It has been secretly preparing for years, arousing the suspicions of neighbors and authorities, incubating speculation, giving way to conspiracy theories. But it wasn’t until this week that the true intentions of a massive multibillion-dollar land-buying operation that began in 2018 in an agricultural area of northern California emerged.
There, halfway between Sacramento and the state capital of San Francisco, in a landscape dotted with wind turbines and high-voltage poles, where cattle now roam free, a powerful group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs wants to build a city from scratch.
The investment group has chosen Solano County, between San Francisco and the California capital of Sacramento, to develop its project. And not just any city, but an idyllic one: with traffic-free streets for adults to run and children to ride bikes, lots of green spaces and restaurants with terraces, paddling surrounded by pastures, meadows, forests and lakes. , fishing and admiring spectacular California sunsets.
But also with accessible housing, sufficient employment for local residents and respect for the environment.
“Instead of watching our children leave, we have the opportunity to build a new community that attracts new employers, creates good local jobs with walkable neighborhoods, is a leader in environmental stewardship and expands the tax base to serve the entire region.” announces the project’s website, California Forever.
Who are behind it? And why so many secrets?
According to the official website launched last week, it is the initiative of Jan Sramek.
Thanks to his past as an operator of investment banking and securities megagroup Goldman Sachs, Sramek was able to court some of the heavyweights of the US technology and financial industry.
Thus, today the project’s investors include:
• Michael Moritz, partner at Sequoia Capital, who once invested in Apple, Google, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Paypal, WhatsApp and Zoom and managed $85 billion in assets.
• Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, who was on the board of directors of Paypal and is said to have arranged the first meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, with whom he would later participate in the first round of financing Facebook.
• Laurene Powell Jobs, entrepreneur, philanthropist, widow of Steve Jobs and administrator of the trust that bears his name, the richest woman in the technology sector, according to Forbes.
• John Doerr, chairman of Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm with investments in Amazon, Google and Twitter, a businessman whose net worth is estimated by Forbes at $9.8 billion.
• Brothers Patrick and John Collison, founders of the multinational financial services company Stripe and a net worth of over US$1,000.
• Marc Andreessen, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be more than $1.7 billion, runs Andreessen Horowitz, a $35 billion investment fund.
• Nat Friedman, the programmer who founded Ximian, a free software provider for Linux, is now the CEO of Github and an activist for the right to decent housing.
But those names were not known until the American media The New York Times brought the matter to light on August 25. Until then, all that was known was that a mysterious company called Flannery Associates – a subsidiary of California Forever – had been acquiring about 20,000 acres of farmland between Fairfield and Río Vista, two towns in Solano County, over the past five years.
It is half of the surrounding land. “They came in with offers four times, five times the market price that they couldn’t refuse,” Fairfield Mayor Catherine Moy told the New York Times.
Flannery Associates purchased 20,000 acres of farmland in Solano County in five years. Was Disney buying land for a new theme park? Was it planned to build a deep water port? Was Flannery representing foreign interests, especially Chinese? Or would the initiative have something to do with the proximity of Travis Air Force Base, which is nicknamed the “Gateway to the Pacific” and sees more cargo and passenger traffic than any other US military terminal?
These and many other questions circulated over the years among landlords, neighbors, local politicians and federal authorities. “The FBI, the Treasury Department, everyone has tried to find out who these people (behind Flannery Associates) were. All this secrecy has created a lot of problems, (loss of) a lot of time and a lot of expense,” the Democratic congressman emphasized in a statement published on August 30.
Mike Thompson, who represents much of the field in the House of Representatives. The team behind California Forever admits that the staggering $800 million deal generated “of course, interest, concern and speculation.”
“But we knew that in order to build a complete and sustainable community we had to collect many properties. And the only way to avoid an avalanche of land speculation in the short term was not to share our detailed plans until we had completed the acquisition,” it is justified on its website.
Apparently, they didn’t completely avoid it, as Flannery’s lawyers filed a lawsuit in district court a few months ago, accusing some landowners of colluding to inflate prices.
Now, the group says, it is ready to move forward with a “well-thought-out and agreed-upon” plan.
So what’s next? And how feasible is it?
For this purpose, the group has announced that it will have conversations with all interested parties, from residents to elected officials, representatives of the air base, unions, the business sector, the agricultural sector, the education sector, the police, etc.
He has already surveyed 2,000 county residents, he says, and every Solano household will receive a survey in the mail in the coming days.
He also plans to open offices in Fairfield, Vallejo and Vacaville, and to form a Citizens Community Advisory Committee, for which he added that nominations are already being received.
“East Solano benefits from existing transmission lines that could make it possible to build a large solar farm that will create hundreds of jobs and accelerate California’s clean energy transition,” says the California Forever website.
To build anything resembling a city on what is now farm land, the group must first convince Solano County voters to approve a ballot initiative allowing urban uses on the land, a protection that has been in place since 1984.
And local and federal officials still have doubts about the group’s intentions. Therefore, in parallel, the representatives of California Forever have already started conducting interviews.
“After the meeting, it’s clear that they don’t have a plan; They have a vision,” Congressman Thompson said in a statement posted on his website on August 30, after meeting with Sramek and another businessman from the group, Andrew Costa.
Democrat John Garamendi (sitting) is a representative in the House of Representatives, and he said he is upset to know who is behind the initiative. John Garamendi, another Democrat who has represented part of the area in the House of Representatives since 2009 and was scheduled to meet with the group’s representatives in those days, told the AP agency that he was upset to know who supports the project.
“You, the big billionaires of Silicon Valley, are part of this. Are these types of people? “Is that how it works?” he said. “What they have achieved is that the well has been completely poisoned.”
Others, such as Suisun City Mayor Pro Tempore Princess Washington, have already made their reservations clear.
Washington suspects that the group’s real goal is to “create a city for the elite” under the pretext of building more housing. And so he told the AP agency.
Rio Vista Mayor Ronald Kott was also invited to a meeting. He suspects older residents, who make up more than half of Rio Vista’s population, won’t appreciate the extra congestion and noise, but he believes others would like the better health care, nightlife and shopping that a sophisticated city next door can offer.
“The point is that whatever is built, whether it’s 50 houses or 500, will have a direct and significant impact on Río Vista,” he emphasizes. Flannery acquired almost all the land around this small town.
Rio Vista Mayor Ronald Kott says Flannery bought all the land around his town of just over 10,000. What worries Mayor Kott and his fellow citizens the most, he says, is the potential increase in traffic on an already congested highway and water supply in an area that sometimes faces shortages.
“All of this will mean a large investment in infrastructure, perhaps widening roads, perhaps building another bridge over the Sacramento River, or a new aqueduct, and that’s something that will have to be worked on at the state level. “, he argues.
As if to take a week of intense scrutiny in the American media, including this Tuesday with some changes.
The California Forever website is already addressing these concerns and wants to be part of the solutions. The possible impact on traffic is one of the concerns of local citizens and politicians. Only time will tell as dreamed up by Silicon Valley titans where the supposedly perfect city becomes so.
Or, on the contrary, if one joins the list of initiatives that remained, in projects, such as the idea raised by Larry Page, the founder and former director of Google, in 2013 to create a high-tech utopian city. and minimum regulations.
“To say that we are facing a long, very long road is perhaps an understatement,” concluded Mayor Kott.
