinger of things to come. But it’s only a matter of time before places like Vallejo become the region’s last bastions of affordability, enticing outpriced residents in the East Bay, a phenomenon that already appears to be underway. And it goes without saying that California Forever—which would carve out $200 million to “revitalize” Solano’s cities and add another that Sramek has favorably compared to the (highly gentrified) West Village in New York or Georgetown in DC—might only douse more fuel onto that fire.

Though unprecedented as it may seem, Sramek’s proposal for a new city is far from the first of its kind. Back in 2008, Peter Thiel cofounded the Seasteading Institute, which aims to construct a crypto-loving, tax-hating town off the coast of French Polynesia, where it would float on seaborne platforms that call to mind renderings of the lost Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. In a similar vein, billionaire Marc Lore is pursuing the proposed community of Telosa, envisioning a 240-square-mile metropolis that would shine as a beacon of “reformed” capitalism, complete with autonomous EVs, high-speed transit, solar roofing, and a massive skyscraper. Remarkably, Lore and Thiel’s are just a few among the many proposed techno-utopias that have surfaced; others in the mix include Spectra, Neom, Praxis, and Painted Rock. The notion of master-planning the platonic ideal of a city has, as The New York Times reports, “been bouncing around the meetings and salon parties of Silicon Valley’s tech elite for years.”

But Sramek, an avowed Ayn Rand enthusiast and a Wall Street wunderkind who once described his own life as a “sprint towards excellence,” has taken the idea and indeed sprinted with it like no other, quietly securing funding and a vast expanse of land over half a decade—all while (until recently) keeping the county in the dark. That last part has been a major sticking point. No great city (not even Rand’s own Galt’s Gulch) has been built without some amount of discrete planning. But Sramek’s especially cloak-and-dagger acquisition tactics—which Solano farmers have said are equivalent to “divide-and-conquer”—have understandably roiled residents. “It’s the secrecy,” one told the San Francisco Standard at a town hall hosted by California Forever last November. “I think it nullifies the whole point here of them trying to be open about it.”

It’s not just locals who feel smarted: One US congressman from California, Mike Thompson, vehemently opposed to California Forever, maintains that Flannery, the investor group heading the project, “violated the trust of the public.” Leaders of the Sierra Club have similarly called California Forever a “hostile takeover” that openly defies the voter-approved uses of land. “We do not see any advantages to the project,” said a board member representing the group’s county chapter. “The only thing we see is billionaires getting richer.”

California Forever, for its part, told Vanity Fair that its stealthy buying spree was aimed at preventing a “reckless short-term land speculation that would have stopped us from proposing a well-thought-out design for the new community.” It also hoped to dispel any notion that it’s undermining the will of the public: “We published the full plan in January. The initiative spells out very clearly what the proposal is, and includes ten voter guarantees to ensure accountability,” a company spokesperson added. “We’re taking this project directly to voters for their approval in the most open and transparent way: by putting it on the ballot in November.”

Whatever the case may be, the idea that some of America’s most affluent would seek to erect a new city on agricultural land without consulting democratically-elected representatives—and then suing some of the county’s most storied members—is enough to make anyone feel queasy. The project’s 30-year horizon may seem more exhaustive than your average VC-bloated start-up angling for a quick and easy egress. But Sramek’s business tactics feel eerily familiar. Consider, for instance, those of Uber: Instead of introducing ride-sharing to cities through open communication and collaboration, the company has quietly foisted fleets of drivers onto them through labor practices that some have seen as running afoul of the state constitution—and then strong-arms regulators to help them with the fallout. Incidentally, it was in California that posed the first major hurdle to Uber’s business model in 2019, when it passed a bill that classified gig workers as employees with benefits and protections. In response, Uber and its peers mounted a ballot initiative, Proposition 22, to legally enshrine its employees as independent contractors. Naturally, with the help of other ride-sharing companies, the company poured $200 million into a propaganda blitz that swayed customers and drivers to vote against their own interests, ultimately preserving the status quo.

Of course, Flannery too will have its own day in the court of democracy. Approval of the city is slated to go up for a vote in November, so long as its backers secure at least 13,000 signatures from county voters by June, granting Sramek a decent window of time to win them over. He’s already held numerous town halls; dispatched signature-collectors who have reportedly “misinformed” voters about their cause; released sleek, though almost certainly AI-generated, renderings of the city; and recently put out a TV ad featuring people, who are presumably Solano residents, asking questions about the city’s impact. (In response to claims they misinformed voters, California Forever released a statement saying, “The signature gatherers are provided a fact sheet that presents very clearly what the proposed measure would do.”) Flannery has also apparently begun poll-testing residents to assess voter sentiment—a tactic that Uber also employed, even pressuring riders and drivers with in-app notifications threatening longer waits and higher prices if Prop 22 failed. Only time will tell if similar skulduggery is in store for Solano. But it’s safe to assume that illustrations, ads, and polls are probably just the tip of the PR iceberg floating its way. “We’re going to spend as much as we need to win,” Sramek promised in January, adding, “I’m going to make this happen no matter what.” Such determination may have something to do with the Randian aphorism he held dearly in his younger years: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

Most tech start-ups are similar in that they fail within years. Some hang on for a while, peddling products of limited value until cash flow dries up. However, the tiny slice of start-ups in Silicon Valley that balloon into stratospherically successful, multibillion-dollar enterprises generally have one thing in common: They don’t promise new products so much as new paradigms. Hence, how the word “disruption” has become the industry’s eye-roll-inducing ethos.

Interestingly, you likely won’t see that word appear in California Forever’s marketing materials. “We want to build a city of yesterday,” Sramek said last September. “It’s very traditional, good American urbanism.” But therein lies the contradiction between Sramek’s ends and means: To the extent that “good American urbanism” has ever really happened, then, sure, California Forever could become a paragon. After all, its ambitions and design sense hardly smack of the neoliberal cartoonishness envisioned by Thiel or Lore. However, when it comes to expanding affordable housing, there isn’t anything “traditional” about plopping an entirely new town into a county of nine others. “We can all agree that more housing is needed,” Sadie Wilson, an activist and land-use planner helping lead an effort to oppose the venture, said during one town hall. “Why don’t they put their billions into building housing in existing communities that already have infrastructure instead of developing open space?”

It’s a fair query, especially in the Bay Area, where the infrastructure is abundant: Over a third of San Francisco’s office space sits vacant as some 35,000 Bay Area residents are homeless on any given night. (In San Francisco alone as of 2021, there were almost twice as many empty homes as unhoused people in the Bay’s nine counties combined.) The estimated cost of permanently eliminating homelessness in the Bay is $12.7 billion—about a quarter of the combined net worth of California Forever’s publicly known investors. Meanwhile, the proposed city’s price tag could be significantly higher, as investors have already spent about $1 billion, with no actual development. None of this is to say that the Golden State’s housing crisis could suddenly be cured by dint of blank checks from billionaires. But, from the outside, a little philanthro-capitalism would seem much easier than pursuing an imaginary city that would-be residents might very well decide should stay imaginary.

If the last several decades have taught us anything about big tech, it’s that comfort and convenience are almost always a devil’s bargain. The bargain, of course, is technology’s insidious creep into every facet of our lives: Got a smart TV? Here’s a smartphone. Got a smart car? Here’s a smart home. One might see California Forever as the terminus of this pervasion. However, cultivating a city is not like designing a shiny new phone, car, or TV—things that are physically complete upon arrival. It’s a piecemeal production, a living, breathing thing, the dynamism of which unfolds over decades if not centuries. A city is “an empty signifier,” as economic geographer David Harvey writes. “Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning.” If California Forever intends to survive as long as its name suggests, it should consider showing more deference to those who could make it mean something.