California Forever: An Interview with Gabriel Metcalf
The Bold Plan to Build a New City in the Old Way
Last week, I sat down (virtually) with Gabriel Metcalf, Head of Planning at California Forever, to discuss one of the most ambitious urban planning proposals of the modern era: building the “first walkable, sustainable new American city” in more than a century. Planned for Solano County in the East Bay Area, the project aims to address California’s housing crisis by creating a transit-rich, mixed-use community for 50,000 residents in its first phase, eventually scaling to a city of 400,000. Unlike the auto-centric suburban sprawl that has typified most greenfield development in the post-war era, California Forever draws inspiration from historical city plans and urbanist principles. It’s an audacious vision that meets California’s housing shortage at the scale of the problem.
Yet the project has faced criticism since its unplanned debut in August 2023, when The New York Times broke the story as if it were uncovering a vast tech-bro conspiracy—a narrative that fueled skepticism, even among some urbanist and YIMBY activists. Initially, California Forever planned to pursue approval for the project via a ballot measure, but they withdrew that initiative last summer and are now working through Solano County’s traditional public approval process for zoning changes.
As someone who defended the project in my essay “California Whatever,” I was eager to learn how that audacious vision has since evolved. Gabe, a veteran city planner who has spent his career working on housing, climate change, and transportation issues, discussed with me:
The progress California Forever has made in its efforts to earn the public trust
Why greenfield development is crucial to solving California’s housing crisis
Lessons from historical city planning that can guide us today
How we can build a better future with more resilient and adaptable cities
This is my first interview for City of Yes, and I’d love your feedback—let me know in the comments if you’d like to see more of this kind of content. Below is my lightly edited conversation with Gabe Metcalf. Enjoy!
Ryan Puzycki: Let’s set some context. Since the ballot measure was withdrawn in July, you've been working fairly closely with Solana County officials going through the normal public approval process. You're targeting November 2026 for a new ballot measure. Catch us up on how that's going and where things stand today.
Gabe Metcalf: In the summer of 2024, the CEO of California Forever, Jan Sramek, and the President of the Solano County Board of Supervisors, Mitch Mashburn, agreed that California Forever would not hold the ballot measure for November 2024, and instead do the full environmental impact study first before seeking an entitlement.
For your readers who are not in California, an environmental impact report (EIR) is a required part of building things in this state, whether it's buildings or infrastructure, and is a multi-year process of both detailing what the project is and studying the environmental impacts of the project.
Our EIR will be, I would guess, 10,000 pages at a minimum, and it contains everything from calculations of how many truck trips there will be over the life of the city, to bringing materials to the site, to where we get the water from—so it's a major body of work involving an army of technical consultants. I run the planning team at California Forever, and that is what we're working on now.
Ryan Puzycki: Elsewhere, you've talked about the need to earn the public's trust. Does doing the process this way fit into that, or are you doing other things in addition to just going through the normal process?
Gabe Metcalf: Yeah, I think environmental impact reports are a classic example of what critics would call “liberal proceduralism,” meaning a kind of ritualistic going through certain steps, and a belief that if you go through the right steps, that's what's most important. I think it's fair to say that in my 25 years of working in California, I have never seen somebody change their mind in either direction based on the results of an environmental impact report. So, it's required, and some of it makes sense, some of it doesn't, but regardless, it's required.
So we're going to do a good job on it, but separate from all of this work, we are very much trying to learn more about what people in Solano County want to see and make friends. I do think that as time has gone on and people have had a chance to understand the proposal and get used to the idea, some people have gotten more comfortable with it, and I'm feeling optimistic that we're going to be able to find a way to get it approved.
Ryan Puzycki: When the news first broke, a lot of the initial response from folks in the urbanist space or YIMBY community was skeptical or even derisive. That's what made me write my essay criticizing the criticism. Were you surprised by this? And I'm curious what you think might account for that initial reaction.
Gabe Metcalf: My read of the YIMBY movement was that it was pretty evenly split between supporters and critics, on first hearing. It makes sense to me. Most YIMBYs are really focused on infill development, and this is a brand new idea and a new approach. I really appreciate that some of the most important voices, like California YIMBY, were supportive. I would like to believe that, as we get a chance to show more of the work and answer people's questions, we are winning more people over.
Ryan Puzycki: The Solana Together Coalition [an opposition group] has argued that we should prioritize housing in San Francisco and on the Peninsula, and they've actually called out NIMBYism there. They don't think the “burden” of housing should be placed on their county. Why can't infill development solve California's housing crisis? And how do we deal with this kind of collective action problem in which no individual community wants to shoulder the “burden” of a regional crisis?
Gabe Metcalf: I've worked my entire career on infill, trying to make infill easier to do, trying to make the quality better, trying to make the costs lower, trying to upgrade public systems that make infill work, like public space and public transit. And I think we can all agree that infill comes first. We should all be doing whatever we can to increase housing production inside existing cities.
With that said, we need to acknowledge that most housing production in America is greenfield development. Most housing production in California is greenfield development. If we were to stop greenfield development, our housing shortage—and in California, our housing catastrophe—would be much, much worse than it already is. It is simply not a serious housing proposal to imagine we could do what needs doing without greenfield development.
I think anyone who is serious about solving the housing shortage needs to be realistic about the need for doing both infill and greenfield. When we focus on the greenfield part of the solution, it's clear to me that we should be trying to shift the physical format of the development into a more compact and walkable form. And if we could find a way to do that, it would be a huge win for people and for the environment.
Ryan Puzycki: So the same opponents have referred to California Forever as “sprawl development,” which seems like a false characterization, since your plan rejects a lot of the typical ways that suburban subdivisions are put together. Can you talk about your philosophy of city planning, how it took this conceived physical shape, and why we’ve forgotten how to do that in the past century?
Gabe Metcalf: I think we can agree on the essential planning insight, which is that building compactly reduces the human footprint on the land. Building compactly enables, potentially, people to walk and bike and take transit, if it's planned and designed the right way. There is virtually no development, there are virtually no places that have been created since World War II that have achieved high rates of walking and public transit. Almost every walkable neighborhood in this country today already existed in 1900. And I would submit that that is the essential problem with the status quo.
We have a brave YIMBY movement fighting to increase densities inside existing cities and winning many battles while losing the war, because we continue to fail to build enough housing for people in places like California, and most of the housing continues to be built in low density formats where people are forced to drive to get anywhere. So organizations that are defending the status quo of current planning policy in places like Solano County are very much part of the problem defending a system that is failing to deliver the results we want.
Our plan has minimum densities higher than Boston's and just slightly lower than San Francisco's locked in. It has a street grid that has high intersection density and is extremely walkable. It will have a public transit system that is going to be high-capacity and cost-effective, essentially Bus Rapid Transit-style services running in physically separated right of way in a grid across the entire city. It will provide walkable urbanism at a more affordable price point than cities like New York or San Francisco. I hope it can become a kind of place that is a model for how we do greenfield development in this country moving forward.
Ryan Puzycki: On the walkability front, the [proposed] zoning map shows that most or much of the city will be zoned Neighborhood Mixed Use, which allows all sorts of commercial uses built into the neighborhoods. From a practical perspective, how do you actually ensure that it gets developed so it doesn't end up just being a bunch of residences with no commercial built in?
Gabe Metcalf: Urbanists in the last 20 years have highlighted the many downsides with zoning that separates different land uses into different places, creating monocultures of housing in one place where you have to then drive to get to an office park or to a shopping center. And so the counter proposal to separating land uses through strict zoning is embracing mixed-use zoning. So, the first step is to fix the zoning so you permit it—and that part's easy.
The second step is actually delivering it. We are going to have to discover some of this as we go, and we are bringing in small builders and sharing the vision with them and inviting them to create their product in the new city. When it comes to retail, there is going to be a big population that needs to go shopping somewhere, so there is going to be demand to be served.
A certain population isn't going to want to drive to some other city and is going to be looking for options close at hand. Our retail thesis is to build traditional two-sided neighborhood shopping streets as the primary format. You see these in every city in this country that was built before 1900—the Main Street of a small town or the neighborhood center in a big city—and these streets have physical similarities across the entire country: similar street width, similar lot width, similar floor-to-ceiling heights, similar solid-to-void ratios in the facades, similar lot depths. And so we have the opportunity to look at the places that have been successful and create a very simple urban design framework to enable shopping streets to spring up.
We're in a moment of transition in how Americans get their stuff, with the growth of online shopping and home delivery, so your guess is as good of mine as to how that's gonna end up. I think our best guess on how to handle that is to define a core area of a shopping street that is relatively small, where we will require ground floor retail. So in order to build on those lots, it must be a store on the ground floor and a wider area where retail is encouraged but not required. Which is a very simple idea to try to respond to the uncertainty about ultimate retail demand in our society.
That said, the zoning will allow people to run stores and small businesses all throughout the neighborhood. And I would be thrilled if we discovered new forms being invented—including things you see in Tokyo1, where retail exists on upper stories of buildings, not only the ground floor—including corner stores of all kinds, including small businesses. So we're going to put our finger on the scale to try to create centers of neighborhood life as shopping streets. Beyond that, we're going to take a very permissive approach to welcoming whatever it is that people want to do.
Ryan Puzycki: So, getting the zoning right and getting the grid right are important basics in doing this. Relating this to an older city like New York—which built its grid but didn't put things like alleyways in there, creating a garbage problem for the city basically up until last year—is there other basic “technology” of city planning that helps a city evolve and grow for the future, not knowing what some of these changes might turn out to be in reality?
Gabe Metcalf: I have a perspective on this project of not thinking like a traditional developer, but thinking like a city planner, which to me means having an awareness about change over time as part of city building. If you look at the New York street grid laid out in the Commissioners’ Plan in 1811 or you look at the O'Farrell [1849] street grid in San Francisco, or really any 19th-century American street grid, that street grid endured for centuries and has worked well generally. The uses of buildings evolve over the decades, the buildings themselves are redeveloped over the decades, but the street grid serves as a flexible form to allow all kinds of people, all kinds of companies, all kinds of builders to plug in and fit within it. And so we have drawn on that American planning tradition and laid out a street grid that will, I think, work well over a really long period of time.
Ryan Puzycki: You’re characterizing California Forever as the “first walkable, sustainable new American city built from scratch in more than a century.” In that century, there have been other attempts to build new cities. What have they gotten wrong? Is it just a scale problem? Is it a design problem?
Gabe Metcalf: The obvious precedents for California Forever are the British New Towns movement and New Urbanism in America. If you cast a broader net, there are other precedents, like national capitals like Washington, DC or Canberra in Australia. There are different planned city traditions in other countries but, I think for us, the most important precedent is the expansion of the United States between 1800 and 1900, when hundreds and hundreds of new towns were platted, and when many existing cities were extended.
If you think about the enormous population growth that the country experienced during that period of time, that growth was only possible because we were in the mode of building. And the contrast between that culture of building and today, when places like California have made it illegal or impossible to build housing or energy or transportation, that contrast couldn't be stronger. That period of population growth in the United States contains a lot of lessons for city builders today: the process of laying out a grid, of parcelizing the land, of providing for public parks and infrastructure—that is the precedent we are drawing on.
I do think that New Urbanism has been incredibly positive for city planning in this country, and we've learned a lot from the New Urbanists. We're getting the opportunity to work at a bigger scale than New Urbanism has had a chance to do. And so you get to work on some new problems just from being at a bigger scale, the most obvious one being transportation. Most New Urbanist developments are small enough that you drive to them, and once you're there, you walk, and that fully solves their transportation problem. Working at a bigger scale, we have to come up with systems for internal mobility across a bigger area. But I very much see us as standing on the shoulders of the New Urbanists.
Ryan Puzycki: Here in Texas, it's not only rules and regulations that are keeping us from building better suburbs. It's the ideas or the culture that people are bringing to it. If you see this project as leading the way, how does this change the culture of building in America?
Gabe Metcalf: If we're able to do this, I hope one thing it does is prove the market, prove that there's an unmet demand for walkable urbanism. I hope it helps highlight some of the practices and standards and regulations that made it difficult to build compact urbanism. Those barriers to building compact urbanism are scattered across many different sections of code, many different sections of law, so we have a lot of work to do as urbanists to reform some of those rules and codes and laws. Between the extremes of never letting developers do anything or letting developers do whatever they want, there is a better answer, which is: make it very easy to build great things. I would like to believe that is the destination that urbanists are moving toward.
I enjoyed talking with Gabe, and I hope he’s right and that California Forever is able to succeed in their ambitions. I’ll be rooting them on. Meanwhile, if you enjoyed this conversation, please let me know in the comments and please share with friends! Thank you always for your support!
Some of my former Sidewalk Labs colleagues are now working on this project. I am following it with interest... thanks for doing this interview!
At the end of the interview, Gabriel says, "If we're able to do this, I hope one thing it does is prove the market, prove that there's an unmet demand for walkable urbanism." Given the price of housing in basically every walkable urban city in America, it seems the question of demand is already settled!
The real question is whether the people of California want affordable housing, walkable neighborhoods and livable cities enough to set aside their ideological hatred of progress, growth, and capitalism.