'Utopian' City 'California Forever' Announces Huge Tech Manufacturing Park 40
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: California Forever announced on Thursday plans to build a massive manufacturing park called Solano Foundry, the newest addition to its master-planned "utopian" city backed by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires. Solano Foundry is 2,100 acres that can host 40 million square feet of advanced tech manufacturing space. The manufacturing park will be built as part of its planned walkable city with over 175,000 homes, CEO Jan Sramek said at the Reindustrialize conference in Detroit.
Sramek tweeted that U.S. manufacturers can't win by "building factories off of random freeway exits in the middle of nowhere. The best people don't want to work there." This site will offer expedited permitting, transportation for finished goods, and plenty of power from renewable energy, he said. The hope is that it will attract hardware, engineering, and AI talent from relatively nearby Silicon Valley. Solano County is about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco.
Sramek tweeted that U.S. manufacturers can't win by "building factories off of random freeway exits in the middle of nowhere. The best people don't want to work there." This site will offer expedited permitting, transportation for finished goods, and plenty of power from renewable energy, he said. The hope is that it will attract hardware, engineering, and AI talent from relatively nearby Silicon Valley. Solano County is about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco.
Welcome to Company Town! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Most towns grew out of a couple big companies.
Somewhere along the line the economy of scale ran away with things and instead of new company towns and agrarian service hubs, we got ever growing cities. Then we put artificial growth boundaries around those cities, making it harder and harder for normal people to afford a nice detached home near their work (which is how almost everyone wants to live, as long as we still have to work).
Nothing wrong with a new company town compared to the dystopian status quo.
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Most major cities grew out geography first and foremost.
Also you cannot build a major city with detached housing alone, that's a very 20th America-brained type of thinking. I mean go to Europe and see the cities that have structure going back centuries, how much of it was detached? A minority to say the least, if thy had the means to build taller they would and did when they could.
Agreed on artificial growth boundaries and one of those is single-home-only zoning pretty much anywhere but especially in major
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Just out of curiosity, what or where are these "artificial growth boundries" you speak of?
Do you believe youre not allowed to build a home in Casa Grande, AZ? Casa Grande is a small town just outside of Phoenix?
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Re:Welcome to Company Town! (Score:5, Insightful)
The project will die because the higher paid tech talent doesn't want to live there, and lower paid don't want to commute there.
Unless they build onsite dormitories for the $15/hr staff, the support/service workforce won't exist either.
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the higher paid tech talent doesn't want to live there
The higher paid tech talent doesn't have to live there. They'll do the engineering in the SF Bay area and then sent their design off to be built. Instead of sending it off to China, the hope is that it will be sent off to Solano Foundry. But otherwise the same as a Chinese factory town. Dormitories, cafeterias and walkable. So the workers won't need cars. Because they won't be leaving.
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If the higher paid tech talent doesn't live there, what's the target market for the "planned walkable city with over 175,000 homes"?
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Define "home". They don't have to be SF houses.
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Eh? Solano Foundry's 2,100 acres includes these planned houses. It has nothing to do with SF.
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at the Reindustrialize Detroit meeting (Score:2)
"I'm building a factory in SF and you can't stop me."
In many ways, Tech Billionaires are the dumbest people on Earth.
Re: Noooo stop (Score:2)
Re: Noooo stop (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah I was wondering about the idea of factories attracting the best people. That's not how factories work, the few people doing the maintenance aside. The work for the people on the line is designed to not require the best people.
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This is the safest time in history to be alive. Crime is low, we can cure diseases and treat some forms of cancers. Well at least in the rest of world where they still believe in science. But you get the idea.
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Walking through many stores highly desirable items are now in cages. Cameras everywhere. Just to get a can of spray paint in Walmart requires finding an employee and then waiting for them to go get the key.
We are now in the times where most people 'can do that only with permission' even though those that don't and take whatever that want ar
It'll be as successful as... (Score:3, Funny)
Sigh, let us welcome our new plutocrat overlords (Score:2)
When American companies finance their own "utopia" cities [apnews.com], I can't help but be reminded that the ruling class loves to design and build [wikipedia.org] their own cities [wikipedia.org] to protect their power and interests.
What can I say, other than let us welcome our new plutocrat overlords.
Avoid Tossing Space (Score:2)
I support this (Score:5, Interesting)
A bunch of them banding together and building an industrial city could actually leave an impact. The rest of US society has mostly given up on big construction, and it’s clear that we need more. It would have been even smarter to just fund infrastructure - write checks to refurbish and replace a thousand bridges and sewer systems, or maybe update the power grid. But that’s boring. I get it. A new city would be the second best thing,
However, they’ll only succeed if they build a PRACTICAL city, not some stupid attempt at a futuristic utopia. Try that and they’ll get something like NEOM. They should build an actual functional city, where large numbers of both people and companies can operate simultaneously. In texas, where theres lots of land, that probably means a grid of streets, apartment clusters, LOTS of cars, industrial parks, and permissive zoning. Lots rectangular buildings with boring sheet metal exteriors and tons of 5+1 apartments. Throw in some nice walkable planned mixed-use residential/retail/entertainment zones to make it pleasant, but THATS NOT WHERE THE REAL WORK GETS DONE, so dont go overboard on that stuff.
Do that, and it just might still be standing and operating 200 years from now.
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For almost everyone, there’s a limit to how much hedonism i
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Five over one wood frame construction is inefficient. The future is as always prefab. It's just that when land costs 10x everything else, the future can wait.
Land should be relatively cheap here, so efficiency matters. The amount of construction is large enough to just put a prefab factory on site. They can do their own zoning too, so the number of stories is just a question of taste.
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Industrial construction is a different matter. An industrial city needs tons of rectangular beige corrugated metal buildings, and
As someone who's been in water for 20 years... (Score:4, Insightful)
Where? (Score:3)
> U.S. manufacturers can't win by "building factories off of random freeway exits in the middle of nowhere
> The hope is that it will attract hardware, engineering, and AI talent... Solano County is about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco
Great plan.
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I want to know where in Solano County? Seems like silicon valley has run out of space, so they need to destroy a new area.
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The east side of the county. This is the same pack of pants-on-head retards who unilaterally declared they were going to build a new city on the east side of the county without bothering to stop and consider pesky things like, you know, whether or not the county zoning plan would let them do that. It went over like a lead balloon and went precisely nowhere. This is their Plan B.
It wouldn't be such a terrible idea if they accounted for the fact that being in eastern Solano County is effectively like being
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Won't be long before this Utopia meets some fine folks from Vallejo.
With a bit more info, you can understand... (Score:2)
I live not too far from where this project would be built. The manufacturing park is just the latest twist on this sordid project. With a bit more info, you can understand why the California Forever billionaires cooked up this project. First, some statistics:
Median home prices:
* San Jose ~$1.5 million
* San Francisco ~$1.3 million
* Fairfield ~$630K (largest town in Solano County, 121,000 people)
* Sacramento ~$490K
Fairfield is about 1.5 hour drive to San Jose with light traffic. Because of extreme differences
15-minute cities (Score:2)