California Forever Delayed Again. Where Solano Buyers Go

Zero. That is how many homes California Forever will have for sale in Solano County this year, next year, and realistically the year after that. The company lost a 3-2 county vote on August 25, 2026, the ballot measure it pulled in July 2024 still has not been refiled, and the annexation it is betting on now has not reached the county boundary commission. Meanwhile Solano County's median single-family home sold for $610,000 in July 2026. That is the number to plan around.

What actually slipped in Solano this summer

The thing that died in August was a state bill, not the city itself. Solano County supervisors voted 3-2 to oppose the Solano Maritime and Manufacturing Act on August 25, 2026. The bill would have cleared 1,350 acres near Collinsville for a shipyard and let the company lean on a 2008 environmental report instead of a fresh one. With the Legislature's August 31 deadline days away, there was no time to rewrite it.

Supervisor Mitch Mashburn put it plainly: “Three days ain't gonna cut it.” The board says it will take the question back up before lawmakers reconvene in January 2027, which is reported locally as a pause rather than a burial.

Everything else is slower than that. The housing piece now runs through Suisun City, which is studying annexation of about 22,873 acres of company land. California Forever filed that application in October 2025, the environmental impact report drew 616 pages of public comment from 38 parties, and the city's own schedule has the report finishing at the end of 2026 before a petition even reaches Solano County LAFCO. KQED has noted that annexations of this size can take years, sometimes a decade.

The company says a homebuyer waitlist opens later this year or early next, and it has promised 400,000 residents eventually. Treat both as company statements, because the county record shows no approved environmental report, no LAFCO petition, and no scheduled vote. We walked through the streamlining fight behind all of this in our August piece on the jobs-for-housing demand.

What the five Solano cities cost while the new city waits

Here is the part that actually affects a 2026 purchase. Four of the five Solano cities buyers shop have medians under $620,000, and the fifth, Benicia, is the only one that reads like a traditional Bay Area price.

Two caveats. The C.A.R. rows count single-family detached homes only, which is why Marin reads $1.77M there and about $1.50M in Redfin's all-home series for the same month. And we do not have city pages for Fairfield, Vacaville or Suisun City yet, so those rows come from Redfin.

Benicia is the Solano ceiling, and it sits under the Marin floor

The gap between the two counties is wider than most people assume. On our Benicia city page, the August 2026 median was about $849,800, and Benicia scores 4.1 out of 5 overall with a 4.7 on safety. Cross the Carquinez Bridge into Marin and San Rafael was about $1.31M the same month, with a 3.3 overall.

So the most expensive city in Solano buys a higher-scoring place than the cheapest large city in Marin, for roughly $460,000 less. That is the trade real buyers are making right now, and it does not depend on anything California Forever does.

The downside is real. Benicia's amenities score is 1.5 out of 5 on our data, which is what happens when the nearest big-box anything is a bridge away. Vallejo is cheaper for a reason, sitting at 2.2 overall and 2.1 on safety citywide, though the spread across its 23 ranked neighborhoods makes the citywide number close to useless on its own. Somerset Highlands and Glen Cove are not Downtown Vallejo.

Three questions buyers keep asking about the delay

Will California Forever ever go to a countywide vote?

Probably, but not on any calendar that exists today. Solano's voter-approved 1984 orderly growth initiative still requires voter approval to rezone farmland, and the Suisun City annexation route is the company's attempt to work around that through LAFCO instead of the ballot.

Does the delay change Solano prices?

Not in either direction so far. Solano's median rose 2.7 percent year over year in July 2026, roughly in line with the county's normal drift, and homes sold in a median 40 days. Nothing in the price series reacted to the August vote.

Is it worth waiting for the new city?

For anyone buying in the next few years, no. Even the optimistic path in the Suisun City process puts groundbreaking at the end of 2027 at the earliest, and first occupancy well after that. We would rather help someone compare Glen Cove against Southampton this fall than wait on a map. The neighborhood you can walk through is the one you can actually score.

Sources

Marin Independent Journal, “New California city with jobs and homes? Not this year,” September 7, 2026

CalMatters, Solano supervisors vote against the shipyard bill, August 2026

Vallejo Sun, Collinsville shipbuilding project put on hold

KQED, Suisun City proposes annexing most of California Forever's new city

California Association of Realtors, July 2026 home sales and price report

Redfin, Solano County housing market data, July and August 2026

Houseberry city and ranking pages for Vallejo, Benicia and San Rafael, September 2026