This is a pretty interesting project by tech zillionaires such as Marc Andreessen, Patrick Collison, and the Widow Jobs. From the
New York Times news section:
The Silicon Valley Elite Who Want to Build a City From Scratch
A mysterious company has spent $800 million in an effort to buy thousands of acres of San Francisco Bay Area land. The people behind the deals are said to be a who's who of the tech industry.
By Conor Dougherty and Erin Griffith
Aug. 25, 2023
In 2017, Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist, sent a note to a potential investor about what he described as an unusual opportunity: a chance to invest in the creation of a new California city.
The site was in a corner of the San Francisco Bay Area where land was cheap.
Whether the proposed site is actually in the mild climate San Francisco Bay area or the severe climate Central Valley of California sounds like a key question that I don't know the answer to.
Mr. Moritz and others had dreams of transforming tens of thousands of acres into a bustling metropolis that, according to the pitch, could generate thousands of jobs and be as walkable as Paris or the West Village in New York.
In this century, urban living came back in fashion, which is why much of the tech industry, which in the Intel era had concentrated in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, moved north in the Facebook era to San Francisco. But, San Francisco's squalor, disorder, and political dysfunction has proven unsatisfying, to say, the least.
So, it's natural for Bay Area business people familiar with Singapore to imagine building from scratch an American Singapore as clean and bum-free as Palo Alto, yet as dense as San Francisco.
This would probably appeal to Chinese immigrants, just as the old planned city of Irvine, CA in Orange County is 44 percent Asian.
He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. And it would all be a short distance from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. "Let me know if this tickles your fancy," he said in the note, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.
Since then, a company called Flannery Associates has been buying large plots of land in a largely agricultural region 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The company, which has little information public about its operations, has committed more than $800 million to secure thousands of acres of farmland, court documents show. One parcel after another, Flannery made offers to every landowner for miles, paying several times the market rate, whether the land had been listed for sale or not. …
The land that Flannery has been purchasing is not zoned for residential use, and even in his 2017 pitch, Mr. Moritz acknowledged that rezoning could "clearly be challenging" — a nod to California's notoriously difficult and litigious development process.
To pull off the project, the company will almost certainly have to use the state's initiative system to get Solano County residents to vote on it.
This is pretty funny:
The purchases burst into public view this spring when lawyers for Flannery filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, accusing landowners of colluding to inflate prices.
We're not colluding, we are a corporation and there is only one of us, so you are the ones who are colluding. The question all seems rather metaphysical.
A couple of
NYT commenters offer some local insight:
John Mann
Maryland
Having grown up in the area, I know the reason it's farmland, it's hot in the summer and foggy, damp and cold in the winter and in the summer the wind howls from the SF Bay "gap" up into the Sacramento valley. If you go 10 miles north you enter "wine country" where the coastal range shelters the land from the onshore winds and the heat is tempered by gentle winds off the Pacific.
Maybe the summer wind is a good thing? (Except during fires, but there doesn't seem to be all that much to burn nearby.)
Randy
CA
The area they are talking about is inland and more like Kansas than San Francisco. Flat, windy and boring. Ok, ok…. To be fair, there are a few differences: The area around Travis afb has higher crime than Kansas, higher home prices, way more traffic, and higher taxes. So, essentially, all of the downside of California with none of the benefits.
On the other hand, northern California has a lot of different microclimates, so it's possible they've found some better than average spot.
Water seems like an obvious problem, but perhaps a dense city doesn't need as much for lawns and the like as a suburb.
Water rights in California are endlessly complicated — for example, Palm Springs has a ridiculous number of golf courses in the low desert due to a law that says you can drill for all the water you want to pump up so long as you use it locally and don't sell it to Los Angeles or San Diego. So there may be some local twist to water rights that makes this project more feasible than it sounds. Or maybe the zillionaires didn't think about water before spending so much money?
Anyway, I shall follow the future progress of this idea with interest, although I doubt I'll live long enough to see anybody move in. We are talking about California, after all.
