Q & A with California Forever's Gabriel Metcalf

I’ve been interviewing interesting people in the urbanism space for over four years now (mostly over on Exasperated Infrastructures), and in the last few months I’ve taken a special interest in California Forever, a recent initiative to build a new city from whole cloth in Solano County, California. This type of development—often called greenfield development—is not a new idea; it’s where our first cities came from, necessarily. We’ve periodically tried to build new cities by fiat rather than by natural agglomeration of people—to various levels of success. Think: Canberra, Brasilia, Chandigarh. Also think: …where in the US has this idea been implemented at the city scale effectively? Our superstar cities are all products of time and weathering, our smaller urban centers could likely use some fresh ideas.

Gabriel Metcalf, California Forever’s Head of Planning, believes incremental successes with a project like California Forever could lay a new roadmap for the future of urban growth within our cities—and provide a blueprint for building a whole new suite of livable places across the US.

Mississippi Forever, indeed.

I recently spoke with Gabriel to learn more about what makes California Forever special and how the team is dedicated to building and earning trust after now having gone a few rounds with a skeptical public. Below you’ll find our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, length, and readability.

Gabriel Metcalf

I’m Gabriel Metcalf, and I am the Head of Planning for California Forever. 

I ran an urban policy think tank called SPUR for a long time where I worked on all kinds of policy issues from housing and transportation to economic development and climate change. I got to learn a lot about bringing planning ideals into the real world. I was then lucky enough to take a job in Sydney, [Australia] at the start of 2019 and got to run an organization called the Committee for Sydney for four years. We worked on similar issues as SPUR but for Australia's largest city. I came back at the start of 2023, to work on California Forever. 

The reason why I was so excited to take this role is that I have come to believe that urbanists need another tool in the toolbox for overcoming growth challenges in the superstar cities of America; the “great” American cities have pretty much all gotten super expensive. Something has gone wrong in our society and our political system that has made us unable to accommodate newcomers to our cities. Over time they have become increasingly “closed” by virtue of them being so expensive. 

All of the walkable urban fabric that exists today already existed in 1900, which is, in a sense, the root of many of the causes of this particular problem. The fact that we have been unable to create new walkable places, the fact that we have lost that art, has meant that we are we've created really intense competition for the urban places that do exist, and we've been unable to allow them to grow to remain open and affordable. We need to rediscover the lost art of building walkable places, again, and I'm really excited to be part of that work.

Sam Sklar 

Walkability seems to be the gold standard for a lot of transport and urban planners–it’s at the core of our values because everyone is a pedestrian before they’ll use other transport options. 

I want to address the elephant in the room here, and I know where a lot of the criticism has come from, that we've tried masterplanning cities from scratch in the past and recent past, even in the US, and there are ongoing projects across the globe, many in the Middle East on the Arabian Peninsula. 

What is the appeal of trying to start from a tabula rasa? Why California Forever…now?

Gabriel Metcalf 

New cities are not a new idea. In the British Town Planning tradition, since Ebenezer Howard wrote Garden Cities of To-Morrow, in the 1890s, “new town” planning has been a really important idea in Britain. Ebenezer Howard, incidentally, after he wrote the book, raised a fund, bought land and developed a new town–and then he did it again! He did it twice. Howard’s an extraordinary figure in the history of planning. 

Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and many Northern European countries also have a “new town” tradition that has been mixed in its outcomes, but over time has gotten pretty good. There are also of course the New Urbanists in the United States who have, on a much smaller scale in experimenting with “new” towns. So I think those are I think the British New Town movement and the New Urbanists in America are probably the most important precedents for California Forever. But we are trying to take what they did to a much larger scale with a much bigger focus on walkability. 

Cities grow organically over many years, and that’s what makes them so wonderful. Each generation adds in its bit, and we could never hope to compete with that. I cannot tell you that we have a way to come close to the magnificence of a New York or a San Francisco. But our belief is that there is a set of people who would choose walkable urbanism if they could get it at a lower price point. And so we think we can do a better job for those people than the other greenfield, suburban options that are available today. I think if you look at the plan we've proposed, we're not trying to over-plan things and design every last detail the way tabula rasa cities in the past, like, say, Brasilia [Brazil] have done. 

The real, and probably the most important planning precedent for California Forever, is the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, which outlines a street grid for Manhattan. What is so beautiful and so provocative about the street grid from 1811, is that over two centuries, over such profound changes in the economy and society, that street grid didn't change. 

A street grid is a framework for hundreds and thousands of people to come and build and it does not require you to know in advance what they're going to build. Our plan is that: it's not a tech city; it's not a utopia; it's not a smart city: it's just a city. And it's, in that sense, a very classically American city plan.

Sam Sklar

There are other examples of “new city” or “new neighborhood” development happening or ongoing concurrently to California Forever’s: Telosa [location TBD], the Culdesac neighborhood in Tempe, Arizona, The Villages in Florida, The Woodlands near Houston, Texas. They exist, or might, but they’re few and far between and as the sample size is small, do you find yourself drawing comparisons to these other places? What do you think you can draw from some concurrent developments from across the US?

Gabriel Metcalf 

In the same way that artists always draw ideas from other artists, city planners draw ideas from other cities. So absolutely. The block structure we are starting with is very related to Brooklyn’s–row houses on the long side, apartments and capped buildings on the short side. One key difference is it has an internal alley system for access to parking, bike parking, or an ADU that could be an independent address. 

That modified Brooklyn block proposal has been hybridized with something more resembling a Tokyo superblock where there are major streets that define a place and interior to those streets, there’s a very fine-grained, intimate scale of urban fabric. We have very much been influenced by the public space culture of European cities with very narrow streets. The internal public transit system is a grid of Bus-Rapid Transit lines, drawing on Curitiba, Brazil’s network and other Latin American ideas that have now spread all over the world. We've drawn on the work of thinkers like Jarrett Walker [Ed. The author of Human Transit and a transit planner who’s practice often focuses on bus network redesign among other solutions] and we’ve proposed a grid of transit rather than a hub-and-spoke system, which means you are one transfer away from anywhere to anywhere, a model that should work better for a full range of trips, not just traditionally commuting to an office downtown. 

The small parcel fabric that we are trying so hard to build is something that you see that in some of the most beloved neighborhoods, especially, new world neighborhoods in Toronto, Sydney, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston, where you'd see row houses–small parcel fabric–which is very different than the large five-over-one apartment buildings that are so common today . 

Sam Sklar 

Do you, then, find yourself either internally or externally being compared to the other new growth places in the US? These places have been either maligned or praised, depending on who’s critiquing. That said…where do you think that California Forever will succeed, where others may not? What's different?

Gabriel Metcalf

It's different to be planning a city than planning a development. We are laying a model and what we're proposing is to try and entitle the big area: build the enabling infrastructure, lay out a street grid, build out a glorious public realm, and then bring in other people to develop the buildings and not try to do the whole thing ourselves. It’s a framework for a lot of different people to contribute a lot of different ideas about what a city is today. That's the big lesson that we're learning and why I think we have a shot at turning this into a really wonderful place. Over the decades, it should become more and more interesting, and maybe a thousand years from now, it won't matter so much that it started two hundred years later than some of the great cities today.

Sam Sklar

So I guess the other elephant in the room when people talk about new growth is: why not just invest in cities that we have today. Why not just take this investment–this big fund–and focus on enhancing the places that we already have, like nearby Stockton.

Gabriel Metcalf

We should absolutely be doing infill development. We should absolutely be doing suburban retrofits. I would say that's what most people are working on in the urban space. And it's what I've worked on most of my career, too. 

I would simply submit the idea that another tool in the toolbox would help. California is 4 million homes behind, maybe more. We could be 10 percent of the solution. We've got to do all of the above.

Sam Sklar

There are a lot of people in my position that are skeptical about spreading ourselves too thin. With the limited amount of money that we have, we should be focusing on enhancing the places that we already have. Here’s how I’m reading your answer: why dismiss it out of hand, because it's something different? Just because it necessarily hasn't worked in a way that traditional planning has prescribed so far, doesn't mean it can't in the future. That’s a helpful way to frame what California Forever is about. 

People need to start seeing. Once people see that this model can work in a way where it's responsive to the needs of a community, and responsive to the population that will have self-selected to move to this new place, it can be a model that can be recontextualized elsewhere.

Another question people might have: how are the investors involved in the day-to-day operations?  There’s so much money involved, from some pretty high-profile players, including Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs, Reid Hoffman, and other Silicon Valley scions, all organized by California Forever founder, Jan Sramek. 

Gabriel Metcalf

As my experience has been, they're not involved at all. Jan founded this company and raised the money and I'm sure he talks to the investors a lot. But I have been completely insulated from that and just try to design the best city I can.

Sam Sklar

So there's no whisper or expectation that you're supposed to build something toward what the silent partners would want.

Gabriel Metcalf

I've had zero interaction. 

Sam Sklar

There should be a firewall there and I'm glad that there is. 

What are some of the challenges that you foresaw when you took this job and how have you worked to overcome them? Getting from zero to one must have been something else.

Gabriel Metcalf

Jan did something pretty extraordinary by articulating a vision in a way where he could raise the money, and then go out and do land assembly: that brought it from zero to one and made sure there would be a project to work on. I joined after that. The challenge we're working on now is trying to put forward a high-level plan and trying to get permission to move forward and build it out. 

Those happen together: trying to get through the approval process and trying to develop the plan. 

I know you're going to ask about transportation. Figuring out our internal transportation thesis and our external transportation thesis are obvious, big challenges. Coming to understand the site as it is–because no site is a tabula rasa–trying to really ground the planning work in the landscape and in the climate is where a lot of the magic happens.

Sam Sklar

The land acquisition was one of the media’s sticking points. People, Californians, locals had a not-unfounded reaction to the land acquisition being cobbled together without really letting the community know what was going on with it. What do you think the organization learned from that process? And how are they applying a learned value differently, going forward?

Gabriel Metcalf

I can really understand how people started out feeling distrustful, because we acquired the land without talking about what we wanted to do with it in advance. And so I think the most important thing we need to do now is earn people's trust. 

I hope people can understand that, as a practical matter, if you're doing site assembly, you probably have to do it without broadcasting what you're doing in advance. 

Sam Sklar

Once one landowner knows what you're doing, they hold all sorts of leverage and can pretty much derail a plan to build out an aggregate site.

Gabriel Metcalf

I am guessing that this is the only way to do a big site assembly is to keep your cards pretty close to your chest.

Sam Sklar

You can understand how people would feel blindsided, that there is now a big site that people don't know what it’s for. They put roots down, and the new development could totally change what their expectation was when they bought nearby 10, 15, or 20 years ago.

Gabriel Metcalf

I can totally understand why people feel distrustful and why we've got so much work to do to earn their trust.

Sam Sklar 

Let's get into the transportation here. Can you talk about the dimensions of the site and how you envision it being connected? Let's talk first about getting to and from the site. Who are the partners that you would expect and what’s the plan to make sure California Forever is connected to its region?

Gabriel Metcalf 

Inherent in a new town strategy is that the land is less expensive, but the infrastructure is more expensive, because you have to build new infrastructure and we have to build all of it. 

One reason why transportation is a little more complicated than some kinds of infrastructure is because it's so institutionally fragmented. We need a lot of different agencies to agree to give us permission to connect to the roads or rail. 

The voter initiative requires us to provide a right of way for future rail should that ever become possible; if it were to become possible, it'd be part of a bigger regional move. What we are really going to rely on in terms of the external connection is a rapid shuttle service, meaning buses. We're going to have a “Grand Central Station,” if you will, a central transit station downtown. We'll have a rapid corridor to get people in and out of the city. And then we will be running shuttle buses to Caltrain and BART, to other cities in Solano County, and then to other cities in the Bay Area. Generally, the idea is that as the population grows, the frequencies and the destinations grow, as well. And I think we are going to end up operating what is one of the larger transit operations in the Bay Area.

Sam Sklar 

You want as part of the plan for California Forever to have its own transit system that's not necessarily related to any of the existing ones?

Gabriel Metcalf 

It will either be that we operate it or we fund Solano County to operate it, whichever.

Sam Sklar 

Do you have a preference?

Gabriel Metcalf 

Not yet. 

Sam Sklar 

The challenge here is: what does the phasing look like for building this out? Do you build connectivity first and then build the land use around it the mobility or do you build or allocate the land uses and then leave room for the transit corridor and build that out eventually? 

Gabriel Metcalf

The transportation infrastructure diagram will end up looking like a stair step, where over time we add capacity, and that supports a bigger population, for both car capacity and transit capacity, over time.

The single best answer for external transportation is making the new community a job engine so that a bunch of people can live and work in the same community. And a bunch of people can commute from outside the community to jobs in the new community in a reverse commute direction, where there's a lot of latent capacity. 

Land use drives transportation more than transportation drives land use. The economic development part of this proposal is the most profound and most important solution for external transportation. 

Sam Sklar

Can you talk to the vision of what success looks like, over short, medium, and long term? 

Gabriel Metcalf

Success, first of all, is that we create a really wonderful community that people love living in, all different kinds of people from all different walks of life. Second, success means that we have created a new economic engine for Solano County that is supporting the prosperity of the whole county. Third, success means that we've helped make housing in California a bit more affordable. And fourth, success means that we are helping reinvent the way greenfield development in America happens.

Sam Sklar

How will you know if it's successful? What are the measurements that you're going to use to determine and be able to say that this project has achieved its goals?

Gabriel Metcalf

Each one of those has some metrics that flow from it.

Sam Sklar

I'm not sure if it's totally necessary to list them here. What I was hoping you were going to say is that there's going to be a transparent process with an open dialogue about what's working and what's not. 

Gabriel Metcalf

The great thing about actually getting to build this new community is that it will, it will be a real thing people can come and study, and talk about what turned out well and what mistakes we made; what went as expected and what turned out not the way we expected. 

It's easy to say in advance, “This plan is walkable.” But after it's built, people can come and see: are people really walking? The disciples of Jan Gehl can come and do pedestrian counts and see how we're doing at creating public life. If we're lucky enough to get to actually build this community, I hope it will be the source of endless study on how it actually turned out.

Sam Sklar

What will change people's minds–we can talk endlessly about the plan, we can talk about the politics–people have to see the first block. What does the timeline look like? When are you hoping to get some demonstration ideas onto the ground?

Gabriel Metcalf

If we win the election in November this year [Ed. The ballot measure], you know, the next step is a full Environmental Impact Report and working toward a development agreement with the County Board of Supervisors. The earliest that could be done would be early 2026.

Sam Sklar

That’s not decades away–that’s soon!

Gabriel Metcalf

I assume there would be some more process after that, but I'd like to believe we're building sooner than five years from now.

Sam Sklar

Yeah. So I guess how do you keep people’s nose to the grindstone here? How do you keep people's attention and the momentum going?

Gabriel Metcalf

This idea is so compelling that if we are able to secure permission to build I think there's going to be a lot of momentum behind this.

Sam Sklar

Small wins, right? 

Gabriel Metcalf

Small wins.

Sam Sklar is a Partner Writer for Resident Urbanist. Sam is a transportation planner and writer. He's worked on projects all over the world that focus on safety, dignity, economic development, and environmental sustainability. For this publication his focus is on transportation and infrastructure policy. Sam graduated with a Master's in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design and a Bachelor's from Boston University's Questrom School of Business. He also runs the Exasperated Infrastructures blog. You can follow him on Twitter, Threads, and LinkedIn.