The scrappy resistance looking to block Big Tech's urbanist utopia

VALLEJO, California — A scrappy resistance of farmers, small-town mayors and recent college graduates are set to take on one of the most well-funded, highly staffed local ballot campaigns in American history.

After an initiative that would transform the wheat fields 50 miles northwest of San Francisco into a futuristic city qualified for the ballot on Tuesday, this unlikely group now serves as the primary roadblock to a utopian dream of Bay Area tech investors and venture capitalists intent on remaking northern California in their own image.

“The question is what they can do that will make them more than the sum of their parts,” Robb Korinke, the founder of a California political consultancy specializing in grassroots campaigns around the state, said of the opposition. “At the end of the day if you’re up against a well-organized effort, you can't just go on Nextdoor and pop off.”

The plan, backed by the co-founders of LinkedIn and Netscape, is run by the one-time chief strategist for John McCain, a former state cabinet secretary to Arnold Schwarzenegger and leaders of Kamala Harris’s presidential super PAC.

Developers frequently run into defiance from residents fearing changes in the character of their area and real-estate interests usually have a resource advantage over opponents. But rarely is the industry group replaced by a coalition of wealthy outsiders with no track record in development, and rarely is the battleground a place like semi-rural Solano County, which observers describe as “politically sleepy” and unaccustomed to combative campaigns.

The California Forever project, a soaring moniker for the could-be city, delivered an adrenaline shock to that languid political environment over the past year even before qualifying for the ballot ahead of the November election.

In just the first three months of this year, the group spent approximately $2 million on its campaign, blanketing the area with television, social media and billboard ads and dispensing more than $500,000 in “community grants” to nonprofits. Last week, the group pledged to build a “top-notch” sports complex in the county. Those commitments are a precursor to an expected tens of millions of dollars in further spending by a campaign that has already brought national media attention to an area unmemorably sandwiched between San Francisco and Sacramento.

California Forever declined an interview for this article.

The unusual campaign is a testament both to the durability of the prevailing narrative surrounding California’s existing cities (crime-ridden, expensive and housing-depleted) and to how far investors are willing to push the Silicon Valley’s move-fast-and-break-things ethos into new realms. California Forever is pitching a fresh start in the midst of a housing crisis that is a top concern for California voters and an increasing focus of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. But first the group has to sell prospective neighbors on its vision.

“They have the money, they have the political connections on a broader level. But the strategy they have is a massive mistake,” said Aiden Mayhood, a 23-year-old county resident who volunteers for the informal opposition coalition known as Solano Together. “They’re treating this as a statewide issue, but it’s not — it’s a local issue.”

Led by the Greenbelt Alliance, a regional nonprofit dedicated to preserving open space, the Solano Together coalition has grown to include hundreds of individuals and groups as varied as the Farm Bureau, county Republican party, and Climate Reality Project. Although the Greenbelt Alliance was able to bankroll a survey showing that 70 percent of Solano County residents would vote against the project, the coalition is now fundraising to hire a part-time communications fellow who would be the campaign’s only paid employee.

'Here’s the plan'

Raised on a ranch in the Montezuma hills along the Sacramento River, Mayhood first learned of the development that could transform the area when his neighbors started getting sued.

Beginning in 2018, there had been whispers of land deals that were many times above market rate, as a masked group known only as “Flannery Associates” bought thousands of acres of land in an agricultural area east of Fairfield, the county seat. A handful of family-run ranches who refused to sell faced lawsuits and accusations of collusion from Flannery, which became the county’s largest property owner. Mayhood’s grandfather is now one of the few landholders remaining in the area, which could soon sprout a cluster of rowhouses, restaurants and bars.

Last year, the purpose of the scattered transactions was publicly laid bare for the first time in August. By the time the company was outed as a group of Silicon Valley-based venture capitalists and investors with plans to build a new community, few locals had any reason to trust the group and its plans for the county. For months, rumors had swirled that a foreign adversary was buying the land to spy on the nearby air force base. Silicon Valley tech money, it turned out, was not much of an upgrade.

When Mayhood heard of the development plans, he decided to join California Forever’s community advisory board. But he quickly grew disillusioned by the project, suspecting that the board existed more to give the appearance of community involvement than a sincere effort to solicit input from residents. He became active on social media, writing about the significance of the land to his family and others as he encouraged his neighbors to voice their opposition at public meetings.

Solano is a tough place for utopian visionaries. Although the 400,000-person county has outpaced the state in producing new homes, it has a decades-long history of regulating development outside of its existing urban enclaves. When in 1984 the San Francisco real estate developer Hiram Woo tried to create a new town called Manzanita, a citizen watchdog group known as the Orderly Growth Committee organized to block the effort. After successfully defeating the plans, the group brought a measure to the ballot that would preempt future encroachments across the county. That plan, widely popular and last renewed in 2008, still governs development and today serves as a major roadblock to designs for a new city.

The California Forever vision is for a semi-dense, new-urbanist style community with walkable neighborhoods, tree-lined streets, a “main street”-style downtown and public transit. Developers show renderings of a community with public parks and amenities, schools at the heart of the neighborhood and easy access to everything from grocery stores to bike paths.

To build it, developers could have attempted to win exceptions to the orderly growth plan through the county’s board of supervisors, likely haggling parcel-by-parcel with elected officials over how neighborhoods would be developed. But California Forever chose to bypass that route, and instead proposed amending the county’s zoning code to provide special exceptions for their development.

“They just walked in and said ‘Here’s the plan’,” said former county supervisor Duane Kromm, who co-founded the Orderly Growth Committee and remains active in its work. That left the developers to pursue their desired changes via a ballot measure, which would rewrite the zoning code to classify 17,500 acres of land from “agricultural” to “new community” with a total capacity of 160,000 units and 400,000 residents – roughly the population of Tampa, Florida. In September 2023, California Forever announced it would begin gathering signatures to place the question on the November 2024 ballot.

Kromm’s Orderly Growth Committee joined forces with the Greenbelt Alliance, a veteran of countless land-use battles, to form Solano Together. Their partnership remains informal, with no legal status and leaning heavily on the Greenbelt Alliance’s existing 20-person staff and infrastructure as it recruits other allied organizations and courts support from local elected officials.

“They have to run a serious campaign,” said Dave Metz, the research partner and president of FM3 who conducts Solano Together’s polls. “They’re undoubtedly doing that.”

The campaign has alighted on an outsiders-versus-local message, but it is unlikely there will be a budget for paid media to reach the approximately 200,000 voters expected to cast ballots in November. Solano Together has yet to file any campaign-finance disclosures, and a Greenbelt Alliance official declined to share how much the coalition had raised, only acknowledging they had “a long way to go” and needed “a good chunk” of money just for basic communications like newsletters and informational pamphlets.

Mayhood was one of the first to sign up for the Solano Together coalition, and with little training now spends weekends manning a Solano Together table at local festivals and farmers markets. It is the core element in a campaign reliant on grassroots organizing and word-of-mouth to cheaply spread its message.

“I’m treating this as my second job right now,” said Mayhood, who works full-time as an audit associate at the international accounting firm Price Waterhouse Cooper. “That’s the amount of involvement I need to feel comfortable that we’ll win this.”

Mayhood was drawn to the cause foremost to stop Solano County from being taken advantage of by wealthy interests, but his fellow couple dozen volunteers have landed there for a range of other reasons. Some are concerned about what the new development would mean for traffic on their daily commutes. Others worry about the impact it would have on existing cities, threatened species and seasonal wetland habitat known as vernal pools.

“This is bipartisan, across the county, across age and ethnicity lines,” said Sadie Wilson, the Greenbelt Alliance’s director of planning and research. “If people are against it, they are against it for so many different reasons.”

That broad opposition is Solana Forever’s greatest asset, but with an amateur campaign unable to centralize its communications that could also prove a source of weakness. County Republican officials and Sierra Club activists are not likely to see eye-to-eye on message strategy. A rancher concerned about the death of family farms might be turned off by a door-knocking environmentalist concerned with species preservation.

“Their message is fundamentally ‘no,” said Korinke, “but there are other messages underneath.”

The butterfly effect

At the recent Bay Area Butterfly Festival, held in a defunct coal depot on Mare Island, Mayhood joined a handful of other Solano Together volunteers in a preview of their coming ballot campaign.

Inside, butterfly enthusiasts walked beside the thin channel of water separating the old naval base from Vallejo, Solano’s largest city with about 125,000 residents. A local band and a smattering of taco trucks bookended the event, which was filled with booths manned by pollinator and gardening organizations. Mayhood stood with other volunteers beside a Solano Together table, approaching people as they paid the entrance fee and had their hands stamped.

Although Mayhood’s pitch primarily focuses on the impact the development would have on local quality-of-life concerns, other volunteers at the event were quick to call it a “billionaire land grab.” It is a common characterization that California Forever disputes, pointing to the tens of thousands of residents that signed their petition, and the “dozens” of Solano residents who work at their company, including their CEO and their head of partnerships.

“Over 20,000 Solano residents signed the petition to put the plan on the ballot. Hundreds of Solano residents have publicly endorsed the plan on our website,” a spokesperson for California Forever said in a statement.

But it did not matter much. Volunteers barely had to start their spiel against the new city before learning that festival attendees shared their disapproval. Many readily accepted the one-page informational fact-sheet offered to them; a few snapped pictures of a QR code linked to a donation site. Only a handful of people had not heard of California Forever at all.

“People know in May stuff that usually they wouldn’t learn until Labor day,” said Bob Berman, a Solano Together volunteer.

Solano Together is counting on voters’ familiarity, even overexposure, to the well-funded, professional campaign to help keep its own improvised coalition intact. “One of the reasons they don’t like this is it's funded by very wealthy people outside of the community,” said Metz. “When you have glossy ads, it reinforces that idea.”

California Together appears to be acknowledging that predicament. In April, the organization reintroduced itself as the East Solano Plan, attempting to distance the project from the bad press of the early process and align its name with its title on the November ballot.

Soon after the rezoning initiative is certified this week, the Solano County Board of Supervisors will have to hold public meetings to consider it. In a nightmare scenario, the board could vote to accept the petition on the basis of its signatures, without ever putting it on the ballot. Solano Together plans to field a heavy presence at those meetings to prevent that from happening.

However unlikely, those potential outcomes are part of a broader anxiety that as Kromm put it, those who have “a boatload of money” typically get what they want. Even if the ballot measure fails, Solano Together leaders fear that their resistance is just the beginning of a yearslong effort to combat the new city in courts, in the legislature and on the ballot. California Forever has even begun hiring lobbyists at the state level.

“This is a story about who gets to make decisions and who has power,” said Wilson. “We’re prepared to keep campaigning on this.”