A company called Flannery Associates, backed by Silicon Valley elites, purchased about $800 million worth of land totaling 52,000 acres in northern California to construct a mysterious utopian city, according to a report from The New York Times.
In the words of major investor Michael Moritz, the city will aim to overcome many of “bad California policies” that have ruined the cities of the Golden State. Pursuing new governmental policies are a key reason for interest in the project, as well as making it a “walkable city” like Paris or New York’s West Village or a “green city” with a public transportation system that will run off non-traditional energy.
“This project would include a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over ten thousand acres of new parks and open space,” a passage from a survey obtained by the SF Gate newspaper reads.
The 52,000 acres of land is 60 miles north of San Francisco near an Air Force base. Flannery Associates has been buying land from farmers far above market value and has become the biggest landowner in Solano County. It still faces many zoning and local legal challenges, and it is far from becoming a reality. But with the financial support network it has behind it, the project is likely to begin making real progress.
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The leader of the project has been revealed to be Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader and the co-founder and former CEO of Better AG consulting firm. Sramek was profiled by New York Magazine in 2009 as a whiz-kid investor whose main influence in life was Peter Thiel. In 2003, he received a scholarship from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation to Cambridge University, which he attended for a year before transferring to the London School of Economics. At the time the article was written, Sramek was saying that he had far-reaching philanthropic ambitions which he hoped to realize through first amassing a fortune of his own.
According to the New York Times, the project is backed by a group of Silicon Valley-based businessmen: widow of Steve Jobs and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, his investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz co-investor Chris Dixon, venture capitalist and partner at Sequoia Capital Michael Moritz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, sibling co-founders of the Stripe payment processor Patrick and John Collison, and startup investors Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman.
As early as 2017, Moritz was interested in the idea of investing in a new Californian city, having at the time written to a potential investor asking if they were interested in financing a place that could serve as a blank slate for experimentation in transportation and governance models.
Many of these “new urbanism” ideas, such as a walkable city and a city whose transportation is designed around climate change initiatives, are also seen in the “15-minute city” concept that has been the subject of many conspiracy theories. Such skeptics believe that unelected groups like the World Economic Forum and the United Nations desire to construct so-called “smart cities” so that access to autonomous travel, the widespread affordability of animal products like meat and dairy, and other freedoms achieved by the industrial age will become a thing of the past.
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