Eleven years into construction of California’s high-speed rail project, a Central Valley city just approved a housing development smack in the middle of where the train tracks are supposed to go.
Officials in Shafter, a small city about twenty miles north of Bakersfield, greenlit the large housing tract after waiting years to hear from the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority about acquiring the land. The state never moved to buy it. So the city and the developer moved on without them.
The decision strikes at the heart of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s troubled bullet train project. Shafter sits along the initial 119-mile stretch between Bakersfield and Merced that represents the dramatically scaled-back first phase of what was once promised as a 494-mile line connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco.
The state can’t connect Bakersfield to Merced without passing through Shafter. And now there will be houses in the way.
The Fresno Bee first reported the development on August 21, noting that city officials had approved the new housing tract knowing full well the state’s plans for the route. A map presented to the Shafter City Council clearly showed the proposed rail line cutting through the developer’s property.
This comes less than a year after Newsom assured Californians the project had cleared its major hurdles. At a September 2025 press conference in San Francisco, the governor said the state had finished all property acquisitions. “We’re on the other side of all of the acquisitions,” Newsom declared. The route was state-owned, clear, and ready for construction, he claimed.
When contacted this week, Newsom’s office didn’t respond. The High-Speed Rail Authority did offer a statement to The Federalist, but it only confirmed the project’s ongoing confusion. “The site you’re referencing is part of the planned Bakersfield extension,” a press representative wrote. “As design for this segment advances, we continue to assess property needs and work directly with affected landowners as part of our acquisition process. Final property requirements will be established as the design is further refined.”
In the same email, the Authority proudly announced that “high-speed rail track is scheduled to be laid as early as November of this year.” But Newsom had already claimed last September that the project was laying track. The Authority offered no explanation for the contradiction.
