More than one buyer has asked me some version of the same question this year: should they hold off on Fairfield or Suisun City because a new city of up to 400,000 people is supposedly coming to eastern Solano County. It's a fair question. The headlines about California Forever have been hard to miss since 2023, and the number attached to it, tens of thousands of acres and roughly a billion dollars in land purchases, is the kind of figure that makes anyone pause before writing an offer.
Here's what I tell them. The project is real. The land is real. But the mechanism that actually controls how much housing exists in Solano County right now has almost nothing to do with whether that project eventually breaks ground. Three separate layers stand between the land California Forever owns and a single new rooftop, and understanding those layers tells you more about your near-term housing options in Solano than any rendering of a future city ever will.
The vote nobody's development skips
Solano County has operated under a voter-approved Orderly Growth Initiative since the 1980s. It requires county voters to approve, at the ballot box, any development outside the county's seven incorporated cities: Benicia, Dixon, Fairfield, Rio Vista, Suisun City, Vacaville, and Vallejo. Inside those city limits, normal municipal zoning and permitting apply. Outside them, on unincorporated agricultural land, a builder needs a countywide election to change the rules first.
That's exactly the wall California Forever ran into. Its original East Solano Plan proposed rezoning roughly 17,500 acres for a city of up to 400,000 residents, and because that land sits outside all seven cities, the only path forward was a countywide ballot initiative. The company submitted that initiative in February 2024, then withdrew it in July 2024, one day before the Board of Supervisors was set to review a staff report on the plan's gaps in infrastructure, water, and fiscal impact. A poll commissioned by opponents that spring had found roughly seventy percent of county voters against it. Jan Sramek, the company's founder, said at the time that the project would come back to voters in 2026 after more preparation.
That reset is the part worth sitting with. A ballot initiative that needs to win a countywide vote is not a project on a construction timeline. It's a project on a political timeline, and those don't move on anyone's schedule but the electorate's.
The airspace rule that doesn't care who owns the land
Even if the vote problem disappeared tomorrow, a second restriction sits directly on top of much of that land, and it comes from a source with no interest in real estate economics at all.
In August 2024, the Solano County Airport Land Use Commission adopted a new Low Altitude Maneuvering Zone as part of the Travis Air Force Base Land Use Compatibility Plan. The zone covers a two-nautical-mile radius around two tactical waypoints southeast of the base, an area the base uses for low-altitude training maneuvers. Within it, the new rules prohibit new schools, daycare centers, libraries, hospitals, and nursing homes outright. They cap building heights at 200 feet, limit agriculturally zoned parcels to two residential dwellings each, and treat most non-agricultural development as incompatible unless the land was already zoned industrial or commercial recreation. Reporting on the compatibility maps has noted that the waypoints run through the site of California Forever's own planned Solano Foundry industrial park, meaning a meaningful share of the company's holdings falls inside a zone that legally cannot host the schools, hospitals, or high-density housing a city of 400,000 people would need. You can read the commission's own description of its role on the Solano County government site.
This is the part that matters most for anyone comparing neighborhoods today. Zoning votes can be won or lost. Airport compatibility rules tied to an active military training mission are far more durable, because they answer to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Force's operational needs, not to a county election cycle.
Where the workaround actually stands as of August 2026
Facing a countywide vote it was likely to lose, California Forever rebuilt its approach around a narrower path: annexation into an existing incorporated city instead of a countywide rezoning. The company reframed its project as the Suisun Expansion Plan and the Solano Shipyard, and pursued annexation into Suisun City, which sidesteps the need for a countywide ballot measure because the land would simply become part of a city that already has zoning authority over its own limits.
Here's how that timeline has actually unfolded:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| July 2024 | Countywide East Solano Plan ballot initiative withdrawn after an opponent-commissioned poll found roughly 70% opposition |
| August 2024 | County Airport Land Use Commission adopts the Low Altitude Maneuvering Zone, restricting schools, height, and density near two tactical waypoints |
| January 2025 | Suisun City Council directs staff to explore annexing land to the city's east |
| October 2025 | Suisun City accepts California Forever's application to annex roughly 22,900 acres |
| Spring 2026 | Draft Environmental Impact Report expected for public release and comment |
| Ahead | Final EIR, a Suisun City Council annexation vote, Solano County LAFCO review, and likely litigation from opponents |
Even in the best case for the developer, that's a multi-year sequence, and the Local Agency Formation Commission review alone exists specifically to determine whether Suisun City could service that much new land without straining the rest of the county's finances. One piece of the project did skip the zoning fight: the proposed Solano Shipyard, on 1,400 acres near Collinsville, sits on land already designated for maritime industrial use since the 1980s. But a shipyard needs a shipyard tenant, and that part of the plan hit its own turbulence this summer. Reporting from mid-July 2026 indicated that Saronic Technologies, the Austin-based defense manufacturer that would have anchored the facility with up to 10,000 jobs, was leaning toward building its $3.2 billion facility in Brownsville, Texas instead, after Texas approved a $211 million incentive package. No final decision had been announced as of that reporting, and California Forever said it was continuing to recruit other shipbuilders, but the episode is a live example of how unsettled the jobs case behind the housing case still is.
What this means if you're comparing Solano cities this year
None of this means California Forever disappears. It means the supply story headlining the news cycle is not a variable you should be pricing into a decision about Fairfield, Vacaville, Suisun City, Dixon, or any other Solano city right now. The inventory inside those seven incorporated boundaries is, for practical purposes, the entire market you're choosing from for the next several years. Waiting for a countywide vote, an annexation, an EIR, and a LAFCO review to resolve before making a move is waiting on a timeline nobody, including the developer, controls.
If your search does put you near the eastern edge of Fairfield or unincorporated land close to Suisun City or Rio Vista, a few questions are worth asking before you write an offer:
- Does this parcel sit inside the Travis Air Force Base Airport Influence Area? State law requires a real estate disclosure notice for any property inside that area, independent of anything happening with annexation.
- Is the parcel inside the Low Altitude Maneuvering Zone specifically? That determines whether future additions, accessory dwelling units, or land use changes face the height and density caps described above.
- Has the specific General Plan for that jurisdiction been updated since August 2024? Some cities have not yet reconciled their zoning with the amended compatibility plan, which can create surprises during permitting even on land that isn't part of any annexation.
A short FAQ
Will California Forever ever add real housing supply to Solano County? Possibly, but not on a timeline anyone can pin down today. The annexation path requires a final Environmental Impact Report, a Suisun City Council vote, and Solano County LAFCO approval, with litigation a realistic next step after that.
Does the Low Altitude Maneuvering Zone affect homes that already exist? The restrictions target new construction and new land uses. Existing homes are not retroactively rezoned, though a deed notice requirement has been proposed for related safety zones, which is worth asking about if you're buying near the base.
Which Solano cities are least tangled up in any of this? Cities without land near the two tactical waypoints or outside the Suisun annexation footprint, such as Dixon, Vallejo, and Benicia, are governed by their own ordinary zoning processes rather than this specific stack of restrictions. That doesn't mean their markets are static, only that this particular story isn't the thing to watch there.
If you're weighing Solano County cities against each other and want a read on what a specific parcel's zoning and airport influence status actually mean for your timeline, I'm happy to walk through it with you. Reach out through JohnsonGroupCA and we'll look at your specific address, not just the headlines.
