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Yan shamak is the CEO and founder of California forever his company with the help of some Silicon Valley billionaires
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has acquired 62,000 acres in Solano County California which is north north and slightly east of San Francisco over
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the last few years with a goal of building a new community so we've wanted to have you on for a while we have so
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many questions SC Scott particularly has a lot of questions but there's been a lot of mystery around California forever
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I I need you to explain exactly what you're planning and I and I get a sense of why it was Secret at the beginning
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because you're buying up about 62,000 acres in this area Northeast of s just Northeast of San Francisco um centered
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in you know in Solano County um so talk a little bit about what you're doing for
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people who don't know we are trying to get California to build again uh and solve this problem that we have um it's
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still the center of innovation it's still this economic engine for the whole country but it's the first time in the
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history of the country where people are moving out of a place like that um and we're doing that by building a new
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community in Solano County about an hour North of San Francisco uh and in some sense this should be the um this is the
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oldest kind of business model um in the world we run out of houses we should find some land um that is not prime
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Farmland that is not sensitive ecological habitat and build a complete Community there and then I think what's
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different is we know not building a subdivision we're building a complete community and so we're building
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something that someone who grew up in an old neighborhood like noi Valley or the
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marina built 100 years ago recognize a complete Community with homes and apartments and schools and shops and
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jobs and churches um and uh we believe that this can be a really unique economic engine for Solano County which
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is a part of the Bay Area that has been left out of the prosperity that that's happened here over the last 20 years so
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most cities just happen you know you know they just sort of occur and then and then cities build on top of cities
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right that's the whole concept is like Rome has 10 different versions of itself depending on the era creating something
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of nothing a lot of cities that do this in the history have not worked out well Brazil you I was thinking lots of
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different things have they've been trying to create the perfect City why did you besides California needs more
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housing which obviously is is a big deal um why do you think it'll work by just creating it out of nothing where people
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weren't naturally going to build themselves or settle themselves I mean I I think that first of all it's a
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um I mean in America it's it's a fairly Young country right and so almost all cities are new
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cities and we have really good examples of cities that were started by a person or a company that turned out to be
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spectacular some of our most beloved cities in America were started this way I mean Savannah Georgia um Philadelphia
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um Irvine in Southern California we have a lot of really good examples of places
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that were basically started by a company um and I think what's um the other part
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of it is we building in an area that actually people have said before should be built uh the US Commerce Department
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um the US Army Corp of Engineers the association of Bay Area governments all said in the 50s 60s 7s that sometime in
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the 2020s we are going to run out of space in the Bay area and we should build some were and they all concluded
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that this was basically the best place to build that by that point we will have run out of space in the inra area and
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this would be a really good place to build and so there's a lot of precedent for why this would happen and I think
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the cities that have um the plan cities that have failed I think they failed for two reasons and I
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spent I spent two years before I started working on this kind of going back and reading the history of all of these
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projects Brazilia and all and every project that you can that you can name and I think they failed in one of two
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ways I either people were building them in a place where there was no demand which is not the Bay Area or the
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developers came in with some kind of singular Vision they were going to impose on the city and it's going to be
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this perfect kind of um master plan and and our approach to it is very very different our approach to it is very
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similar to how a place like San Francisco or New York were built or indeed kind of locally Rio Vista or
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bisha Ojo which is you lay down a street grid and um you do a really good job doing that and then you think of the
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city as a platform and it's it's you don't say the houses are going to be beige and they're going to have these
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windows and this is where the residential is going to go and this is where the um the small houses will go
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and this is where the big houses will go instead you do the bare amount of correct planning in the beginning and
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then we let the city kind of emerge out of that and a lot of different people and Builders and Architects and
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companies and residents come and they build their lives and and I I think cities are this unique invention that we
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have where particularly in the society that we live in today and it's uh it's it there there's challenges now but I
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think cities are still the place where people with a lot of different values can come together and build something
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really special and out of that disagreement and CH chaos and conflict something really special emerges and
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that's what we trying to do here Scott and IU so I I want to try and if I can describe the tension around what I think
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I think some of the tens you're facing or the questions so when I first heard about this I love the idea of of
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creating massive housing such that young people finally have their shot right I think that uh slowly but surely
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homeowners have weaponized local governments to restrict housing permits and the American dream if that's buying
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a home is increasingly sequestered from young people so I like the Innovation I like the idea that they're doing
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something similar in Florida where they're incorporating a city tons of new housing units I love that
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the the thing I think that sent chill down my spine or chills down my spine when I was when I read some of the
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comments from bellagi shavasan and is I I think people are worried that is this this new techno Neo neol
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libertarianism where people who are very blessed want to start their own want to
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basically secede from the nation and want to create their own government want to create and you know everyone has the
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right to create local politicians but I guess this is my question is is this rooted an opportunity for young people
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that haven't participated in the spoils that a lot of these people have enjoyed or is it a vision for a different type
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of society which quite frankly just makes me very kind of scares me a little bit can you can you walk us through that
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I'm going to just put some update for for Scott was just referring to former andri and Hood's partner uh sky is
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calling for something like Tech Zionism he said his vision is to ethnically cleanse San Francisco of liberal
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he has some scheme around colored shirts that people wear it's demented actually
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but a lot of tech people are trying to take over San Francisco government with donations and their own mayal candidates
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which is their right to do so although some of the things that pop out of their mouth are just so heinous and stupid at
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the same time which is very hard to do um so talk about this because a lot of people feel like given some of the
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investors which I think does include Mark andreon uh who is a big backer of apology um California forever connection
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to a movement that wants to build a place where Tech Elite can live under their own rules or or the idea that
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you're trying to do a different kind of governance new kinds of governance and I
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know Mike Moritz who has been an investor has talked about that the idea of a new kind of governance
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so perhaps separate yourself from that or not or just say what we're trying to do here is yeah no I mean I think we're
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not trying to do any of that and I think there's a lot of baggage that Tech has created in building new cities that
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unfortunately we at the receiving end of it but um my interest in this from the beginning was um very simple I I really
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care about the built environment I I really think that walkable dense places um are special I think walkable cities
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have amazing impact on um this the sense of community and creativity and human health and uh knowing your neighbors and
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all of these things and so for me the primary interest has always been how do we build more housing so there's more
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opportunity and then how do we make the place walkable because if you look at these old neighborhoods um like big
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pants of San Francisco or Georgetown or the West Village um it's clear that a huge proportion of Americans love them
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but they've become these Oasis for the rich because we've stopped building them and so these walkable communities today
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Working Families just can't afford them and so for me it was about building a place like that I have very little
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interest in innovating on um in particular two things that Tech has done and the first one is does this um Tech
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libertarian kind of um floating cities um Network States and so on I have zero interest on any of it um Balaji is not
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an investor um and um there's also this kind of smart City component of it what some other people have tried to do and I
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have zero interest in that as well I mean we building a place that actually is from that perspective really really
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boring um we're building a place where if all we did was build a great combination of some of these old
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neighborhoods I mentioned like noi Valley and Marina and Mission and West Village and P of Philadelphia and
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Georgia Sav Georgia moreable correct more affordable absolutely because because we they are expensive because we
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don't have very many of them if all we did over the next 30 or 40 years was build something that people looked at in
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50 years the way that they look at those places I would be over the moon we don't
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need to do anything but you are going to get saddled with that Tech thing given some of your investors you know they're
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very among the wealthiest people on Earth so it and you know some of them are have their nonsensical I'm moving to
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Australia some of them I'm going to go in space like you that's the Jeff Bezos thing the floating city that's his dream
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of the world um of course in sci-fi that's always a bad dream for most people and a good dream for rich people
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um so you you're going to carry that baggage no matter what like no matter what given your investors right one two
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they they feel um anti-democratic in a lot of ways so presumably the governance here even when Mike and I happen to like
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Mike Moritz um talking about new kinds of governance presumably democracy is at the center of that correct it's not
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what's a new kind of governance I don't even there's I think what what Mike was referring to I think what Mike was
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referring to in that email I think it's an old email from 2017 um was new kinds of governance when it comes to making it
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easier to build I see the thing that we've been obsessed about since the beginning is why does it take two years
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to get a permit to build a small apartment building in San Francisco I sat at a door it took me forever in San
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Francisco but go ahead exactly exactly and so if you look at the ballot measure that we proposed the only Innovation I
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mean it's a 80 page ballot measure and the only innovational governance that's in it the only one is it says it should
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be easy here to build buildings we're going to do an environmental impact report on the whole Community we're
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going to study all of the impacts going say important because it's San Francisco
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yeah exactly and we said as long as you building something that fits in here you
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should be able to get a building permit in 60 days and so that's the only kind of governance Innovation that we have
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but the governance is democracy correct I mean it's not like you're not going to
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innovate on some let's have a king or let's have you know Mark indre to be king for a day or whatever let's not
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have him be a king any day but um when you when when you were doing this at the beginning you had to be very secretive
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and obviously there was a lot of back and forth with local land owners um did you talk about why you did it
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that way presumably because you didn't want the prices to go up like crazy like oh rich people are here with their money
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bags and um uh you you also um uh filed a lawsuit against accusing 40 Solano farmers are price fixing their land
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which they've denied so talk a little bit about that because you got to get the support of the community moving
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forward too and the elected officials that are there now yeah I mean on the on the buying the
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property quietly um we we've done the same thing that um for example Disney did when they were buying the property
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in Florida for for Disney World which um it's just standard practice I think for
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us it was partially about the prices but it was also we felt that you could design a really great Community here but
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someone had to basically control a large amount of the land so you could place things correctly for example one of the
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things that we did is um in the ballot measure is we doubling the security buffer around the Air Force Base here
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and we would not be able to do that if there were 40 different land know as trying to build a project in the
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community so that was part of it and then um people don't know there a Big Air Force Base nearby for people right
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exactly um which by the way one of the biggest challenges for the Air Force Base number one the people who work
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there are struggling to afford to live here and number two their spouses often commute one and a half hours every day
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to paloo because there's very few jobs here and so we've had an amazing response from many of the people who
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serve on the base saying you know what actually this is the best thing that's happened to the base um and then on the
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lawsuits I mean the main thing I would say is is we've settled the majority of them um there was a recent ruling in the
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case from the court that basically said there is evidence that this happened um but we've been very reasonable on
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settling it and and uh we hope we'll be able to put that behind us soon so first
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off I find your comments really heartening um and I also want to point out that masking your identity when
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you're a buyer is common practice NYU does the same thing um because anyways for a lot of reasons you don't
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necessarily want the seller to know who you are get our greed glands going young
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people have been held out from the American dream of buying a home what do you envision what does Victory look like
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in 10 years out in terms of the price of the home the amenities you know paint the vision here for why this will be a
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net positive for society yeah affordability was a really big Criterion for us from the beginning and we
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designed the whole Community with that in mind and the biggest component of that is if you look at what Developers
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are actually building today we've basically stopped building starter homes and that's a big part of the problem if
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you talk to people who've bought a home in the Bay Area in the 70s or ' 80s or '
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90s their first home would be 1,000 square F feet 1200 square ft kind of three three-bedroom one bathroom small
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single family home and then they would build equity and and they would grow in it and eventually trade up um for all
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kinds of reasons in the real estate business we've stopped building those homes um the community we have is UN the
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kind of we proposed is unusual in that um California has a standard that says affordable by Design and what it
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basically says is if you can build a walkable Community where you have grow houses and adus and small apartment
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buildings they can be affordable by Design you can actually build units that you can buy that are not de restricted
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um from the beginning and so I think we would have homes or apartments starting at probably
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$400,000 um which even by Solano County standards is really affordable I mean you can't buy a new home here for
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$400,000 and we we do that by really innovating on what we build and the density and then using the land much
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more wisely um in a much more compact footprint so what you want to get this built presumably correct what what what
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do you think the timing is on this and how it's happening and is there a chance it wouldn't happen and and and that it
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could couldn't happen what do you need to succeed to go forward certainly there's interest in more housing in
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California that said a lot of people are in fact moving back all those people who
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insulted California on their way out are now ai is back like there's there's a lot of there's you can see it in San
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Francisco and the in the Palo Alto area there's real growth and you know Google killed it this in the you know they
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haven't moved anywhere you know there there's other things so there's there's a little more excitement around living
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in California than there was a year ago even or two years when a couple years when you started this what is the
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prospects of and what's your biggest challenge and if you had to go back and repair a mistake you made uh what
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would it be yeah I mean first of all I I started this eight years ago not two years ago I've been I've been working on
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this for eight years and so we've been through the whole cycle in California of excited people are leaving people are
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coming back I think to your point of people are coming back to California that that makes the need for this even
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more preed because if the AI boom continues and the salaries continue in in in the
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bay area that's going to just increase the pressure on the housing market and it's going to be harder and harder and
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harder for Working Families to stay in San Francisco or or in in in paloalto uh and so I think the AI boom is just
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another huge reason for why um this needs to happen because the bay area needs more housing otherwise it's just
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going to be an oasis of the rich um in terms of what we would do differently I I think we we would have liked to
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introduce the project to the community differently we were preparing for that when Connor wrote the article we were
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probably a month away from New York Times Reporter yeah exactly we were about a a month away from wanting to
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talk about it um I I also wish that some of the elected officials had kept more of an open mind instead of condemning
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the project in the beginning I think um it's totally fair for people to say you know this looks like a really big idea
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I'm not sure it works but I'm going to stay open-minded and I'm going to look at it when there's more details I think
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a lot of people rush to conclusions um um without Merit and I think that's particularly concerning when they have
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presided over the situation getting worse and worse and worse for Working Families for the last 20 years and they
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haven't been able to do anything about it and I think we should be a bit more open to Scott's point about new
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Solutions because whatever is it that we doing California is no longer working for Working Families I don't think
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anyone is disputing it yeah I think that's a very good point I just think when you're coming in hot with a lot of
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rich people and you've already experienced some of their behavior you you you you don't trust them necessarily
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even if it's a good idea um which I think this actually is uh Scott do you see this more as the folks who are
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funding this and there's nothing wrong with the profit motive but do they see an opportunity to um find a place where
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there's less owning requirements and they want to be in the business of of development or do they see this as an
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opportunity and the two AR the two are mutually exclusive a social ill how important is it is it a new form of
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governance or just bringing housing prices down it when you're like what are your investors up
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to here what when they sit down with you what does success look like for them because these guys have enough well they
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have enough money that's ridiculous they I was want more money um what do you think their objective is do they see see
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this as a social good or do they see this just as a great Economic Opportunity I think it's both and I mean
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we've been we've been very clear from the beginning that it's a for-profit investment and over the long run this
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can be a pretty good investment it does require kind of a 20-year um time Horizon which is part of the reason for
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why um I went to the people that I went to to raise the capital it's much longer
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term much more patient Capital um I think for all of our investors it's a I I started to say profit plus investment
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and so if you look at the people who've invested in it um they all have causes that they really care about and I think
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if you ask them I I can't speak for them but um for someone like Loren Powell jobs I mean a lot of her work has been
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about Economic Opportunity and economic mobility and sustainability and and and whenever I talk to um um her or the team
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those are the questions I get asked is how do we make it more sustainable how do we make sure that teachers can live
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in the community how the way you build it how do we make sure that um we have that it's not a food desert how do we
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make sure that there's really high quality food available for kids in the schools um when we talk to when I talk
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to someone like um like like Reed Hoffman uh I mean for him Reed is an eternal optimist I mean he believes that
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we can solve things he believes that technology can solve them and he believes that um a lot of the
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Innovations coming out of the Bay Area have really made the world better and so he asks how do we make the opportunity
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as broad as we can possibly make it um for um someone like Nat Friedman or the cison they are really passionate about
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high quality walkable places and so we talk about design and how do we make this an amazing place um I think Mike
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morit has been extremely invested in improving things in the in the in the Bay Area I mean um he spent hundreds of
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millions of dollars in philanthropy in San Francisco trying to make it better and um
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so uh when I talk to Mike it's about how do we create homes that people who work
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in the Bay Area can afford and and how do we make the last discussion I had with Mike
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about can we help nurses be able to live here instead of flying here from Idaho I
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mean that started to happen it's so expensive to live here the nurses are flying from Idaho
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yeah yeah I think it's you know I think it is easy to be suspect of some some of
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the people um and and intentions of them from the get-go um because of but you know I think a lot of I think that at
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the heart of the good part of it is believing in California and you know one of the reasons I call my book a tech
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love story is cu I do believe in the great possibilities and I hate what they've done to the place so why don't
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they use the better parts of their nature to do things which is um I'm glad to hear you saying it's not going to be
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some demented I hate I hate the term I hate the term I found the term internally and U I mean if I if I can
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cities aren't smart that's why they exactly exactly and and if I can just comment on the investors you
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know I I think when I started working on this in 2016 there was this popular narrative that um kind of venture
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capitalists and billionaires in general are wasting the capital they have investing in Dumb messaging gaps and
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they should really do something in the in the real world to make life better for working families and then three or
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four years ago during Co the popular narrative was how dare all of these people who've made their Fortunes in
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California take the money and go to Texas and go to Florida and just take it away and I think we found a group of
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people who really believe in California who really want to down and they did exactly what people have been calling
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for invest in hard things in the physical world with an uncertain payoff that requires 20 years patients and um
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that doubles down on California and so I'm really proud of um the cap table that we have and I know why people um
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kind of see this as controversial but these are just people who love the Bay Area and they wanted to work for
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everyone last question Scott yeah I I just want to say I I that's not even a question it's just a that's a great
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point and some of the people on your cap table I do not think a great deal of but
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I I think I think what you're doing here assuming that you're being honest about
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this you're exactly right they're not going into space they're trying to make the this place more habitable I I think
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it's a really a really excellent point what if you could if you could say anything what is the level of
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cooperation or non-cooperation from either the state government or the federal government do
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they have they embraced this as as another signal of innovation that'll bring more people to California are they
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suspect of it and feel threatened by it you know the the state government and the federal government is is not a
00:24:05
unitary body there's a lot of different stakeholders in there but I think what we've seen in general is people are
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really excited um housing used to be a priority for the California government the the um to your point Scot it's
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become a priority for the federal government because house prices across the country have just gotten so crazy in
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the Last 5 Years and so what we've seen is a lot of excitement from people saying um boy if if you can get the buy
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of the local community we would love to help and so I think the opportunity for Solano County which is which is a part
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of the Bay Area that really has been left out um um one data point that is incredible in 2002 the average household
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income in Solano County was 90% of the rest of the Bay Area it was about $6,000 a household less over the last 20 years
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it's the Gap has widened to 30% the average household in County makes $40,000 less than anyone else in the Bay
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Area um and the county hasn't gotten its fair share of employers it hasn't gotten
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its fair share of um tax dollars infrastructure dollars and so the opportunity that we've seen from state
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and federal government is to say if you can get the buying of the local community we would love to help and I
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think there's a real opportunity to bring a lot of state and federal funds to Solano County um and and really make
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this make the county better for the people who live here uh and it's it's a really special place I mean I I moved
00:25:30
here uh with my wife and two kids we live here uh We've made so many friends in the last year that we've been here
00:25:36
and I really care about uh it getting its share of The Economic Opportunity in the Bay Area and I think we have the
00:25:42
most credible plan to do that that's been proposed here in the last 30 years but what about the cows what about the
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cows it's a the town one of the main towns there was Vacaville which means cille that's true you know we have uh
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it's a good question I mean the just don't let Christy know just bring in christe she'll we will we going to
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build an amazing place for the cows in the green belt you you know what we doing now uh we the community is going
00:26:07
on about a third of the land that we building on on the rest of it we building solar Farms it turns out that
00:26:13
the Sheep really like grazing underneath the solar panels because they don't have
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to stand in 105 degree heat in the summer it's hot out in salano County um much more than people realize how warm
00:26:24
it is in the out because the Bay Area seems like a cooler environment you know what's the most special thing about um
00:26:31
um designing this ride it turns out that it's windiest in the summer and so if you design the street grid correctly and
00:26:36
you Orient it correctly the wind can cool it off kind of like it does in on some of the islands for example in uh in
00:26:43
in take carabano or the Mediterranean yeah it's a beautiful land out there I love it out there I think it's so
00:26:48
beautiful well in any case Yan thank you for coming on and answering questions we'll be watching it carefully um you
00:26:54
know it's you're right you're 100% right bugging them to do bigger things is what
00:26:59
I've been doing and this is definitely a bigger thing and they're not building space colonies so that's always a plus