Volts · David Roberts

How to design a brand-new city

March 13, 2026·1 hr 12 min·5 clips

A Solano County father told Jan Sromic he sees his wife only on Saturdays because she leaves for Silicon Valley at 4am — and it radicalized him.

Part two starts with the machinery. Roberts lays out California Forever as a decade-long push to buy 70,000 acres in Solano County and turn it into a real 400,000-person city with jobs, schools, parks, manufacturing, and civic life. First up: cars. Could families and kids get through most ordinary days without driving everywhere? That question leads into transit, then into the housing math. Sromic says California stopped building starter homes, which left even the first step into ownership too big and too expensive. Roberts hears the price and pauses. A starter unit under half a million dollars sounds almost fake from a West Coast housing-market angle, so he asks what kind of home that really buys. Not a single-family house. Sromic describes a flat in a row-home pattern, more like Boston or Chicago buildings split across three or four stories into several owned units. Scale is the bet. Since the company has so much to build, he argues, its incentive is volume that still holds up. The mix matters too: starter units, higher-priced row homes, and mostly ownership rather than rentals. Then comes the hard part. Roberts names the old American worry that good urban places become too expensive for the people they were meant to help. Governance is sitting behind all of it. The cold open also catches the political suspicion that a billionaire-backed city might be techno-utopia branding in disguise. The close stays grounded, with Roberts and Sromic talking about coming back once construction starts, and Roberts joking that a site visit might finally drag him into video.

As heard by us

A practical look at California Forever's pitch for a walkable, owner-oriented city from scratch.

Volts uses California Forever to ask whether a new city can do more than add another subdivision to California's housing map. David Roberts talks with founder Jan Sromic about the plan for a 400,000-person city in Solano County, with jobs, schools, parks, manufacturing, transit,…

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Why you'd press play

You want the mechanics behind a brand-new city, not the marketing gloss.

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