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

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:07.2	Summer packages of three, four, or seven nights include hiking, mindfulness, and culinary adventures with farm-fresh ingredients.
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0:53.3	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Marisa Lagos and Formina Kim. Coming up on forum...
0:55.0	New A-10, we're learning more about plans to build a city in Solano County.
0:59.0	We now know the identity of the people who are buying up land around Travis Air Force Base.
1:03.0	So some really, really, really rich people began grabbing up thousands of acres.
1:07.0	It's not often that news from Northern California, Sleepy Solano County makes
1:11.6	international headlines, but that's exactly what happened in August when the story broke that a group
1:16.5	of tech billionaires have been secretly buying up tens of thousands of acres of farmland as part of a
1:22.1	plan to build a new city from scratch. We'll hear from the CEO of that group as well as a skeptical local
1:28.2	lawmaker and we'll take your questions. That's next after this news.
1:35.5	This is Forum. I'm Marisa Lagos and Vermina Kim. For years, Solano County residents wondered
	...

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