A City Is Broke. Can Billionaires’ Urbanist Dream Offer It a Last Chance?

Suisun City, Calif., has ping-ponged between the threat of insolvency and revitalization plans that tend to fizzle out. Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTListen to this article 10:40 min Learn moreShare full article32By Conor DoughertyConor Dougherty revealed the secret backers of California Forever in 2023 and has been following the project ever since.Nov. 18, 2025Updated 8:47 a.m. ETSuisun City is a town of 30,000 in a neglected corner of the San Francisco Bay Area. Its two most prominent features are its marshy waterfront and its lack of money.The local government has spent the past several decades ping-ponging between the threat of insolvency and revitalization plans that work for a time and then fizzle out. Walking through the 19th-century downtown, past historic brick buildings with boarded-up windows and a redeveloped park where homeless people sleep, you see a city with good bones that wishes to be more, but cant seem to figure out what.Enter Suisun Citys latest bid for renewal: a proposal to annex 22,873 acres of agricultural land owned by a company called California Forever, a development play backed by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires. California Forevers hope is to build a new, up-from-the-ground city on yellow hills dotted with sheep and wind turbines.The point of the Suisun annexation is for each side to help the other solve a problem. California Forevers problem is that it wants to build on unincorporated land in Solano County, which has a law forbidding the building of much of anything outside established cities.