Silicon Valley Investors’ Plans for a New City Put on Hold

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Silicon Valley’s plans for a start-up city are on hold. The East Solano Plan — a proposal backed by a roster of technology billionaires to build a city of up to 400,000 people on farmland about 60 miles from San Francisco — is being delayed at least two years to study the project’s impact on the environment, the company behind the development said in a statement. The city was meant to be a walkable urban community in a rural corner of the San Francisco Bay Area now home to sheep farms and windmills. Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who came up with the plan and is now the chief executive of the company behind it, pitched it as a way to build significantly more housing, something California badly needs, in a short amount of time. The company’s investors, a who’s who of Silicon Valley, included a number of billionaires including Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective. But the proposal created tension in the area. California Forever, the company driving the development, spent years buying some $900 million of farmland without revealing anything about the identity of its backers or plans for a new city. The secrecy stoked fear and mistrust among neighbors who spent years trying to uncloak the company’s identity until The New York Times revealed it last year.