Astral Codex Ten

Solano County

5 min read

Solano County

Article

Solano County is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 04, 2023 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “The specific land is farmland in Solano County”; “Solano County has a so-called ‘Orderly Growth Measure’”; “ensuring nobody builds anything outside existing cities in Solano County”. It most often appears alongside California Forever, Honduras, Prospera.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: September 04, 2023
  • Last seen: October 28, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

23: California Dreamin'
September 04, 2023 · Original source
The specific elites include the Collison brothers, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Marc Andreessen, and others, led by the mysterious Jan Sramek. The specific land is farmland in Solano County, about an hour’s drive northeast of San Francisco. The specific utopian city is going to look like this:
Inline links: Jan Sramek
In another sense, this is an extremely risky investment with a long and unclear path to profitability. You can make a killing selling housing in California because there’s constricted supply. There’s constricted supply for legal reasons. Building your own town routes around some, but not all, of the legal problems. And it causes new legal problems of its own. Solano County has a so-called “Orderly Growth Measure” saying that new building should happen in existing cities and not on empty land. In order to start building at all, Flannery has to win a referendum granting an exemption. But they already have a powerful coalition of local enemies: Three months ago, Flannery sued a group of local farmers who wouldn’t sell to them, accusing them of “conspiring to inflate the value of the land”. This isn’t implausible - a known risk of trying to buy lots of contiguous land without eminent domain powers is that locals realize you’re desperate and conspire to raise prices. But it’s also not implausible that billionaires trying to get farmers to sell their land are playing legal hardball. In any case, local officials and farming activist groups took the farmers’ side and are now really mad.
Inline links: accusing them of
Solano County Orderly Growth Committee is a forty-year-old “watchdog and community action group” ensuring nobody builds anything outside existing cities in Solano County. They are pro-farm, pro-wilderness, and anti-”endless and sprawling subdivisions”. They haven’t yet expressed an opinion on Flannery but it seems like the epitome of the thing they exist to prevent.
Inline links: Solano County Orderly Growth Committee
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post
September 11, 2023 · Original source
Original post: Model City Monday 9/4/23 Comments On The Solano County City Ecorche writes:
Inline links: Model City Monday 9/4/23, writes
Just because the city is founded by elites doesn’t mean it will be inhabited by them. Mark Zuckerberg is an elite, but that doesn’t mean Facebook is “a website for elites”. No elite wants to live in Solano County (unless it’s their summer ranch home or something). The natural demographic is people priced out of the Bay.
25
October 28, 2025 · Original source
See here for a more complete history of the island, and here for a Charter Cities Institute podcast on the topic. California Maybe Actually Pretty Soon Now California Forever, the project to build a new city in unoccupied land an hour from San Francisco, has overcome a first round of political headwinds. In 2023, a stealth mode company announced it had quietly bought up a city-sized tract of land in Solano County, and would be placing an initiative on the county ballot to let them build a futuristic planned community there. Enough local NIMBYs protested that the company and county jointly withdrew the initiative in favor of seeking some other agreement. In 2025, they announced their new strategy: they would partner with nearby Suisun City. Suisun would annex their land and permit development there, avoiding a county-wide referendum (they might also make a deal with another nearby city, Rio Vista). The new plan is moving forward: earlier this month, California Forever submitted their annexation paperwork, which was deemed complete by the city. The remaining steps are: Suisun City Council must approve their environmental impact report (may cause delays and added expense, but unlikely to block the project outright)
Inline links: here, here, has overcome a first round of political headwinds
The Solano County Local Agency Formation Commission - a county-level body of two supervisors, two local mayors, and a public member - must approve the annexation (may be complicated; lots of room for NIMBYs to cause problems here)