Tech-Sector Developer Has Grand Plans for a Bay Area Shipyard
A well-financed real estate development company in California has ambitions to build a new West Coast shipyard, comparable in size and scale to the largest in China.
California Forever, a mega-scale property developer backed by some of the biggest names in tech, is known for its plans to build a vast manufacturing park northeast of San Francisco. The 2,100-acre Solano Foundry would be a place for high-tech manufacturers to set up shop, just an hour north from the engineering expertise of Silicon Valley. Alongside the industrial park, California Forever envisions a new city of 400,000 people and 170,000 homes. There is plenty of space: California Forever has bought up more than 100 square miles of land - about 70,000 acres - between Vacaville and Antioch. To build it out, the developer has signed a deal with the region's construction labor unions to use mostly union workers on projects within its boundaries for the next 40 years.
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To the south of the proposed city, California Forever has secured rights to 7,500 acres of waterfront land on a 30-foot-deep channel in the Sacramento River. It is the largest piece of undeveloped land suitable for shipbuilding in the U.S., and would complement the capabilities available at Mare Island, a former U.S. Navy public shipyard located 25 miles to the west of the Solano site. A newly-commissioned economic impact study suggests that buildout of the Solano Shipyard site would cost about $22 billion over the span of 30 years, and the resulting mix of variously-sized yards on site would employ about 40,000 people - nearly twice as many as HII Newport News Shipbuilding. (The details of the envisioned yard buildout and vessel construction mix are yet to be released.)
A shipbuilding revival would be welcome in the region. The nearby Mare Island yard, which dates to World War II, recently closed down after 13 years under private management. Its commercial operator shuttered its doors and laid off its staff earlier this month after losing a contract to drydock the icebreaker USCGC Healy. About 80 jobs were lost in the Solano County area. The region also recently lost two other major industrial employers, and a new mega-industrial revival in rural Solano County would more than make up the difference.