Masterminds behind California Forever plea for Gavin Newsom’s help

A group of Silicon Valley billionaires spent years quietly buying up ranchland in Solano County to build a new city from scratch, and now that the project is stalled in California's regulatory swamp, they're going hat in hand to Gavin Newsom asking him to fast-track the very environmental review process his own state built into an art form. There's something almost poetic about it. The people who can afford to buy an entire county's worth of land still can't out-muscle CEQA.

Here's the thing though: they're not wrong to ask. California Forever, whatever you think of its founders or their tech-utopian pitch, is trying to do something the state desperately needs, which is build actual housing at actual scale. And the same environmental review machinery that's supposed to protect open space has instead become the tool that blocks almost everything, from apartment complexes to solar farms to, apparently, entire planned cities backed by billionaire money. If men with nine-figure bank accounts and a direct line to the governor's office still have to beg for permitting relief, imagine what it's like for a regular developer trying to build a fourplex in Fresno.

This is the quiet admission buried in the story. California's own creators of wealth and jobs are telling Sacramento, in effect, that the state's rules are too slow and too tangled even for people with unlimited resources and patience. Newsom likes to talk about housing urgency, but here's a live test case sitting on his desk. If his answer is more study sessions and tax disputes dragged out for years, that tells you everything about whether the state actually wants more housing or just wants to keep saying it does.