Dear Solarpunk Presents… Is It Solarpunk When Billionaires Decide to Build a Solarpunk City?
When we make the podcast, write the blogs, and tend our Patreon garden, most of the time, it feels like shouting into the void. We occasionally hear from one of our supporters on Patreon and sometimes get comments on our various social media accounts, but what we’d really like is for discussions to fire up in the comments. We have yet to find a good way to enable comments on our episodes, but it’s definitely possible to send us feedback via the contact page of this website an under individual blog posts. And… woot! woot!… someone finally has.
So, welcome to the inauguration of our Solarpunk Advice Columnist column! Here is our first letter…
Hello Ariel and Christina,
I've been listening to your podcast for a while now (and Solarpunk Futures as well). I came across this article just now from Popsci regarding a utopic city under the title "California Forever". I was wondering where this falls in the solarpunk spectrum of things. At first glance, it *seems* adjacent to the movement, but I'm wondering if this is just a Silicon Valley billionaire stunt ultimately for capitalistic purposes and not about making the world a better place... I'd love to hear you guys' thoughts! Here are the sources I'm pulling from:
https://www.popsci.com/technology/silicon-valley-utopian-city/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
https://californiaforever.com/
Thanks!
Emily S
Dear Emily S,
Thank you for listening! And thank you for writing in. We’ve been hoping for comments, questions, and community discussions. Three cheers to you for breaking the ice!
Also, thank you for giving us the chance to wade into the Solarpunk Advice Columnistᵀᴹ waters.
(Just kidding about the trademark.)
To give you my own personal answer, wow, this California Forever scheme is totally not solarpunk. After spending a few minutes browsing through the limited information available on the project, I’m gibbering with revulsion for what these people are up to. To boil it down to a single set of bullet points, a group of billionaire investors
secretly bought up enough low–cost agricultural land to build a city that will make them obscenely richer when they sell and lease the resulting residential and commercial properties
used their ownership of parcels of land badly needed by the county to try to leverage the county into granting them the necessary permits and zoning changes
attempted to get the country to cover some of the cost to build pipes to supply water to the city they will profit from building
obtained the rights to that water by buying it from farmers who’ve had the market for their crops crash
and then, despite riling up county officials and local voters with their actions, tried to sell their project as a wonderfully generous social and environmental endeavor.
Forget about solarpunk or even solarpunk adjacency. This is the plot of a comic book movie in which the investors/developers are definitely not the good guys.
The setting is Solano County, California, wedged in between the northeastern shores of the San Francisco Bay Estuary and the county of Sacramento. It’s hot and dry in this fifth most racially diverse county in the USA that is home to slightly more than 450,000 people. Three–quarters of the county—or 675 square miles—is rural and/or agricultural. A piddle (84 square miles) is marsh and water. Presumably, the remaining 16% is urban or suburban area.
Enter California Forever and its subsidiary, Flannery Associates, entities made up of a number of billionaires from Silicon Valley. They aim to convert 93 square miles of the agricultural land into a city that would hold 75,000 people. To do the math, this would reduce the county’s agricultural area by 15% and increase its urban/suburban area by 65%. Step one in this endeavor involved spending the last 5–6 years and about $900 million secretly buying up those 60,000 acres (93 square miles) of Solano County’s pastureland.
The first question you might have is why secretly. California Forever states that the “only way to avoid creating a rush of reckless short-term land speculation was to not share our specific plans until we finished acquiring the properties.” In other words, the billionaire investors wanted to buy the land at the cheap price that agricultural land is valued at, not at any price approaching what that land will be worth if it gets rezoned for commercial or residential use. Had the landowners had gotten wind of their plans, the landowners would not have sold their land at the typical price of pastureland.
Of course, if California Forever’s main interest was in building a sustainable city for good of humanity, it could have negotiated with the landowners openly and transparently or simply involved them in the project, allowing them to share in the profits that will be made if the project succeeds. But, of course, building a sustainable city for the good of humanity is not California Forever’s prime motivation, it’s just the branding.
The plot thickened slightly when some local landowners did actually figure out what California Forever and Flannery Associates were up to. Understandably upset (for who wants to be tricked into selling land for much less than it will be worth later), the landowners began holding out for higher prices. Because they made the mistake of talking to each other about this, they have now been sued by Flannery Associates for secretly conspiring to illegally fix the prices of land. Which, in this twisted timeline we live in, is a completely legal, if appallingly hypocritical move on Flannery’s part.
Yet this is still just the beginning of the story. One of the important things that California Forever needs to do to found a city in a particularly warm, dry location in California is obtain the water that 75,000 people and all the associated businesses, swimming pools, and landscaping will require. Part one of California Forever’s solution to this problem was to do things like buy the water rights off of some of California’s almond farmers, since they are desperate for money because overproduction of almonds has caused the price of almonds to plummet. Part two was to have been to get the county to share the cost of building a new pipeline to bring that water to the California Forever city site. But the Solano County Water Agency said nope after a public meeting where there was vocal opposition to California Forever’s proposal. Which is understandable. Why should local tax payers subsidize the infrastructure California Forever/Flannery Associates needs to make its investors obscenely richer, especially after they’d secretly bought up the land, excluding the previous landowners… presumably many of them local farmer families… from the profits to be made.
The next wrinkle in what is, yes, also still just the beginning of this saga has to do with a proposed land swap. California Forever happens to have bought land that Solano County, the City of Fairfield, and Solano County Water Agency wanted to purchase around Travis Air Force Base and around Jepson Prairie. These parcels are needed as a security buffer around the base and as a critical part of the Solano County Conservation Plan to protect endangered species, etc. Meanwhile, it appears that the county owns land that California Forever needs for its project. California Forever proposed a swap, but with the stipulation that the deal will fall through if California Forever doesn’t receive the voter permission and county permits they need to rezone the land and build their city. That may be the way of big business in Silicon Valley, but it left the voters of Solano County rather cold. In early November, the voters rejected the measure that had the land swap contingent upon voter approval of Forever California’s project.
So far, none of this is sounding terribly solarpunk. But if there is anything solarpunk about trying to build a city where it isn’t wanted while maximizing the profits of billionaires at the expense of local landowners and local taxpayers, it’s that California desperately needs more housing. A general shortage of housing has house prices and rents soaring out of the average person’s reach, contributing significantly to the state’s high rates of homelessness. Building a brand new city for 75,000 people would be a step in the right direction. However, the housing situation in California is so dire, it wouldn’t be much more than one single step in the right direction.
California Forever also has lots of warm, fuzzy solarpunk–sounding bullet points going for it. Their creation of a “walkable city” will “create jobs” and “generate tax dollars” that could be used to improve various warm, fuzzy county services. Also, somewhat confusingly, given that they’re proposing to build a city from scratch on what is currently open land, they say their project will “protect open land”. But what does any of this even mean, when there are no details? To repeat just that one lack of detail that’s central to what’s bugging me about this project: how much of a profit are the investors going to make when reselling or leasing out the 60,000 acres (93 square miles) of agricultural land that they bought for a song after it gets rezoned and developed into a tech billionaire’s vision of the perfect city? And how much of that profit will be reinvested into or given back to the community?
So, yeah, it would be great to have a brand, spanking new walkable city, with great public transportation and lots and lots of parks and other communal spaces. And it would be great to have a city with great jobs for all sorts of people. And maybe this city could be a city like that. But these warm fuzzies are just our imagination at work, not actual concrete plans that have been published by California Forever. Their secretive land purchases, their attempts to get the county to help fund the construction of the water pipeline that would increase their investment’s value, and the way they tried to push the county into granting them the permission and permits they need for the project fail to inspire confidence on this front. California Forever and Flannery Associates aren’t in it for the community. They are in this for the spectacular profits. Never mind the money they will make selling homes, imagine the cash that will roll in from leases because they will own all of the commercial property and apartment buildings in the city.
A truly solarpunk attempt to build a solarpunk city would be run in exactly the opposite manner to the California Forever project. It would be bottom up instead of top down. There is no escaping the need for investors, but a project doesn’t need to be 100% investor and 0% community. A project could be designed by a community that would then go find investors to help them realize it. All plans would be public and efforts to buy land would not shrouded in secrecy so as to maximize profits for a tiny group of investors. Attempts to build infrastructure and obtain permits would not antagonize most of the residents of the county. A solarpunk endeavor would also already have a specific vision for the design of the city and its amenities, how the resulting real estate would be owned, leased, or sold, and what would be done with the profits (besides put entirely into billionaires’ pockets).
Ultimately, any city on Earth could become a solarpunk city today. Sustainable design and infrastructure are important dreams to have for solarpunk cities, but any old city could have sustainable design and infrastructure. A solarpunk city also addresses how we live as a community within that city, regardless of the infrastructure the city has. Being solarpunk is about the right high tech solutions for a super future and about how we care for each other, provide opportunities for each other, and respect and make space for each other. A solarpunk city will have to revolutionize how we handle property ownership and will have to make some serious decisions about the ability of anyone to make money simply by owning property.
But those are my thoughts. Dear reader, what are yours? What’s your idea of a solarpunk city? And how would you go about building a brand new one?
Comment below! Let’s get a discussion going. Because that’s one of the things we want our website to be here for.