Located at the northernmost tip of Sonoma County, Cloverdale doesn’t have the same kind of cachet as its southern neighbors Healdsburg and Petaluma. But big things are brewing in the town of nearly 9,000. In July 2024, the Press Democrat reported that Esmeralda Land Company — an outfit run by a Stanford-educated software engineer named Devon Zuegel — entered a purchase agreement to buy a massive 267-acre site in Cloverdale with plans to build a 600-unit, “‘pedestrian-first’ eco-village” on the land.
Zuegel is promoting Esmeralda as a utopian community that will bring new energy to a vacant plot of land, but the proposal is splitting residents and officials, and setting off a fiery debate about Cloverdale’s future.
The community would be built on the site of a former sawmill, and designs include a 200-room resort-hotel, 22,000 square feet of retail space, 17,500 square feet of office space, over 160 acres of open space — and the potential for a K-6 school.
The project’s dense design and founder’s tech background have drawn comparisons between Esmeralda and California Forever, the Solano County megaproject backed by Silicon Valley billionaires. But Zuegel has explicitly said she is not connected to California Forever…