Cities of Tomorrow, Today: With a New City Targeted for Solano County, Here’s How Planned Cities Have Worked (or Not) Before

After five years of buying up land in Solano County, often at inflated prices and, according to Democratic U.S. Rep John Garamendi, “using secrecy, bully and mobster tactics to force generational farm families to sell,” a shadowy group calling itself Flannery Associates finally revealed who’s behind the near-billion-dollar land purchases—and what the new owners want.

Flannery’s investors include an all-star squad of Silicon Valley investors, organized by a 36-year-old Czech-born former Wall Street wunderkind named Jan Sramek. The tech industry bigwigs are now proud owners of 140 properties in Solano County, including nearly all the land on three sides of Travis Air Force Base, totaling about 55,000 acres or 86 square miles. That’s nearly twice the size of San Francisco and four times the size of the island of Manhattan.

Convergence of unplanned events seems pretty typical of the stories behind most California and American cities. But is there another way? 

As it turns out, those are apt comparisons because according to their own literature as well as what the company’s reps told local political leaders, Sramek’s Silicon Valley consortium plans to build an entirely new city on the Solano County, about 40 miles southeast of Sacramento. Actually, according to the county’s other U.S. House rep, Mike Thompson—who met with representatives from Flannery—they may build as many as three cities on the parcels.

The consortium, now calling itself California Forever, quickly put up a website outling its plans in some detail, and saying it will create an "community advisory board" of "Solano citizens."

Their prospects for actually bringing this dream into reality seem at least somewhat remote, especially in Solano County, which in 2008 approved a ballot measure that strictly regulates development outside of the county’s already existing cities, of which there are seven. But is their ambition to create a new city (or cities) from scratch really all that far-fetched? And what would it mean for a group of billionaires to start their own city?

How California Cities Are Born

As is the case with most cities in the United States, California’s biggest and best-known cities arose organically. No one planned them. They just grew more or less on their own. The state’s largest city, Los Angeles, started in 1781 when a group of just 44 settlers hiked their way from northern Mexico across about 1,000 miles of punishing desert to set up farms in a place they christened “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula.”

Just over 100 years later, sometime in March 1842, a rancher named Don Francisco Lopez discovered gold in an area called Placerita Canyon, just 45 miles from where downtown Los Angeles sits today. The strike happened six years before James Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill in Northern California. Marshall’s discovery is widely acknowledged as the spark that set off the Gold Rush, setting California on a path of explosive population and economic growth that continues to the present day.

The developers envisioned a “dream city” carved out of the large tract of land. Moving at breakneck speed, they bulldozed and paved 133 miles of streets on a giant grid, and dug foundation trenches for the homes in as little as 15 minutes each.

But the Lopez discovery also made national news and set off its own gold rush, bringing hundreds of would-be prospectors to the area. By 1850, Los Angeles incorporated as its own city, the same year California became the 31st state. And in 1892 a failed prospector named Edward Doheny drilled a well near where he had seen pools of “tar” seeping from underground.

He struck oil in what is now the Echo Park neighborhood not far from where Dodger Stadium opened almost exactly 70 years later. From there, Los Angeles really blew up. The quickly burgeoning oil industry powered the city’s infrastructure and economy, helping to make the creation of Hollywood possible. Los Angeles just kept growing from there.

That convergence of unplanned events seems pretty typical of the stories behind most California and American cities. But is there another way? 

In 1948 a trio of developers, Mark Taper, Louis Boyar and Ben Weingart, took out an $8.8 million loan from the Prudential Insurance company and bought up more than 3,300 acres of agricultural land—beet and bean farms mostly—in an unincorporated area called Lakewood outside of Long Beach. Their idea was to quickly build thousands of low-cost houses for servicemen back from the war that ended three years earlier and primed with Federal Housing Authority low-interest loans for GIs.

The developers envisioned a “dream city” carved out of the large tract of land. Moving at breakneck speed, they bulldozed and paved 133 miles of streets on a giant grid, and dug foundation trenches for the homes in as little as 15 minutes each. Then their crews went about building house after house with industrial efficiency, using pre-cut wood and pre-fab building materials measured to precise specifications.

Within just two years, they had a new city with 17,000 houses, each on its own lot. Lakewood was one of the first developments to display an entire street of fully furnished model homes, which proved an effective sales tool. At one point, a single sales rep sold 107 houses in one hour. Their sales office had lines out the door as buyers waited impatiently to plunk down as little as $3,000 (about $35,000 today) with zero money down for their dream home in the dream city.

At the center of the whole development was a giant shopping mall known as Lakewood Center with a May’s Department store as its anchor—and a parking lot designed to accommodate 10,000 cars. The concept of centralized, automobile-accessible shopping at the core of a sprawling suburb was a hit. Reportedly, 200,000 eager consumers patronized May’s on its first day of business.

 Not every aspect of the Lakewood “dream city” was utopia. Racial discrimination was the rule in Southern California’s burgeoning 1950s suburbs and Lakewood was no exception. Though in 1948 the United States Supreme Court ruled that explicit racial “covenants” in real estate deeds—prohibiting the sale of homes to Black people, as well Jews and other minorities—violated the 14th Amendment and were not enforceable, realtors found other ways to “steer” Black buyers away from white suburbs.

Today, Lakewood is far more ethnically diverse, though Black residents make up just 8 percent of the population. The same cannot be said for Lakewood’s East Coast prototype.

“When (Black buyers) would come ... they used to turn them over to me,” Woodrow Smith, a Lakewood sales manager in 1950, told a historian decades later. “And I’d sit down and talk to them. I’d say, ‘It may not be in your best interest, so you better think about it carefully before you make this decision. I can’t prevent you and I won’t, but you’d better think about it.’”

Today, Lakewood is far more ethnically diverse, though Black residents make up just 8 percent of the population. The same cannot be said for Lakewood’s East Coast prototype, one of the earliest and perhaps best-known planned cities in the country—Levittown, in Nassau County on New York’s Long Island. 

Named for its developer, Abraham Levitt, the development was designed, like Lakewood after it, for GIs optimistically restarting their lives after the war. Levittown was even more explicit in its exclusion of Black and other minority buyers. The basic deed to all Levittown properties expressly forbade non-whites from buying or living in homes in the new city. After the 1948 Supreme Court decision not much changed. As of the 2020 census, more than 70 years after the first Levittown homes broke ground, the community’s demographic was 79 percent white and only 1.7 percent Black—in a state where Black residents make up almost 18 percent of the population.

The Disneyfication of Planned Cities

As a consortium of Silicon Valley technology magnates start the process of creating their planned city in Solano County, further south the world’s second-largest media corporation, the Walt Disney Company, is also looking to build a planned community, but one with Disney’s own “special brand of magic.” Or so the company itself says.

In 2022, Disney created a new entity, which it dubbed Storyliving by Disney, and whose purpose is described by the $203 billion conglomerate as the creation of “master-planned, new home communities … intended to inspire residents to foster new friendships, pursue their interests and write the next exciting chapter in their lives—all while enjoying the attention to detail and special touches that are Disney hallmarks.”

What it means to live in a community laced with “Disney hallmarks” is not yet clear. But Disney’s own publicity makes it sound like living in a theme park.

The first such “Storyliving” development broke ground, at least ceremonially, in April 2022 just outside of Palm Springs and within the city limits of Rancho Mirage, in the Coachella Valley. The company’s founder, the late Walt Disney, called that region his “laughing place,” where he’d often go to unwind, ride horses and other such recreational activities. 

In an operation that foreshadowed the tech consortium’s land grab in Solano County, in 1963 Disney began secretly buying land around Orlando, Florida.

The development, given the name Cotino, will—according to plans filed with the city—center around an artificial lake called “Cotino Bay,” which according to Disney “will feature the clearest turquoise waters with Crystal Lagoons technology.” According to the Crystal Lagoons website, that technology claims to be a water purification system that “allows up to 100 times less chemicals than those used in conventional swimming pools.” The price tag for a Crystal Lagoons lake? Up to $650,00 per acre. The Cotino Bay lake is planned to be 24 acres.

The Disney planned community will include hotels, restaurants and of course, entertainment facilities including a club—available to residents willing to pay its membership fee—that includes a party venue styled after the home of the titular family in the animated superhero film series The Incredibles.

The Origin Story of Disney City Planning

Walt Disney himself died in 1966. But shortly before his death that year, he announced his own plans to build a new city from the ground up. In an operation that foreshadowed the tech consortium’s land grab in Solano County, in 1963 Disney began secretly buying land around Orlando, Florida—most of it seemingly unusable swamp—through a series of anonymous shell companies with cryptic names like Project Winter and Project X.

By the time the Orlando Sentinel cracked the case of the mysterious land purchases in  October of 1965, Disney had scooped up 27,400 acres of land, and was ready to undertake a massive land reclamation project—ultimately turning the murky swamps into stable, buildable real estate that Walt Disney expected to be the site of his “a living blueprint for the future” that would be unlike “anyplace else in the world.” 

He named his dream city “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow,” or EPCOT.

Commercial trucks and fast-food chains were banned. Even such minute details as the freshness of paint on picket fences and length of mowed grass on residential lawns came under Disney’s fastidious regulations, all calculated to give Celebration the atmosphere of the long-lost—and frankly, never really existed—America of the mid 1950s. 

According to Disney’s master plan, the city would be laid out in a wheel-like pattern, with a dense downtown core at the center, and increasingly less dense residential areas radiating outward. The whole community would be connected by a transportation system Disney called the PeopleMover, which ran on motorized tracks, eliminating the need for any resident of EPCOT to own a car (unless, of course, they wanted to travel outside of EPCOT). Today, an updated version of the PeopleMover carts tourists around the Tomorrowland theme park inside DisneyWorld in Orlando. 

Back in 1966, the Disney company board of directors was more interested in building a new theme park than a futuristic “prototype community,” so when the company’s founder and namesake died in December the company dumped plans for the city and went all-in on the theme park that in 1971 opened to the public as Walt Disney World.

A somewhat different EPCOT opened in 1982, a theme park within Disney World focused on global culture and scientific innovation. But much of DisneyWorld incorporates Walt Disney’s original plans and ideas for his own EPCOT concept. The development even has its own government, known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District, with the power to levy taxes, pass zoning ordinances and other functions that would normally fall to county and municipal governments.

Disney’s dream of a planned city that would embody his ideas for utopian, Disneyfied living did not die out completely. Three decades after Walt’s passing, the first homebuyers began moving into Celebration, Florida, a census-designated place—not officially a town or a city, but a residential development nonetheless—on the outskirts of DisneyWorld. Celebration sits on land that was part of Disney’s original purchase, but the company eventually figured that it was too far off the beaten path to become a part of the theme park.

With 4,300 homes and a population of just under 9,000, Celebration is designed as a full-service community, where Disney keeps a number of its corporate offices, including the headquarters of Disney Cruise Line. But at least at the outset, the Disney company kept tight control over the quasi-town, forcing any new structure to fit its idyllic “small town” mold.

Commercial trucks and fast-food chains were banned. Even such minute details as the freshness of paint on picket fences and length of mowed grass on residential lawns came under Disney’s fastidious regulations, all calculated to give Celebration the atmosphere of the long-lost—and frankly, never really existed—America of the mid 1950s.

In 2004, Disney sold Celebration’s town center, named appropriately enough Town Center, to a New York property management firm called Lexin Capital. According to a lawsuit filed by Town Center residents, the town quickly went to hell. Buildings fell into disrepair, according to the allegations, businesses shuttered, schools neglected students often failing to provide books or even assign homework.

Lexin denied the allegations and blamed the residents for supposedly mismanaging their own money and claiming that, in fact, the townsfolk owed the corporation millions for repair work. 

Even before Lexin took over the Town Center, Celebration was already subject to the same malady as the planned cities of the 1950s—racial segregation. Residents charged that Disney’s approach to ethnic diversity was lackadaisical at best, deliberately exclusionary at worst. Not only did Disney fail to build affordable housing units within Celebration, the  company gave Osceola County almost a million dollars to help people buy affordable homes—outside of Celebration.

According to the 2020 Census, the population of Celebration is now 77 percent white, roughly the same as Osceola County itself, but a mere 0.5 percent Black. The population of the county is 15 percent Black. 

Sometimes Dreams Die

From the Gold Rush to Hollywood to the technology boom, California has long been perceived as the land of big dreams, where Americans and people all over the world, for that matter, come to reinvent themselves. That spirit reinvention extends to the places people live. But like dreams, things don’t always work out the way the dreamer sees them.

A decade after Taper and his colleagues began buying the land that they turned into Lakewood, Nathan Mendelsohn—a Columbia University sociologist who ankled academia to become a real estate developer—began buying land in the Kern County Mojave Desert. Mendelsohn’s purchase dwarfed the relatively puny 3,300 acres scooped up by Taper’s group, and even easily surpasses the 55,000 acres recently accrued by the tech billionaires in Solano County. According to a report by the Los Angeles Times, the former professor amassed an empire of 82,000 acres, about half the size of the San Fernando Valley.

Unfortunately, Mendelsohn overlooked the top three fundamentals of real estate investing: location, location, location.

His dream was California City, California, which may be a city so nice they named it twice but it’s also a city where almost no one wants to live.  In a vision later described by Wired Magazine as “Ozymandian,” Mendelsohn planned to build a cosmopolitan utopia exemplified in its street names, still immortalized in street signs there today: Stanford, Yale, and of course Columbia. The plan called for hundreds of miles of streets all surrounding a 25-acre artificial lake.

Unfortunately, Mendelsohn overlooked the top three fundamentals of real estate investing: location, location, location. The land for California City was, and still is, 100 miles north of Los Angeles, 60 miles southeast of Bakersfield, and 10 miles from the nearest highway. In other words, the middle of nowhere.

As a result, when Mendelsohn finally cashed out his shares in the development in 1969, after sticking it out for 14 years, the city had attracted all of 1,300 residents. Today, per the latest U.S. Census, only 15,127 people live there. At least the small population doesn’t have the racial segregation problem of some other planned cities. The demographics show a white percentage of just below 50, with 22 percent Black. Kern County’s percentages are 81 and six. 

Utopian Dreams, a California Tradition

Victor Gruen, the Viennese socialist urban planner perhaps best known as the “father of the shopping mall” (a title he disavowed), got a chance to put his vision into practice in Valencia, a planned community in the city of Santa Clarita. Malls aside, his dream was to create communities where people could walk, meet and spontaneously socialize in public spaces—and car use would be minimized if not eliminated.

Valencia, following Gruen’s plan, is a series of “villages,” each designed to be as self-contained as possible. The first of the community’s 26 villages was completed in 1967.

Victor Gruen, the Viennese socialist urban planner perhaps best known as the “father of the shopping mall” (a title he disavowed), got a chance to put his vision into practice in Valencia, a planned community in the city of Santa Clarita.

In Orange County, the planned community of Mission Viejo, which sold its first homes in 1966, advertised itself as embodying “the story of man’s search for a better way of life. It is the story of a plan—a plan that reached reality, a plan that works.” But unlike Gruen’s plan for walkable “villages,” Mission Viejo built itself around a series of shopping plazas that still stand today but are considered a dilapidated eyesore by residents of the city, which is now home to almost 92,000.

Irvine, about 40 miles south of Los Angeles, became a planned community largely to avoid being overrun by sprawl spawned by the metropolis to the north. William Pereira, the Chicago architect who designed San Francisco's iconic Transamerica Pyramid, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and dozens of others, designed the Irvine master plan and described the city—which incorporated in 1971—as a “city of tomorrow”—familiar terms indeed.

The latest city of tomorrow may soon take shape in Solano County. But as the history of planned cities appears to show, there are countless potholes on the road to urban utopia.