A New City for a New Economy: Gabriel Metcalf on California Forever’s Vision

Gabriel, to start, introduce yourself, how long you’ve been with California Forever, and what drew you to this effort.

Thank you for your interest, and I’m the city planner for this project. I came to this work after a long career studying housing and transportation policy in California. I ran the urbanist think tank SPUR (San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association) for many years. I’d say that gave me a front-row seat to how policy change actually happens. 

Going back into the 1990s, we worked extensively on the housing shortage and on public transit’s systemic problems. We had a lot of wins and, of course, losses, but I believe we made progress.

Here’s the thing: it’s absolutely clear to me, and I think to anyone who is intellectually honest about this, that California needs to create more places where growth can happen at scale.

Incremental infill development is wonderful. We should be doing as much of it as possible. But we are never going to solve our housing shortfall through infill alone. We need a more sophisticated conversation about growth, one that includes doing greenfield development better.

For our readers, define and elaborate on what you mean when you say “doing greenfield development better.”

Doing greenfield better, to me, means walkability. We are so used to the postwar suburban model of car-oriented suburbia, where the development is so spread out that every trip requires a car. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Doing greenfield better means getting back into the business of building “new towns.” America used to know how to do this…not once or twice, but thousands of times. There’s a template that works: medium-density, walkable, mixed-use town building, but that art has been lost. We spend enormous energy fighting about how to preserve or adapt the small number of walkable places we inherited from the past. I reject the idea that we can’t make new walkable places again. We can. We should.

This is my chance to take everything I’ve learned in the Bay Area and Australia, and apply it to what I consider the greatest planning opportunity of our generation. If we figure out how to do this, I hope it becomes a model that can be replicated, helping California get back into the business of building cities. Cities are wonderful. We should have more of them.

And I’ll add one more thing: We don’t just struggle to build housing in California. We struggle to build factories, transit, and energy infrastructure. If we’re going to scale jobs, energy, and major infrastructure, we need places where building is actually possible.

California Forever has captured national attention, but the effort also speaks to a larger question about growth. What’s the broader vision of new communities that address the state’s housing, sustainability, and economic competitiveness challenges?

It’s no secret that California has had a very hard time coping with growth. We’re now poised to lose four Congressional seats while Texas gains four. For decades, California has been mired in bureaucracy and lawsuits while other states have continued to grow. That’s a tragedy, and a self-inflicted one, that’s materially changing the direction of America for the worse.

California remains an extraordinary engine of economic growth. We’re exceptionally good at attracting people from all over the world. If we could simply make room for more people to live here, we’d improve their lives and our own. The rest of the country looks at California as a symbol of Democratic governance; judged by our ability to house people or manage growth, we’re not doing well. We need to change that.

New cities won’t solve everything, but they can be one solution—and at a scale that actually matters. Right now, about 7% of California is urbanized. Increasing that to just 8% could accommodate 10 million more homes if built at the densities California Forever is proposing.

Let me pause on one central critique: why pursue new-town development at all when so many of California’s existing cities struggle to absorb growth? Respond to legacy developers and urbanists who insist the state should rebuild what it already has.

I’ll say again, new town development is not the only tool; it could help a lot. We absolutely need to keep working hard on other strategies as well…incremental infill development, brownfield redevelopment, and suburban retrofits. We need to do all of the above.

But when you look around, it’s completely, absolutely clear that we will not be able to solve our growth challenges by infill alone. It takes years and years to get projects approved, and they often end up “everything-bagel” to the point that they are not feasible to build unless home prices are really expensive.

The cities in this country that are growing while also maintaining a semblance of affordability all accommodate greenfield development. I think this is a really essential empirical observation. It’s beyond wishful thinking, so say we can do everything we need without greenfield development. Any serious policy response has to grapple with this.

Let’s figure out how to make new walkable places. We can make room for everyone!

Moving on, speak to how your background informs California Forever’s approach to neighborhood design, open space, and the public realm.

Being the planner for a new town starts with a deep appreciation for what works in existing cities. I draw heavily from San Francisco and Sydney, of course, but also from New York, Boston, Tokyo, Barcelona, and Melbourne. You can see pieces of all those places in our work. Our CEO has his own set of influential precedents.

But the most important precedents are the 19th-century grid extensions. I’d highlight three: the Manhattan Commissioners Plan of 1811; Barcelona’s Cerda Plan of 1860; and the 1847 O’Farrell Plan for San Francisco. 

During the 19th century, enormous urban growth was accommodated by extending walkable grid plans into greenfields. These plans created small, human-scaled blocks subdivided into narrow parcels sold to many developers. There was no zoning—not in the modern sense. The city emerged organically within a strong public-realm framework.

I believe that is the right model for greenfield planning today. Instead of trying to micromanage every land-use decision, planners should create a framework that invites thousands of individual builders to act over time. As the master developer, our responsibility is to create the public realm: streets, sidewalks, parks, plazas, and the infrastructure that supports everything else. American planning has become overly focused on regulating private development, and I’d like to redirect that energy toward designing and building the public realm.

Shifting to economic strategy: with global attention on maritime industrial capacity, how does the proposed Solano Shipyard fit into this moment? 

It’s shocking how much America’s shipbuilding capacity has declined. The largest shipyard in China built more ships last year than the United States has built since World War II.

We happen to own a waterfront site that would be ideal for a large, modern shipbuilding facility.

Coming out of COVID, there’s bipartisan interest in rebuilding critical industries domestically. Semiconductors are one example; shipbuilding could be another. If that happens, we could play a role. It’s too soon to say exactly how it will unfold, but it’s a very real possibility we’re exploring. I hope to be doing planning work on this in the next year or two.

Following up, and with San Francisco still struggling with post-pandemic recovery, how might the Solano Foundry fit into the Bay Area’s shifting geography of jobs, talent, and affordability?

The plan includes a 2,100-acre industrial zone we’re calling Solano Foundry. It’s one of the most exciting components, and our goal is to create a center for advanced manufacturing companies—a place close to their R&D hubs but with room to scale production. Proximity matters enormously for iteration and product development, and I think the new city will be a complement to the existing San Francisco. 

The Bay Area’s innovation economy generates a tremendous number of “hard tech” companies, firms that build physical things. Many eventually leave the state for many reasons, and it’s not just real estate. 

We’re not trying to compete with places that grew organically over 200 years, and if you can afford to live in SF, Berkeley, or other inner-Bay cities, you should stay there. What’s missing is walkable urbanism at an attainable price point. 

Generally, the Bay Area benefits when multiple economic clusters thrive. Oakland’s success doesn’t hurt San Francisco; UC Davis doing well doesn’t hurt Stanford. The region’s power comes from overlapping, interdependent clusters, and we want to build another one focused on advanced manufacturing… I think there’s a compelling story here. We can provide both the industrial space employers need and more affordably priced homes for their employees.

Staying with housing, elaborate on how the project’s walkability, street design, and neighborhood structure support a community where people can genuinely age in place.

The people who will value this most are those who need safe streets the most: kids and seniors.

Car culture is so deeply ingrained that we’ve stopped noticing its impacts. We expect streets to be dangerous. We expect mobility to collapse if you can’t drive. It doesn’t have to be that way.

We’re building a city that’s extremely safe for pedestrians and very transit-connected. Nearly all streets will be capped at 20 mph. There will be many car-free streets. This will be a place where kids can play in the street and seniors can ride bikes…like my grandmother did in Boulder until she was almost 80.

We’re not building senior “developments.” We’re building mixed neighborhoods with a range of housing types, shapes, tenures, sizes…all mixed within our communities. We are planning neighborhoods around local shopping streets, making it possible for every resident to walk to one. It’s basic, American town planning, adapted to the modern age. I think it’s going to be really popular with people of all ages, and that in and of itself is going to be good for older people.

Building a new city requires not just vision and best practices, but fiscal governance. How are you structuring partnerships, entitlements, and infrastructure finance at this scale? To what extent can core infrastructure rely on private financing?

Yes, we are doing a lot of work on the public finance plan right now, as you would imagine. We are committed to the promise that we will not be imposing taxes or fees on people in the rest of Solano County, which means we are relying on the taxes and fees generated by the households and employers that locate in the new city, and that’s the essence of how this works. 

Every private building that gets built there pays a property tax; in a new development, people generally pay the equivalent of an extra property tax through a Community Facilities District. People pay sales tax and hotel tax, and we collect fees from developers who build there.

In other words, it’s all of the normal sources of funding that pay for local public services. There’s no magic—it’s the same funding sources any community has. We borrow money to pay for the up-front costs, and it gets paid back by those revenues. The public finance plan has to show how that all works—what the costs are and how those costs get covered. What has been most interesting for me is getting that demystified.

I should also say we have a great advantage in the plan to become part of Suisun City via annexation. For the major public services, we’ll simply be part of the Suisun City Police Department and Fire Department.

We have a few slightly innovative financing ideas, but nothing revolutionary. We’ll be setting up a community services district to provide some services, and we’ll be establishing a Transportation Management Association (TMA) to operate transit. Those are a bit less common, but still normal organizations that already exist elsewhere in California.

Given local skepticism and political headwinds, how are you approaching transparency, engagement, and trust-building with Solano County residents?

I think we’ve made real progress politically. We’ve listened, learned, and built relationships. 

I’d like to think publishing the Suisun Expansion Specific Plan has helped show people the thoughtfulness behind the project. Our entitlement path is annexation into Suisun City and approval of a Specific Plan. That still requires a tax-sharing agreement with the County and LAFCO approval. We’re preparing a full Environmental Impact Report.

There is a lot here not just for Suisun City, but for Solano County and California. Of course, not everyone will agree, but I’m hopeful we can reach an approval that most people feel good about.

Finally, stepping back: how might California Forever contribute to reimagining California’s economy from Silicon Valley’s innovation base to a more diversified, production-driven future?

Great topic to conclude on. I’ll say this…

We have everything we need in California to succeed. We have people from all over the world. We have the greatest innovation economy in history. We share broad agreement on values like democracy, human rights, and climate action. We have a giant economy and a giant tax base. Millions more would love to join us, and be part of this way of life—if housing policy didn’t exclude them. 

We just need to get out of our own way and actually make it possible to build again. If we reform the bureaucracy and vetocracy that created this sclerosis, we can once again build the things we need.

Ironically, so much of that sclerosis grew out of a previous generation’s environmentalism aimed at stopping growth. That’s not the environmentalism we need now. 

We need an environmentalism that builds—housing, factories, energy, transportation. I hope we can play a part in shifting California in that direction.