The California Forever Project aims to build a new city with affordable housing, walkable amenities, and «well-paying local jobs.» Photo: California Forever
Katherine Moy first heard the name Flannery Associates when she got a call from a farmer in her hometown of Fairfield, 45 minutes from San Francisco.
Moy, a local politician who is now mayor Fairfield, were told that the mysterious organization was causing irritation by secretly buying up tens of thousands of acres of rural land.
After some digging, she discovered that the firm, a Delaware-registered corporation whose registration means it does not disclose its sponsors, offered sellers a purchase price several times the market price, spending $800m (£630m) on real estate. and becoming the largest landowner in the local area.
< p>Farmers who sold their land made a profit, but the project aroused suspicion: most of the land is adjacent to a large air force base. Local politicians have spent years trying to get Flannery supporters to reveal their identities. Government officials have begun investigating the purchases this year, fearing they could be funded by foreign adversaries.
The truth, when it finally opened, was just as strange. The New York Times reported last week that some of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors have backed a company that aims to build at least one, if not three, new cities in the region.
Billionaire supporters (left to right): Lauren Powell Jobs; Reed Hoffman; Sir Michael Moritz; Marc Andreessen
Sir Michael Moritz, Welsh-born billionaire who invested in Google and Yahoo; Mark Andreessen, founder of Netscape and investor in Facebook; Lauren Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs; and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, is reportedly among the funders of the venture. Sir Michael took an active part, having heard from co-investors in 2017 the concept of a walkable metropolis powered by renewable energy.
Work on an unnamed urban project is now beginning in earnest. Local residents began receiving emails asking for their opinions on the new city «with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar-powered farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over 10,000 acres of new parks and open spaces.»
The project is led by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who grew up in the Czech Republic and studied at Cambridge and the London School of Economics. One university friend describes it as a «machine» who worked part-time at a hedge fund while earning his degree.
After years of protecting its secrecy, the company began contacting local politicians in anticipation of a possible public vote on the issue. permission to build a city in the area.
The project's website, called «California Forever», debuted on Friday, featuring drawings more reminiscent of the Tuscan countryside and tranquil European cities than American suburban sprawl and huge highways.
The drawings of the proposed city are more reminiscent of the Tuscan countryside and European cities than American suburban sprawl. Photo: California Forever
The goal of the project is to build a new city with affordable housing, «well-paying local jobs» and a pedestrian zone. Supporters «are eager to start a conversation about the future of Solano County,» the website says.
Mine is skeptical.
«The Flannery weren't good actors,» she says. “It really caused a lot of heartache. I won't call them enemies, but they are suspicious, whoever they are.»
Flannery Associates sued a group of local landowners this year, alleging they conspired to raise land prices in an attempt to raise land prices. force the company to overpay.
Mine adds that since it was discovered that the project was sponsored by Silicon Valley billionaires, hundreds of her constituents have contacted her.
«Maybe 96% people want them to leave and want nothing to do with It,” says Moy, arguing that they should use their funds to build housing in Silicon Valley.
Billionaire entrepreneurs have long been obsessed with building utopias from scratch. Walt Disney spent most of his later years planning to build the city of the future (after his death in 1966, the site became home to the giant Disney World theme park).
Telosa was conceived by billionaire Jet.com founder Mark Lore as a «city of the future».
Technicians have been the idea's biggest proponents in recent years, motivated in part by the problems of San Francisco, which is plagued by high housing prices, a rampant homeless, and a sclerotic government.
In 2016, Y Combinator, a well-known startup sponsor, backed Airbnb, Stripe and Instacart have said they will be looking into building new cities. “We think you can do amazing things with a clean slate,” the blog post said at the time. The proposals included limiting city laws to fit in 100 pages and banning human-driven cars.
Seven years later, Y Combinator has made no further announcements, suggesting that the project has stalled.< /p>
In 2021, Mark Lohr, the billionaire founder of Walmart-owned e-commerce website Jet.com, bluntly announced, leaving the retail giant to build the «city of the future».
Telosa, as the project was named, will see self-driving cars harmoniously share the streets with pedestrians and bicycles. Vegetables will be grown on soilless «aeroponic» farms. The roofs will be covered with solar panels.
The project website says that by 2050 it will be home to five million people. Officially, Telosa is still looking for places, although there were few updates last year.< /p>
Jeffrey Burns, a cryptocurrency millionaire, has bought up thousands of acres of the Nevada desert as part of plans to build a smart city called Painted Rock that will run on blockchain technology. A county spokesman told Bloomberg that there has been no update on the project since local commissioners voted against the proposal for a new government.
The bigger players weren't any luckier. Sidewalk Labs, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, run by Dan Doctoroff, former New York City government official Mike Bloomberg, planned to build a high-tech district on the Toronto waterfront, lined with sensors and cameras.
the project was closed due to overwhelming local opposition, and Alphabet closed Sidewalk Labs in 2021.
Sidewalk Labs construction plan Toronto's waterfront high-tech district has been shut down by overwhelming local opposition
In a more ambitious plan, Elon Musk has proposed to SpaceX to build cities on Mars, and PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel has funded the San Francisco-based Seasteading Institute, which aims to build autonomous floating cities in the ocean, unencumbered by the laws of countries.
Rachel Cooper, a professor of design management and policy at Lancaster University who has advised government on the future of cities, says building cities from scratch is particularly attractive to tech professionals.
“Modernizing technology in existing cities is a complex and costly task. associated with planned and regulatory restrictions,” she says.
Cooper adds that technologists' ideas for new cities include ideas such as digital twin simulations for easier planning, self-driving cars and drones, which are harder to implement in centuries-old cities.
However, Mike Batty, expert in Urban Planning from the Bartlett Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, says vertical cities like Masdar in the UAE and the abandoned PlanIT project in Portugal rarely succeed.< /p>
“Cities like tend to be idealistic and don't really take human behavior into account as easily because it's very hard to do,” he says. «Eventually, they sort of go back to how cities look.»
The billionaires behind California's proposed utopia have invested too much to back down now.
But My, Mayor of Fairfield says the locals aren't going to make life easy. “This is an experimental toy,” she says. «And you can't play with us.»
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