US farmers, tech tycoons square off over plans for utopian city
Glenn CHAPMAN
Thu, September 21, 2023
Swaths of rural land between San Francisco and Sacramento, in the western US state of California, were secretly purchased by tech tycoons keen on building a new city
(JOSH EDELSON)
A stealth campaign by Silicon Valley elites with a dream of turning a swath of California farmland into a new age city has ranchers who live here challenging their tactics and their motives.
The project first surfaced when a mysterious buyer started snapping up parcels of land in this rural outback between San Francisco and Sacramento.
The buyer, first revealed by The New York Times in August, turned out to be a secretive outfit called Flannery Associates, the brainchild of a former Goldman Sachs wunderkind, Jan Sramek.
Flannery Associates said on its recently launched website that it has acquired more than 50,000 acres (20,200 hectares) of land for its California Forever project, whose backers include LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Steve Jobs's widow Laurene Powell Jobs and star tech investor Marc Andreessen.
According to court documents, the tycoons have already shelled out more than $800 million to fulfill their vision of building a city in the middle of nowhere.
"This doesn't just happen at Burning Man one night, doing some mushrooms," Solano County property owner John Sweeney told AFP while standing on a lot surrounded by land bought by Flannery.
The group started covertly buying parcels in Solano County between the city of Fairfield and Travis Air Force Base about five years ago, according to residents interviewed by AFP.
Cassandra Dana said the first unsolicited offer she got from Flannery to buy her ranch came in 2018, and she's been called relentlessly in subsequent years.
"It's at the point of when they do call and they say who they are, I basically just hang up," Dana said of Flannery.
"They've actually reached out to my oldest daughter and asked her... to sell it from underneath me."
Neighbors in the tight-knit community have been targeted with a gamut of tactics, according to Sweeney.
He said he was contacted five years ago on behalf of a group purportedly interested in buying his property to preserve it for agriculture.
"They pulled all sorts of different tricks," Sweeney said.
"It was pretty underhanded in general."
According to the project's website, the new city would host the "agriculture and green energy industries that sustainably feed and power our state, strong middle-class communities and our nation's busiest Air Force base."
Nestled between Sacramento, the California Delta, San Francisco and Napa Valley, it "would include a variety of land uses: a new community, but also solar farms and open space, including both agriculture and habitat conservation."
The road ahead however will not be easy for this tech-age, utopian project.
Flannery has filed a half-billion-dollar lawsuit against some land owners in federal court, accusing them of conspiring to get higher prices for their properties.
"Their lawsuit makes it sound like there were some big meetings where people were talking about how to screw Flannery," said Sweeney.
"Well, no. Everyone just knew that if you waited longer, you'd get more money; that's logical."
Flannery declined an interview for this story, with a spokesperson telling AFP that the company might have a response in several months.
- Dream or delusion? -
Fairfield Mayor Catherine Moy told AFP her community just learned a few weeks ago of the campaign to buy up nearby agricultural land.
"We're trying to find out everything we can," Moy said.
Flannery has bought land around the air force base, which is a main transport hub for supplies headed to Ukraine and other parts of the world, according to Moy.
"At this point, I'm opposing it. Anything that threatens Travis Air Force Base threatens my city and the country."
For now, that land is occupied by livestock, wind turbines and farmers and ranchers who have long been in harmony with the base, Moy said.
"This proposed city situation, it just breaks my heart because it's gonna ruin all of our rural area," Dana said as she tended to a small herd of goats.
"It's just open land and it's beautiful."
Moy said she has written a letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom expressing concerns.
Newsom, for his part, said earlier this month that the California Forever project, after its exposure by US media, was a surprise to him as well, and that he planned to meet with a representative from the group.
And while the project’s website presents a heady vision, there are no details concerning things such as concrete plans for where the new city would get its water supply.
"The 'Forever,' or as we call it, the 'Never Project,' would change the countryside into, I guess, a modern San Francisco," property owner Sweeney mused.
The CEO of Flannery Associates says he envisions very few cars in this new city that will bring good-paying jobs, sustainable infrastructure and clean energy to the area.
Opinion
What the billionaires planning a new Bay Area city can teach us about California housing
A stealth campaign by Silicon Valley elites with a dream of turning a swath of California farmland into a new age city has ranchers who live here challenging their tactics and their motives.
The project first surfaced when a mysterious buyer started snapping up parcels of land in this rural outback between San Francisco and Sacramento.
The buyer, first revealed by The New York Times in August, turned out to be a secretive outfit called Flannery Associates, the brainchild of a former Goldman Sachs wunderkind, Jan Sramek.
Flannery Associates said on its recently launched website that it has acquired more than 50,000 acres (20,200 hectares) of land for its California Forever project, whose backers include LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Steve Jobs's widow Laurene Powell Jobs and star tech investor Marc Andreessen.
According to court documents, the tycoons have already shelled out more than $800 million to fulfill their vision of building a city in the middle of nowhere.
"This doesn't just happen at Burning Man one night, doing some mushrooms," Solano County property owner John Sweeney told AFP while standing on a lot surrounded by land bought by Flannery.
The group started covertly buying parcels in Solano County between the city of Fairfield and Travis Air Force Base about five years ago, according to residents interviewed by AFP.
Cassandra Dana said the first unsolicited offer she got from Flannery to buy her ranch came in 2018, and she's been called relentlessly in subsequent years.
"It's at the point of when they do call and they say who they are, I basically just hang up," Dana said of Flannery.
"They've actually reached out to my oldest daughter and asked her... to sell it from underneath me."
Neighbors in the tight-knit community have been targeted with a gamut of tactics, according to Sweeney.
He said he was contacted five years ago on behalf of a group purportedly interested in buying his property to preserve it for agriculture.
"They pulled all sorts of different tricks," Sweeney said.
"It was pretty underhanded in general."
According to the project's website, the new city would host the "agriculture and green energy industries that sustainably feed and power our state, strong middle-class communities and our nation's busiest Air Force base."
Nestled between Sacramento, the California Delta, San Francisco and Napa Valley, it "would include a variety of land uses: a new community, but also solar farms and open space, including both agriculture and habitat conservation."
The road ahead however will not be easy for this tech-age, utopian project.
Flannery has filed a half-billion-dollar lawsuit against some land owners in federal court, accusing them of conspiring to get higher prices for their properties.
"Their lawsuit makes it sound like there were some big meetings where people were talking about how to screw Flannery," said Sweeney.
"Well, no. Everyone just knew that if you waited longer, you'd get more money; that's logical."
Flannery declined an interview for this story, with a spokesperson telling AFP that the company might have a response in several months.
- Dream or delusion? -
Fairfield Mayor Catherine Moy told AFP her community just learned a few weeks ago of the campaign to buy up nearby agricultural land.
"We're trying to find out everything we can," Moy said.
Flannery has bought land around the air force base, which is a main transport hub for supplies headed to Ukraine and other parts of the world, according to Moy.
"At this point, I'm opposing it. Anything that threatens Travis Air Force Base threatens my city and the country."
For now, that land is occupied by livestock, wind turbines and farmers and ranchers who have long been in harmony with the base, Moy said.
"This proposed city situation, it just breaks my heart because it's gonna ruin all of our rural area," Dana said as she tended to a small herd of goats.
"It's just open land and it's beautiful."
Moy said she has written a letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom expressing concerns.
Newsom, for his part, said earlier this month that the California Forever project, after its exposure by US media, was a surprise to him as well, and that he planned to meet with a representative from the group.
And while the project’s website presents a heady vision, there are no details concerning things such as concrete plans for where the new city would get its water supply.
"The 'Forever,' or as we call it, the 'Never Project,' would change the countryside into, I guess, a modern San Francisco," property owner Sweeney mused.
The CEO of Flannery Associates says he envisions very few cars in this new city that will bring good-paying jobs, sustainable infrastructure and clean energy to the area.
Opinion
What the billionaires planning a new Bay Area city can teach us about California housing
Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox
Sat, September 23, 2023
Cattle and wind turbines in California's rural Solano County, where Silicon Valley billionaires are plotting to build a city from scratch.
(Terry Chea / Associated Press)
A cadre of Silicon Valley elites is drawing fierce criticism from local residents and environmentalists for planning a new city on the outskirts of the Bay Area, a project dubbed “California Forever.” But the effort should be applauded for revealing a truth about California’s failed housing policies.
This group of California’s most influential wants to build one or more new towns on the urban fringes, having spent about $900 million to buy an area roughly twice the size of San Francisco some 60 miles east of the city. The project breaks with the philosophy of the state’s housing policy, which has long been focused on urban densification.
Despite the state’s efforts to encourage residential development, California’s housing markets remain among the least affordable in the country. The homeownership rate is near the nation’s lowest. To afford a house at the median price today in Southern California, a family needs an annual income of $180,000, twice the region’s median.
Read more: Opinion: The $1-million home is becoming the norm in L.A. This is an outrage we could have prevented
Some housing advocates insist that the solution is to force growth into existing neighborhoods. Yet the state’s supposedly pro-development new housing laws have yet to produce more homes at a scale sufficient to address the affordability crisis, and recent data suggest an accelerating decline in housing production.
Over the last five years, California has consistently lagged in construction not just of single-family housing but of multifamily housing as well. Not one California metropolitan area was among the top 50 in housing growth last year; Texas had six areas on that list, Florida 11. Los Angeles, the state’s dominant metropolitan area, didn’t crack the top 200.
Clearly we need a new approach that is more aligned with market demands. A recent report by London Moeder, a San Diego real estate consultancy, noted that California regulations make it difficult to build the kinds of housing people are looking for, particularly multi-bedroom homes that can accommodate families.
Research by Jessica Trounstine at UC Merced similarly found that “preferences for single-family development are ubiquitous. Across every demographic subgroup analyzed, respondents preferred single-family home developments by a wide margin. Relative to single-family homes, apartments are viewed as decreasing property values, increasing crime rates, lowering school quality, increasing traffic and decreasing desirability.”
Read more: Opinion: California housing development remains abysmal despite reforms. Here's what's missing
Opposition to densification of existing neighborhoods remains staunch in many cities, with some threatening a voter initiative to restore municipal control of zoning.
California’s focus on increasing density in urban areas is also at odds with the national shift toward remote work and retail and office growth in more suburban, lower-density areas.
A sensible California housing policy would respond to these trends and consumer desires, much as the Bay Area project promises to do. This does not mean we will need sprawling growth.
California’s population is dropping and is not expected to increase in the next four decades, which alters projections of future housing needs. The solution lies in strategic growth. Rather than force growth in places that are declining in population and resistant to development, including Los Angeles County and San Francisco, the state needs to look at the parts of California that are growing, places such as Riverside and Yolo counties.
Read more: Opinion: California has passed more than 100 housing laws since 2016. Are any of them working?
To encourage growth where it’s happening naturally, the state could create a “Housing Opportunity Area” comprising the Central Valley and Inland Empire, subject to more liberal rules than the coast. Land costs are far lower in the interior of the state than in metropolitan Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and San José. Policies that support inland development could help stem the outbound migration of Californians.
The rise of remote work means development away from urban centers is far more plausible and less environmentally toxic than in the past. Indeed, the International Energy Agency suggests that if everybody able to work from home worldwide were to do so just one day a week, it would save around 1% of global oil consumption for road transport per year. That would prevent 24 million metric tons of annual carbon dioxide pollution, equivalent to the bulk of greater London’s emissions. And roughly 40% of California’s jobs, including 70% of its higher-paying ones, could be done at home, according to research by the California Center for Jobs and the Economy.
Equally promising, many new suburbs are being designed in consciously more sustainable ways, as MIT professor Alan Berger suggests. Sophisticated systems for controlling energy and water use can make suburban and exurban communities more environmentally responsible. Another promising innovation is broader use of manufactured housing, which has the potential to speed construction by as much as 50%, according to a 2019 McKinsey & Co. report. A single-family subdivision is under construction by 3-D printer in suburban Austin.
There are still opportunities for innovative housing production in dense urban cores such as downtown San Francisco and Manhattan. New York Mayor Eric Adams is seeking to quickly add 20,000 housing units through office building conversions. He has also proposed a larger program to convert more than 130 million square feet of office space to residential use, though he needs state legislation to reach that goal.
Read more: Opinion: How L.A. can build more housing without looking like New York
More such promising opportunities may lie in old, underused retail spaces in both cities and suburbs, which have the advantage of simple floor plans, ample parking and presence across metropolitan California. A recently announced plan to replace Buena Park’s vacant Sears building with 1,100 housing units could represent one piece of our housing future. Flagging malls in Orange County and throughout California provide similar possibilities.
Such developments are critical to our increasingly diverse middle and working class. Older, overwhelmingly white Californians have achieved high rates of homeownership, but the rates among millennials, African Americans and Latinos are well below the national average.
If they don't leave the state entirely, younger generations will tend to continue to migrate outward in search of affordable suburbs. The majority of people of color in California live in suburbs, accounting for virtually all suburban growth over the past decade. Communities could be built in the exurbs and beyond for senior citizens, too, helping to produce new housing opportunities for young families near job centers. The outer suburbs and exurbs are the future homes of most Californians.
We have the land for such a new vision. While other populous states have devoted as much as a third of their land to urban development, California’s developed lands constitute only 6% of the state. A “7% solution” to the California housing crisis would free up 1 million more acres to build the new communities that we largely stopped building around 2000, when we had 5 million fewer people.
Relying on billionaires to build new cities in the hinterlands isn’t a generally sustainable answer to California’s housing crisis. But the California Forever project does rightly suggest that our solutions must build on the state’s penchant for innovation, capitalism and a distinctly suburban lifestyle.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University.
A cadre of Silicon Valley elites is drawing fierce criticism from local residents and environmentalists for planning a new city on the outskirts of the Bay Area, a project dubbed “California Forever.” But the effort should be applauded for revealing a truth about California’s failed housing policies.
This group of California’s most influential wants to build one or more new towns on the urban fringes, having spent about $900 million to buy an area roughly twice the size of San Francisco some 60 miles east of the city. The project breaks with the philosophy of the state’s housing policy, which has long been focused on urban densification.
Despite the state’s efforts to encourage residential development, California’s housing markets remain among the least affordable in the country. The homeownership rate is near the nation’s lowest. To afford a house at the median price today in Southern California, a family needs an annual income of $180,000, twice the region’s median.
Read more: Opinion: The $1-million home is becoming the norm in L.A. This is an outrage we could have prevented
Some housing advocates insist that the solution is to force growth into existing neighborhoods. Yet the state’s supposedly pro-development new housing laws have yet to produce more homes at a scale sufficient to address the affordability crisis, and recent data suggest an accelerating decline in housing production.
Over the last five years, California has consistently lagged in construction not just of single-family housing but of multifamily housing as well. Not one California metropolitan area was among the top 50 in housing growth last year; Texas had six areas on that list, Florida 11. Los Angeles, the state’s dominant metropolitan area, didn’t crack the top 200.
Clearly we need a new approach that is more aligned with market demands. A recent report by London Moeder, a San Diego real estate consultancy, noted that California regulations make it difficult to build the kinds of housing people are looking for, particularly multi-bedroom homes that can accommodate families.
Research by Jessica Trounstine at UC Merced similarly found that “preferences for single-family development are ubiquitous. Across every demographic subgroup analyzed, respondents preferred single-family home developments by a wide margin. Relative to single-family homes, apartments are viewed as decreasing property values, increasing crime rates, lowering school quality, increasing traffic and decreasing desirability.”
Read more: Opinion: California housing development remains abysmal despite reforms. Here's what's missing
Opposition to densification of existing neighborhoods remains staunch in many cities, with some threatening a voter initiative to restore municipal control of zoning.
California’s focus on increasing density in urban areas is also at odds with the national shift toward remote work and retail and office growth in more suburban, lower-density areas.
A sensible California housing policy would respond to these trends and consumer desires, much as the Bay Area project promises to do. This does not mean we will need sprawling growth.
California’s population is dropping and is not expected to increase in the next four decades, which alters projections of future housing needs. The solution lies in strategic growth. Rather than force growth in places that are declining in population and resistant to development, including Los Angeles County and San Francisco, the state needs to look at the parts of California that are growing, places such as Riverside and Yolo counties.
Read more: Opinion: California has passed more than 100 housing laws since 2016. Are any of them working?
To encourage growth where it’s happening naturally, the state could create a “Housing Opportunity Area” comprising the Central Valley and Inland Empire, subject to more liberal rules than the coast. Land costs are far lower in the interior of the state than in metropolitan Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and San José. Policies that support inland development could help stem the outbound migration of Californians.
The rise of remote work means development away from urban centers is far more plausible and less environmentally toxic than in the past. Indeed, the International Energy Agency suggests that if everybody able to work from home worldwide were to do so just one day a week, it would save around 1% of global oil consumption for road transport per year. That would prevent 24 million metric tons of annual carbon dioxide pollution, equivalent to the bulk of greater London’s emissions. And roughly 40% of California’s jobs, including 70% of its higher-paying ones, could be done at home, according to research by the California Center for Jobs and the Economy.
Equally promising, many new suburbs are being designed in consciously more sustainable ways, as MIT professor Alan Berger suggests. Sophisticated systems for controlling energy and water use can make suburban and exurban communities more environmentally responsible. Another promising innovation is broader use of manufactured housing, which has the potential to speed construction by as much as 50%, according to a 2019 McKinsey & Co. report. A single-family subdivision is under construction by 3-D printer in suburban Austin.
There are still opportunities for innovative housing production in dense urban cores such as downtown San Francisco and Manhattan. New York Mayor Eric Adams is seeking to quickly add 20,000 housing units through office building conversions. He has also proposed a larger program to convert more than 130 million square feet of office space to residential use, though he needs state legislation to reach that goal.
Read more: Opinion: How L.A. can build more housing without looking like New York
More such promising opportunities may lie in old, underused retail spaces in both cities and suburbs, which have the advantage of simple floor plans, ample parking and presence across metropolitan California. A recently announced plan to replace Buena Park’s vacant Sears building with 1,100 housing units could represent one piece of our housing future. Flagging malls in Orange County and throughout California provide similar possibilities.
Such developments are critical to our increasingly diverse middle and working class. Older, overwhelmingly white Californians have achieved high rates of homeownership, but the rates among millennials, African Americans and Latinos are well below the national average.
If they don't leave the state entirely, younger generations will tend to continue to migrate outward in search of affordable suburbs. The majority of people of color in California live in suburbs, accounting for virtually all suburban growth over the past decade. Communities could be built in the exurbs and beyond for senior citizens, too, helping to produce new housing opportunities for young families near job centers. The outer suburbs and exurbs are the future homes of most Californians.
We have the land for such a new vision. While other populous states have devoted as much as a third of their land to urban development, California’s developed lands constitute only 6% of the state. A “7% solution” to the California housing crisis would free up 1 million more acres to build the new communities that we largely stopped building around 2000, when we had 5 million fewer people.
Relying on billionaires to build new cities in the hinterlands isn’t a generally sustainable answer to California’s housing crisis. But the California Forever project does rightly suggest that our solutions must build on the state’s penchant for innovation, capitalism and a distinctly suburban lifestyle.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University.
Wendell Cox is the principal of Demographia, a public policy consulting firm.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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