Solano Shipyard and Solano Foundry will not work without homes
In recent weeks, there have been discussions about possible legislation that would help bring major shipbuilders and manufacturers to Solano County. Some elected officials have voiced support for a faster permitting pathway for the Solano Shipyard and the Lambie Industrial Park, but not for the Suisun Expansion.
This is a mistake. Narrow legislation that excludes the Suisun Expansion will not bring major employers to the county. For context, the Suisun Expansion includes the Solano Foundry, an evolution of the existing Lambie Industrial Park, located further away from Travis AFB to protect its air space, as well as new neighborhoods, homes, shops, schools, and parks. Here’s why the Suisun Expansion is essential:
- Unlike in other states, there are no public funds to pay for the hundreds of millions of dollars of water, wastewater, and other infrastructure required to make the Solano Shipyard and Solano Foundry shovel-ready. This infrastructure can be financed privately, but only if these facilities are part of the larger complete development.
- Shipbuilders and manufacturers want the mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods proposed in the Suisun Expansion. Without these assets, these companies are not interested. Industrial leaders know this, elected officials know this, and this conclusion is echoed by research from a wide array of sources, including the Congressional Research Service (which identifies affordable housing within commuting distance as a direct driver of shipyard recruitment and retention), Government Accountability Office (finding that all shipbuilders cited housing-related recruitment and retention as an active constraint on meeting the Navy’s shipbuilding goals), resulting in Federal legislative action on shipyard workforce housing crisis.
Without the investments and larger mixed-use ecosystem that comes with the overall project, major employers will not come. Moreover, Solano already has a major housing crisis, as referenced in press reports discussed below including both NorthBay Health, the county’s largest healthcare provider, and Travis AFB, its largest employer. Adding new major employers to the region without building more homes would just worsen the ongoing affordability crisis.
LOCAL HISTORY
The Solano Shipyard has been designated for maritime industrial purposes in Solano County planning documents going back to at least the 1970s. In 1980, this designation was added to the Solano County 1980 General Plan, and Lambie Industrial Park was added for general industrial uses. Today, more than half-a-century later, not a single major employer is located in either of these two industrial sites. Isolated, without infrastructure or housing, these sites have been essentially vacant for more than half a century.
The clear lesson is that modern shipyards and manufacturing parks do not succeed on their own. To thrive, industrial sites must be integrated into nearby research and development, shops, hotels, neighborhoods, parks, and schools for the people who work there and their families.
Here is what the Lambie Industrial Park looks like today. First designated for industrial use 46 years ago, less than 5% of Lambie’s 1,400 acres have ever been developed. Not a single major employer is located here.
EnlargeNATIONAL EVIDENCE
Solano’s lessons are obvious when contrasted with national success stories. Every major shipyard in America, from Puget Sound in Washington state to Newport News in Virginia, is located within or near a city, surrounded by housing and manufacturing facilities, with services that support the people who work and live there.
Take, for example, the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, the largest ship repair complex on the West Coast, which repairs aircraft carriers, submarines, and all other types of vessels, and employs a total of roughly 15,000 military and civilian workers. As shown on the satellite image below, the shipyard is built directly into the city of Bremerton, deeply integrated into the community, and surrounded by residential neighborhoods that support families who have worked there for generations.
To be clear, there is such a thing as a goldilocks distance: not too far away, but not too close, either. As American cities grew up around their shipyards, often residential development got too close, and encroached upon these facilities, generating community friction and division.
Unlike almost any other potential shipbuilding center in America, Solano County can avoid this problem by integrating these hard-won lessons into a master planned development, where residential neighborhoods are located at an optimal distance – not so close as to encroach, but close enough that workers enjoy a short commute and are supported within the workplace by sufficient ancillary infrastructure to keep their workplace attractive.
SOLVING THE INFRASTRUCTURE GAP THROUGH PRIVATE CAPITAL
The scale of the Solano Shipyard and the Solano Foundry is one of Solano’s unique differentiators, but it comes with a price tag. To bring these sites to market, they need foundational infrastructure–power, water, sewer, and transportation. That costs a lot.
Every employer and every California politician knows this. Indeed, Solano County’s own report, the 1989 Collinsville-Montezuma Hills Development Area Study, concluded that the waterfront’s lack of infrastructure was the biggest barriers to its development. Since the site was designated for industrial uses back in the 1970s, more than half-a-century ago, no public or private entity has ever committed the capital to bring the shipyard to the market.
The same is true of Lambie Industrial Park, just a mile east of the proposed Solano Foundry site. To this day, 46 years after Solano County originally designated Lambie as an industrial park, the area still lacks scaled water or sewer infrastructure.
These are precisely the problems large-scale master-planned developments can solve. Approving a bigger project allows private capital to step in and fund the infrastructure that makes an employment-generating industrial site viable.
SOLANO COUNTY HAS A HOUSING SHORTAGE
Like the rest of California, Solano County has a housing shortage. A recent poll showed that 78% of Solano residents believe the county needs more homes. The shortage impacts everyone – young families, seniors, and even Travis Air Force Base, Solano County’s biggest employer. A 2025 Community Needs Assessment from NorthBay Health, one of the county’s two major healthcare providers, concluded:
“Residents of the NorthBay Health service area are facing persistent affordable housing shortages…many families cannot afford the growing housing prices, especially as wages fail to keep pace with housing costs….Some households, especially in the Fairfield area, are spending more than 50% of their income on housing. These households are labeled as having a “severe housing burden.”
BUILDING A BALANCED, COMPLETE COMMUNITY
A few years ago, Governor Newsom called California’s failure to build enough housing California’s “Original Sin”. Subsequent research agrees with him. People across the political spectrum have realized abundant housing is the foundation of a healthy community. America’s chronic under-supply of housing is at the root cause of many other tough social issues, including inequality, low productivity growth, and falling fertility rates.
Nowhere is this problem more acute than in California.
Solano has a chance to get ahead of the housing problem, avoid mistakes of the past, and masterplan for decades of sustainable growth in the future. Chasing employment opportunities that exceed Solano Country’s available housing supply will end in failure.
Solano County’s housing shortfall is most consequential for a shipbuilding economy. Shipbuilding jobs carry an unusually large economic multiplier, creating more jobs across the community. The U.S. Maritime Administration has found that each direct shipbuilding job supports another 2.7 jobs in the surrounding economy. Applied to a 10,000-job shipyard, that means roughly 27,000 additional regional jobs on top of the original 10,000 — a total regional impact approaching 37,000 jobs.
Solano County isn’t equipped for that kind of growth today. According to Federal Reserve data, Solano County has permitted on average less than 1,000 housing units per year for the last nearly 20 years – which has not even been enough to keep up with existing needs.
The following map clearly illustrates the problem with both quantity and location of existing permitted pipelines of new housing in Solano County:
No company will site a large shipbuilding or manufacturing facility in a region with this housing profile without a long-term, multi-decade guaranteed supply of homes for its workforce. Neither should Solano County leaders want them to, because without new housing, the existing supply will be further squeezed and less affordable for everyone in the community. Only a stable, long-term supply of new homes will make Solano County a place where families can put down roots and live and work for generations.
To be clear, there is an important distinction. For reasons explained above, the Solano Shipyard will not work without the Suisun Expansion. However, the Suisun Expansion can and will work even without the Suisun Shipyard, since the Expansion was designed as a balanced, complete community with a jobs-housing balance internally between Solano Foundry, office and other non-manufacturing jobs, and the homes in new neighborhoods.
CONCLUSION
Drawing the line at “Shipyard and Foundry only” is not a compromise – it’s a guarantee that these employment centers are approved on paper but never get built.
The alternative is real: thousands and eventually tens of thousands of new jobs, a growing tax base, and the neighborhoods and infrastructure to match. This is an opportunity for Solano County to build something on its own terms, a project that the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development called “of statewide significance” and “the kind of transformational opportunity California should fight for and win.”
ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES
Norfolk Naval Shipyard (NNSY) and Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS), Virginia
Perhaps no city in America is more closely associated with shipbuilding and ship repair than Norfolk and Newport News, Virginia, the home of both the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and Newport News Shipbuilding, a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries. These shipyards both build and repair aircraft carriers, submarines, and other vessels, and, in total, employ over 36,000 people – roughly 10,000 at Norfolk Naval Shipyard and nearly 26,000 at Newport News Shipbuilding, the largest industrial employer in Virginia.
Both sit in the middle of dense residential neighborhoods and close to manufacturing parks. As shown in the image below, the shipbuilding areas are deeply integrated into the community.
Electric Boat, Groton, CT
Electric Boat builds America’s Virginia- and Columbia-class nuclear submarines, with more than 26,000 employees today across its Connecticut and Rhode Island operations and plans to hire another 8,000 in 2026 alone, which would take the workforce past 30,000 for the first time since the 1980s. The main yard in Groton, CT, is again deeply integrated into the community, surrounded by both manufacturing and residential space.
Saronic’s Port Alpha in Brownsville, Texas
In Brownsville, Texas, where Saronic will be located, the artificially created Brownsville Ship Channel comes from the ocean directly into the heart of the city itself. Saronic’s operations will be based a short drive from the residential, retail, office, and industrial areas of Brownsville.
Ulsan Heavy Industries, South Korea
As explained in the 60 Minutes special on shipbuilding, the country other than China that currently dominates shipbuilding globally is South Korea. In South Korea, the two largest yards are the HD Hyundai Heavy Industries yard at Ulsan – one of the largest shipbuilding complexes in the world, with roughly 15,000 people working on site – and the shipyards at Geoje, which cover an area the size of 900 football fields and host some 30,000 workers.
Both yards are deeply integrated into the fabric of the cities, and that integration, along with quality of life and manufacturing for suppliers, is at the cornerstone of their success. Every major Korean and Japanese shipyard follows the same pattern: deep integration with the housing and manufacturing around it.
Samsung at Geoje
