This summer, I co-organized a month-long 1,300-person "popup village" in Healdsburg, CA called Edge Esmeralda. This gathering was incredibly fun and rewarding, and it was also a huge accelerant to the creation of the permanent village we are building, Esmeralda. Edge Esmeralda is happening again next year! Mark your calendar: May 24 - June 21, 2025 A huge challenge when building a town is that the feedback loops are very, very long. Instead of accepting this fact, I decided that we have to get creative to find ways to learn and adjust, because within a few years we will literally be laying our plans in concrete. Edge Esmeralda was essentially a prototype to learn about how we want to approach building the Esmeralda permanent community, both the "hardware" (urbanism, infrastructure, architecture, etc) and the "software" (events, programming, culture, etc). The Edge Esmeralda "popup village" was 30 days long, and it took place scattered throughout a charming 11,000-person town in Sonoma County called Healdsburg. This extended gathering gave us an opportunity to put our ideas into practice and learn firsthand which ones we want to incorporate as we the permanent community — more importantly, which ones we'll want to leave behind, or at least adjust. These learnings ranged widely, such as: What makes a great town square How to integrate kids while maintaining expert-level programming Where to provide the lightest amount of structure and routine for the group to allow the emergent creativity of the attendees to make awesome things happen How to approach local outreach to make existing residents feel included Which restaurant layouts and acoustics make for the best nightly community dinners How far apart is too far apart for things to feel easily accessible on foot It's hard to capture EE in a blog post — it was really more of an ecosystem like a college campus or city than a single tracked event — but these stats will give you a sense of what the month looked like: ~1,300 people joined us during the month of June 80 kids attended Edge Esmeralda 6 weeks old & 86 years old, the ages of the youngest & oldest attendees 25 expert-led program tracks 551 sessions throughout the month 93% were organized by attendees, with just 7% planned directly by the Edge Esmeralda organizing team! 167 unique session hosts 3x increase in Bird Bike usage in the town during the event – and that doesn’t even count the bikes people rented or brought, separate from Bird, which was a much larger number! 350 redwood trees funded by donations from a solar-powered night market, organized entirely by attendees Read the Edge Esmeralda 2024 recap → The coolest thing to me is that our design principles focused on emergence, so we didn’t actually know precisely what would happen. Instead, we created the container and then watched it unfold. In other words, all the cool things that happened were because the attendees saw it as an opportunity to make something awesome out of it. One of my favorite examples was the Solar A-frames project, catalyzed by Nick Foley and Anson Yu/ Over the course of a few weeks, they led a group of attendees to build an A-frame made out of solar panels up in a formerly burned redwood forest close to town, which ended up hosting the spectacular Golden Future Night Market and the memorable Closing Ceremony. I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to collaborate with Edge City to make Edge Esmeralda a reality. It's one of the most rewarding things I've ever worked on, and they were incredible partners in bringing this to life. "Edge Esmeralda was one of the weirdest, wildest, most ambitious, most unexpected — and most fun — things I’ve ever watched unfold in Healdsburg." — Simone Wilson, Healdsburg Tribune In fact we had such a good time, and so many people asked us to do it again so they could come longer next time, that we have decided to organize Edge Esmeralda again! Mark your calendars: May 24 - June 21, 2025. Hope to see you there! .post .post-content table { margin: 18px 0 18px 0; } .post .post-content tr div {padding: 6px 0 0 0 } .post-content b a, .post-content b {font-weight: 900;} @media (min-width: 1200px) { table {min-width: calc(100% + 190px) !important; margin-right: -90px !important; margin-left: -90px !important}} @media (min-width: 768px) { table { min-width: calc(100% + 140px) !important; margin-right: -70px !important; margin-left: -70px !important}} @media (max-width: 768px) { table tr > * {flex:none !important; width: calc(100% - 12px) !important}} .row hr {margin: 20px 0 !important;}

One thing I like about Georgist land taxes is they reflect a deep-seated intuition many people have that land should be owned by the community, while still employing markets to ensure efficient use of this limited resource. People feel that land is special and should serve the collective good and reflect community interests. This intuition manifests in behaviors like NIMBYism, where residents oppose changes to their neighborhood and try to stop people from doing what they want to their own property. These behaviors essentially reflect a belief that they as a community have rights over the property in question, even if they don't own it. One reaction is to scoff at this behavior, because it violates a basic interpretation property rights. But another reaction is to ask ourselves, why do people have such strong intuitions that land is different than other forms of property? One way in which natural resources (including land) are qualitatively different than other forms of property is that you can't make more of them (with minor exceptions). As a result, natural resources aren't the fruits of someone's labor. One reaction is to say that no one should be able to individually own them, and that they should be collectively owned by the community. However, the history of the 20th century shows us that giving over the land to the state isn't a great idea either — government's aren't exactly known for making best use of opportunities to their best and highest use, to say the least! Henry George proposed a different solution – tax the land rent while allowing private ownership. Land rent is the value of the property created by society rather than individual landowners (e.g. its location, views, and other natural resources), so taxing it would essentially recapture this socially-created value for public benefit. While society is recapturing the socially-created value of the land, use of the land is in the hands of private actors who have the incentive to use it efficiently, so the system maintains the productivity benefits of private ownership while addressing issues of unearned wealth. Markets are still generally the best tools we have for organizing human activity and resources, so by allowing private actors to own land but then simply tax them on the land rent leaves us with the best of both worlds!

A new city has been proposed in California, and I’ve never been more captivated by a vision for the future of my home state in my lifetime. This post is part of a series I’m writing about this bold proposal. Up until recently, the new city’s potential impact on Travis Air Force Base had been a source of questions about the project. California Forever’s holdings extend to land that borders Travis, and although the city itself will be on the opposite side of this assemblage, officials raised concerns about whether building a city in the area would interfere with the base’s operations. To address these concerns, California Forever updated its plan to give the base more room for flight operations. These changes satisfied the base, and on February 15, Travis Air Force Base came out in support of the proposal. I think it’s instructive to understand the background of this episode, because to make this plan a reality, over time California Forever will need to develop many more productive relationships like the one they’ve cultivated with Travis. According to California Forever’s website, they had made the original plans in a way that "fully complied with the Air Installation Compatible Use Study published by Travis, and the Land Use Compatibility Plan published by Solano County". In a post titled Our partnership with Travis Air Force Base, California Forever walks through the considerations they took into account to protect and support Travis AFB. Here are some highlights pulled directly from that post: "The New Community is located entirely outside of Accident Potential Zones." "The New Community is located entirely outside of 50 dB CNEL noise contours." "The Initiative nearly doubles the security buffer around Travis AFB where no residential or commercial community development is permitted." (And that's even before the changes announced on February 14.) "There are fewer flights going over the New Community than over the cities of Suisun City, Fairfield, and Vacaville." "The New Community is located entirely outside of Accident Potential Zones." "The New Community is located entirely outside of 50 dB CNEL noise contours." "The Initiative nearly doubles the security buffer around Travis AFB where no residential or commercial community development is permitted." (And that's even before the changes announced on February 14.) "There are fewer flights going over the New Community than over the cities of Suisun City, Fairfield, and Vacaville." But after the details were unveiled in January, Travis still had some remaining legitimate concerns. As a result, California Forever updated the plan to remove those remaining impacts. The adjustments included changing the zoning to create a buffer between the base and residential zones, which included relocating industrial uses to the area closer to the base in order to separate the residential areas from the base. They also zoned the westernmost portion of the new city to only permit solar farms, battery storage, and other infrastructure such as wastewater and water treatment plants. As a further protection for Travis, the new initiative also requires Travis to accept the siting, technology, and design of these facilities. It appears that after Travis AFB reviewed these changes, they determined that the revised proposal addressed all of their concerns, and on February 15, Travis Air Force Base came out in support of California Forever’s proposal. Their press release said "Travis AFB will be able to continue flying its full mission, including all of our operational, exercise, and local training flights consisting of multiple patterns and landings to all runways", and added that California Forever’s plan has the potential "to improve the wellbeing of our Airmen and families into the future" Here is the old map from California Forever's original proposal published in January Here is the new map reflecting the February 14 changes, which addressed Travis' concerns I’m very encouraged by the constructive relationship that Travis AFB and California Forever appear to have cultivated with each other. It’s a great example of how win-win solutions can happen if both sides get creative about what’s possible. I hope California Forever is able to develop similar productive relationships with other stakeholders as it moves forward. If you’re interested in understanding more about the new city that California Forever has proposed, here are the other posts in the series: Intro: The new city in California Part 1: The story of California Forever so far Part 2: Clustered development will preserve California’s landscape Part 3: The first walkable city in America in a century Part 4: Success is tied to benefiting existing Solano residents Part 5: Relationship with Travis Air Force Base (this post!) Part 6: Is the proposed new city in California climate resilient?* Part 7: Building new cities in CA vs building more in existing cities* Part 8: What’s next for the proposed new city in California?* *These are planned posts, still works in progress! 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A new city has been proposed in California, and I’ve never been more captivated by a vision for the future of my home state in my lifetime. This post is part of a series I’m writing about this bold proposal. California Forever was founded by Jan Sramek in 2017 as a way to create the missing economic engine for Solano County while helping to solve the region’s growing housing crisis in a scalable, financially self-supporting way. He began pitching the project to wealthy Californians who were committed to the long-term health and success of the state. Jan described it as an investment that would achieve these goals and also could make money long-term if it succeeded. This resonated with people like Laurene Powell Jobs, Mike Moritz, John and Patrick Collison, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Reid Hoffman, who ended up investing a combined hundreds of millions of dollars to the project. A photo from the area where the new city has been proposed A map showing the location for the proposed new city Over the next 6 years, California Forever bought over 60,000 acres of land in Solano County. (This is a lot of land; for comparison, Golden Gate Park is about 1,000 acres and San Francisco is about 30,000 acres.) They made these purchases without telling people in advance what their ideas were for the land, similar to how Disney purchased the land for Disney World. They knew that if they announced the plan upfront, the land prices would spike and the project would no longer be possible. As the years went on and California Forever bought more and more land, neighbors grew curious and, later, concerned about who was behind the project. Farmers were selling at prices that part of the county had never seen before, with many of them making out with millions of dollars, and eventually the proximity to Travis Air Force Base made people concerned that perhaps some foreign adversary was buying the land. In summer 2023, the team was preparing for a public launch in the fall. But before California Forever could make their planned announcement, the project leaked – the start of a rocky rollout to the public. It’s clear to me that the land assembly could never have happened if they had told the whole world what they were doing in advance. It’s also clear to me why some Solano residents would feel suspicious about an entity that purchased so much land quietly, and why California Forever would need to make up for that. CEO Jan Sramek at a December town hall in Rio Vista, a town neighboring the proposed new city (The Reporter) Over the following months, California Forever went into community engagement mode — talking to people in the county, setting up a community advisory committee, organizing town halls, and hosting meetings with electeds and community groups. These conversations became input into the plan for the new city. "To make sure those programs reflect input from all residents, we need your advice on what causes to prioritize in these community benefit programs," said a blog post from late 2023 that outlined some of the themes they had heard Solano voters say were priorities for them, such as down payment assistance, childcare, and education and training. On January 17, after incorporating input from Solano stakeholders, California Forever announced the ballot initiative that will go in front of voters in November. The proposed legislation is called the East Solano Homes, Jobs, and Clean Energy Initiative. If passed, its contents would become legally binding. Here are key aspects of the project as spelled out in the initiative: The city would use just 17,500 acres, or about a quarter of the total land that California Forever owns. 4,000 of those acres would be used for parks, trails, urban ecological habitat, community gardens, and other types of open space. Neighborhoods would be centered around local shopping streets and schools, and designed so that families can live within a short walk for most daily needs. The community is designed to provide a range of transportation alternatives to cars, including walking, biking, and frequent transit service. The initiative describes 10 guarantees to ensure the plan will benefit citizens all across Solano County, such as tying the new city’s ability to grow to the creation of 15,000 new jobs and $400 million in downpayment assistance. (I’ll dive deeper into these guarantees in a later post in the series.) The company made some minor modifications in a revised initiative submitted on January 29th. Travis Air Force base still had some concerns about the impact of the project on their flight operations, so on February 14, California Forever modified the plan based on this input to shift uses farther from the base. In response, Travis Airforce Base said that the amended initiative will work for them, allowing them to continue their full mission. (I’ll dive deeper into this topic in a later post in the series.) The next step is for California Forever to collect approximately 13,500 signatures to place the initiative on the ballot in November 2024 (10% of Solano residents who voted in the last gubernatorial election). Then, it’ll go to a vote of Solano residents in November 2024, and they will decide what happens next. Now that you have an overview of the story so far, here are the other posts in the series that dive into various key aspects of California Forever’s proposed new city: Intro: The new city in California Part 1: The story so far (this post!) Part 2: Clustered development will preserve California’s landscape Part 3: The first walkable city in America in a century Part 4: Success is tied to benefiting existing Solano residents* Part 5: Relationship with Travis Air Force Base* Part 6: Is the proposed new city in California climate resilient?* Part 7: Building new cities in CA vs building more in existing cities* Part 8: What’s next for the proposed new city in California?* *These are planned posts, still works in progress! 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