An organization referred to as Flannery Associates has been buying land in a county close to San Francisco.
The corporate has spent as much as $15,000 per acre, court docket paperwork present.
Silicon Valley has lengthy sought to construct a brand new metropolis from scratch.
A thriller firm backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has been snatching up land in a northern California county in an obvious bid to construct a wholly new metropolis within the state.
The New York Instances reported these buyers embody a few of the Valley’s most recognizable names, from Marc Andreessen to Laurene Powell Jobs.
The corporate, Flannery Associates, has spent $800 million to buy 1000’s of acres of farmland in Solano County, which sits northeast of San Francisco, court docket paperwork obtained by Insider present.
The Wall Road Journal reported that Flannery has bought about 52,000 acres of farmland round Travis Air Pressure Base since 2018. In accordance with the report, authorities officers started investigating the purchases because of issues that overseas pursuits could also be behind the corporate.
Travis Air Pressure BaseGoogle Maps
“So the complete base is encircled now,” Catherine Moy, mayor of Fairfield, informed ABC 7 Information. “So there isn’t any half that is not touched by Flannery.”
Little is understood about Flannery Associates or its particular metropolis plans.
In accordance with the Instances, the corporate is led by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs dealer.
Flannery’s backers embody Andreessen, Powell Jobs, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and others, based on the report.
It is unclear how a lot they every invested within the firm.
Solano CountyGoogle Maps
In 2017, Flannery Associates pitched an thought to show the Solano County land right into a walkable metropolis powered by clear vitality and housing tens of 1000’s of residents, The Instances reported. Actual property knowledge exhibits that the present median housing value within the county is $585,000.
In an electronic mail obtained by the Instances, Moritz mentioned that Flannery had bought about 1,400 acres of land for lower than $5,000 per acre.
However the spending value has since soared, with Flannery spending as much as $15,000 per acre, attorneys for Flannery Associates mentioned in court docket paperwork.
In Might, the attorneys for Flannery filed a lawsuit in opposition to a gaggle of Solano County landowners, saying they conspired to inflate their land costs.
The lawsuit alleges Flannery overpaid the homeowners by about $170,000,000 and is in search of damages of at the very least $510,000,000.
In a movement to dismiss the lawsuit that was filed in July, the landowners mentioned that they’ve “both engaged in good-faith, arms-length transactions for the sale of land, or weren’t tempted by Flannery’s costs, as a result of that they had no need (or skill) to promote.”
Attorneys for Flannery Associates and the landowners didn’t reply to a request for remark exterior of working hours.
Silicon Valley has lengthy sought to construct a metropolis from scratch, generally with a utopian imaginative and prescient of a “sensible metropolis.”
In 2016, Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup accelerator, started wanting into the way it may construct a metropolis that might tackle California’s reasonably priced housing disaster.
“We need to construct cities for all people — for tech and non-tech individuals,” the accelerator wrote. “We’re not excited by constructing ‘loopy libertarian utopias for techies.'”
Tech founders, together with Invoice Gates and Elon Musk, have additionally had visions of their very own cities.
Musk just lately bought 3,500 acres of land exterior of Austin, Texas, to construct a city he intends to name “Snailbrook.”
Sources informed The Journal that he envisioned a “type of Texas utopia alongside the Colorado River.”
Learn the unique article on Enterprise Insider