Farmers and tech tycoons square off over plans for utopian city

San Francisco, California - A stealth campaign by Silicon Valley tech elites with a dream of turning a swath of California farmland into a new-age city has ranchers who live there challenging their tactics and their motives.

Silicon Valley tech elites have a dream of transforming a swath of California farmland into a new-age city, but locals aren't buying into their fantasies.

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.

Today the NYT ran a story on some massive land purchases in Solano County with the endgame of a new city between San Francisco and Sacramento.

I mapped the land purchased by Flannery Associates LLC, the vehicle for the project. Parcels are in red. Just shy of 23,000 acres. pic.twitter.com/KWnXlqC02H

— TB Storrs 😷 (@TBirdStorrs) August 26, 2023

Silicon Valley elites attempt to manipulate California locals to bolster their utopia plan The tech billionaire's California dreams have been deemed "underhanded" by locals in the area.

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.

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. https://t.co/B91gDNq41Z

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) September 22, 2023

Locals push back against billionaire-backed California Forever project California Forever is a billionaire-backed project that seeks to create a futuristic city with walkable communities.

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.

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 the media, was a surprise to him as well and that he planned to meet with a representative from the group. 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.

If you want a glimpse into the future of the California Forever project in Solano, look no further than Laguna West. Built outside of Sac in the 90's, it was envisioned as a model walkable community in adherence with the principles of new urbanism. pic.twitter.com/39xubERCj7

— Jake Wilde (@awildjank) September 13, 2023

"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.