For the past five years, a company called Flannery Associates has been quietly buying undeveloped land in northern California, Solano County. She sometimes leaves there sums three or four times greater than the market price. However, this vast arid territory that stretches between Sacramento and San Francisco is not well known. It is even quite wild, confined by ranches passed down from generation to generation, says the newspaper San Francisco Chronicle.
Since 2017, Flannery Associates has managed to acquire more than 22,000 hectares, stretching between a US Army air base and the town of Fairfield, in the heart of Solano County, about 100 kilometers northeast of San Francisco. According to information from the American daily The New York Times, the company spent no less than 800 million dollars to acquire these thousands of hectares of agricultural land. Flannery Associates “bought so much land, and so quickly”, that it ended up “frightening the inhabitants, who had no idea who the buyer was or what projects he had in mind” , observes the American daily in its investigation. “Was Disney looking for land for a new amusement park? Could the purchases be linked to China? A deep-water port?”. These were questions that locals were asking themselves, while at the same time many ranchers became very wealthy after selling acres of their land, notes the San Francisco Chronicle.
A new utopian city?
However, last week, these mysterious buyers finally came out of the shadows. Also according to the survey of New York Times, Flannery Associates contacted elected officials in the county to meet them and talk about their projects. Some residents have also received text messages and e-mails, asking their opinion on a project “that would include a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar farm, orchards with more than a million new trees, and more than 4,000 hectares of parks and green spaces”. The poll does not mention Flannery by name, but describes itself as an organization “led by architects and urban planners” and “funded by a group of California businesses and wealthy families.”
This is the idea behind these mass land takeovers: to create a new, almost utopian city. According to a note written by Flannery Associates investors a few years ago and that the New York Times was able to consult, this new “ideal” city would use only clean energy sources, would offer a reliable network of public transport, and would be designed so that its inhabitants could stroll in the streets, as “in Paris or in the West Village in New York”.
The big tech bosses at the helm
As for the promoters of the project, they would constitute, according to the recent investigation of the New York Times, the top of the basket of big bosses in Silicon Valley, with in particular Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. Other notable names like Chris Dixon, who runs Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund, as well as the founders of payments company Stripe have invested. Even Laurene Powell Jobs, the politically active widow of Steve Job, is involved. According to the American daily, the brain of the Flannery Associates operation would also be Jan Sramek, 36, a former Goldman Sachs trader who discreetly courted some of the biggest names in the technology industry as investors.
Nevertheless, the project could encounter some obstacles. And for good reason: according to the local authorities, the land purchased by Flannery cannot be built on. Especially since according to the mayor of the neighboring town of Fairfield, Catherine Moy, questioned by the NYTthe area is “regularly hit by droughts and has a high risk of wildfires”.