Foster’s Bighorn, a tavern in Rio Vista, California, feels far removed from San Francisco. Two blocks from the Sacramento River and 60 miles from the Embarcadero, it’s the sort of small-town watering hole where local lore looms as large as the hunting trophies above the bar. Deep in eastern Solano County, Rio Vista can seem alien to Bay Area denizens.
If Jan Sramek and his tech backers have their way, however, Foster’s Bighorn and San Francisco are about to get much closer. Sramek is the founder of California Forever, a real-estate venture proposing to turn a 100-square-mile tract of farmland outside Rio Vista into a new planned city—anchored by an advanced-manufacturing park, a riparian shipyard, and, ultimately, a population nearing half a million.
Locals don’t seem thrilled. In the alley parking bay between Foster’s and Kramer’s Barber Shop on Rio Vista’s Main Street, I meet Nikki, a Gen X mother of three, smoking a cigarette. Asked what she thinks of the plan, she replies, “It’s a shitshow.” Pressed to elaborate, she says, “It’s just political money, foreign money. They’re buying up land, they’re trying to sue farmers for their land, and we don’t need all that.”…