☀️ A California dream that should come true
Neom, Saudi Arabia’s sci-fi megacity, shows what happens when visions outstrip reality. California Forever shows what’s possible when they don’t — if the state's degrowth politics don’t smother it
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
Neom was meant to be Mohammed bin Salman’s glittering, steel-and-glass proof that Saudi Arabia could vault from petrostate to sci-fi superstate. The centerpiece of the desert megaproject would be The Line — a 100-mile, 1,500-foot-tall mirrored megacity designed to house 9 million residents.
But MBS’s dream is set to be erased by unyielding financial math rather than the unceasing desert winds. As a recent Financial Times piece notes, projected costs have ballooned from an official $1.6 trillion to internal estimates of $4.5 trillion, scaring off foreign investors as construction has slowed to a crawl. Today the site holds little more than some giant pilings, empty trenches, and a shrinking ambition now reduced to maybe finishing a few sections of the sideways skyscraper.
From the FT:
While Neom employees say that much of The Line might still be technically buildable, they are not convinced anyone is ready to pay for it. Construction work across Neom has slowed, with the desert ski resort Trojena, the intended venue for the 2029 Asian Winter Games, one of the few sites still moving ahead at pace. Neom says that the attention has now moved to “the complex engineering and detailed design work associated with the first phase” of The Line. But one former employee has said that everyone knows the project won’t work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently.
So Neom might endure in some more limited form, but the grandiose Line looks set to become a grand folly undone by engineering limits, money, and time. “I think as a thought experiment, great,” said one urban planning expert who works in Saudi Arabia. “But don’t build thought experiments.”
A Californian long shot — but not a fantasy
Keep Neom in mind when thinking about the critics of California Forever, the billionaire-backed effort to build an entirely new, master-planned city for up to 400,000 people on 15,000 acres of grazing land in Solano County, roughly an hour northeast of San Francisco. Granted: It’s hard not to view the project as a long-shot endeavor. Building new cities isn’t something America still does. The last major one was Irvine, California, incorporated back in 1971. And since then, California has earned its reputation as a place where it’s hard to build, except in cyberspace.
But although The New York Times is correct to call California Forever “big and audacious” in a new piece, it isn’t a multi-trillion dollar megaproject of a scale never before attempted. It’s more akin to something we used to do quite often. And its failure could reasonably be interpreted as a another unfortunate sign that America is a deeply unserious nation.
The plan itself offers lots of reason for optimism. The current proposed incarnation reads like someone at California Forever has been binge-reading urban planner Alain Bertaud. The former chief urban planner of New York City, longtime World Bank urbanist, and author of Order Without Design, argues that cities are labor markets before they are anything else. They thrive when they maximize mobility and access to jobs and falter when planners impose grand visions or aesthetic ideals divorced from how people actually behave and what they actually desire.
From housing pitch to jobs engine
Seen through that lens, what the NYT piece portrays as California Forever’s strategic pivot from homes to jobs seems telling.1 For its part, however, California Forever argues there was no pivot, noting that the very first version of its website talked about jobs as a first principle: “Create good paying local jobs, and paths to get those jobs, for Solano’s residents.”
At the center is the proposed “Solano Foundry,” an advanced manufacturing zone meant to attract defense, aerospace, and shipbuilding firms, aided by proximity to Travis Air Force Base. As I read Bertaud, this sort of thing is a necessary starting point. A city without a functioning labor market is not a city. It is a decorative bedroom community stranded inside a commuting nightmare.
California Forever’s transportation plan pushes even further in a Bertaudian direction. It argues that Northern California already operates as a single megaregion and that Solano County, stuck between Sacramento and Silicon Valley, endures some of the worst commutes in America.
The solution, the developers insist, is that by bringing jobs, shops, services, and daily necessities into the new community, residents won’t have to drive long distances on already overburdened highways. Many people will live and work in the same place, work from home part-time, or commute in reverse of the Bay Area rush — using spare highway capacity rather than adding to peak congestion.
The real test ahead
But will the economic merits of the plan be overwhelmed by politics? A recent Arena story about the project suggests California Forever is now entering its most perilous phase.
The current plan calls for nearby Suisun City to annex roughly 23,000 acres of the project’s land — an administrative maneuver that would fold part of California Forever into an existing municipality and bring it under Suisun’s planning authority.
This detour sidesteps direct democracy, but whether approved by ballot measure or by Suisun City, the project still must get through California’s regulatory labyrinth — an immense environmental review, a procession of state-agency permits and, hanging over it all, the uncertainties of a gubernatorial transition in 2026. Yikes
We’ll see what happens. Jan Sramek, California Forever’s CEO concedes that environmental lawsuits “are likely to slow things down somewhat.” But it would be a terrible sign if delay turns into defeat — not on the economic merits, but because California’s machinery of anti-growth process, process, process once again proves stronger than its appetite for pro-growth progress.
UPDATE: I added California Forever’s disagreement with media accounts that suggested the project pivoted to emphasizing jobs over homes as the main selling point.
Initially, the project met fierce resistance. A ballot measure collapsed. Local critics denounced the secretive land purchases and labeled the idea an “oligarch city,” as the NYT reported in its piece.
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