It has been brewing in secret for years, raising the suspicions of neighbors and authorities, incubating speculation, giving free rein to conspiracy theories.
But it was not until this week that the true intention of a gigantic and million-dollar land purchase operation that began in 2018 in an agricultural area of Northern California.
There, halfway between the state capital Sacramento and San Francisco, in a landscape dotted with wind turbines and high-tension poles, where cattle roam today, a powerful group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs wants to build a city from scratch.
And not just any city, but an idyllic one: with streets without traffic where adults can go for a run and children can go for a bike ride, with abundant Parkland and restaurants with terraces, surrounded by pastures, prairies, forests and lakes in which to row, fish and admire the spectacular Californian sunsets.
but also with accessible housing, enough employment for its inhabitants and in a way that respects the environment.
“Instead of watching our children leave, we have the opportunity to build a new community that attracts new employers, creates good-paying local jobs with walkable neighborhoods, leads in environmental stewardship, and expands the tax base to serve the county in general”, announces the web page of the project, California Forever.
Who are behind? And why so much secrecy?
According to the official website, which was launched last week, it is an initiative of Jan Sramek.
Thanks to his past as an operator of the investment banking and securities megagroup Goldman Sachs, Sramek managed to court some of the heavyweights of the technological and financial industry from United States.
Thus, today among the investors in the project are:
- michael moritza partner in the firm Sequoia Capital, which once invested in Apple, Google, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Paypal, WhatsApp or Zoom, and manages assets worth US$85,000 million.
- reid hoffmanco-founder of LinkedIn, who was on the board of directors that created Paypal and is said to have arranged the first meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, with whom he would later participate in the first phase of financing Facebook.
- Laurene Powell Jobsbusinesswoman, philanthropist, widow of Steve Jobs and administrator of the trust that bears his name, the richest woman in the technology sector, according to Forbes.
- John Doerrpresident of Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital company that has investments in Amazon, Google or Twitter, a businessman whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $9.8 billion.
- Brothers Patrick and John Collisonfounders of the multinational financial services Stripe and whose fortune exceeds $1,000 million.
- marc andreessenwho is estimated by Forbes to have a net worth of more than $1.7 billion and heads Andreessen Horowitz, an investment fund with $35 billion.
- Nat Friedmannthe programmer who created Ximian, a company that provides free software for Linux, is today CEO of Github and also an activist for the right to decent housing.
But these names were not known until the American media The New York Times uncovered the matter on August 25.
Until then, all that was known was that a mysterious company called Flannery Associates -a subsidiary of California Forever- had been acquiring in the last five years some 20,000 hectares of agricultural land between Fairfield and Rio Vista, two towns in Solano County.
It is about half of the land in the area.
“They came with offers that were four times, five times the market prices, offers that could not be refused,” he told The New York Times Fairfield Mayor Catherine Moy.
Was it Disney buying land for a new theme park? Was the construction of a deep-water port being planned? Did Flannery represent foreign, particularly Chinese, interests? Or would the initiative have to do with the proximity of Travis Air Force Base, nicknamed the “Gateway to the Pacific” and which sees more cargo and passenger traffic than any other US military terminal?
These and other questions circulated for years among landowners, neighbors, local politicians and federal authorities.
“The FBI, the Treasury Department, everyone has been trying to find out who these people were (behind Flannery Associates). All this secrecy has caused a lot of problems, (the loss of) a lot of time and a lot of expense,” Democratic lawmaker Mike Thompson, who represents a large part of the area in the House of Representatives, stressed in a statement published on August 30.
The group behind California Forever admits that the gigantic $800 million dollar operation “naturally generated interest, concern and speculation”.
“But we knew that to build a complete and sustainable community we needed to bring together a lot of properties. And the only way to avoid an avalanche of land speculation in the short term it was not to share our specific plans until we had just acquired them ”, it is justified on its website.
Apparently they didn’t dodge it entirely, as Flannery’s lawyers filed a lawsuit in district court a few months ago, accusing some landowners of colluding to inflate prices.
Now, the group says, it is ready to go ahead with a “well thought out and agreed” plan.
So what’s next? And how feasible is it?
To do this, the group announced that it will hold talks with all interested parties, from residents to elected officials, representatives of the air base, unions, the business sector, agriculture, education, the police, and so on.
has already carried out polls among 2,000 county residentshe assures, and in the next few days each household in Solano will receive a survey by mail.
It also intends to open offices -without an expected date- in Fairfield, Vallejo and Vacaville, and to form a Citizens Community Advisory Boardfor which they are already receiving nominations, he added.
To build something resembling a city on what is now farmland, the group must first convince Solano County voters to pass a electoral initiative that allows urban uses in those landsa protection that has been in place since 1984.
And local and federal officials still have questions about the group’s intentions.
For this reason, at the same time, representatives of California Forever have already begun to meet with them.
“After the meeting, it becomes clear that they don’t have a plan; they have a vision”said Congressman Thompson in a statement posted on his website on August 30, after meeting with Sramek and another businessman from the group, Andrew Costa.
John Garamendi, another Democrat who has represented part of the area in the House of Representatives since 2009 and who was due to meet with the group’s delegates on those days, told the AP agency that he was dismayed to learn who supports the project.
“You big Silicon Valley millionaires are a part of this. Are these kind of people? Is this how they operate?he exclaimed. “What they have managed to do is completely poison the well.”
Others, like Suisun City mayor pro tempore Princess Washington, have already openly expressed reservations.
Washington suspects that the true purpose of the group is “create a city for the elite” under the pretext of building more houses. And so he told the AP agency.
Ronald Kott, the mayor of Rio Vista, also received the invitation for a meeting.
“In our city the reaction has been mixed”, he tells BBC Mundo, pointing to those who maintain their reserves and those who see it as a potential opportunity.
He suspects older residents, who make up more than half of Rio Vista’s population, won’t appreciate the extra congestion and noise, but he thinks others they might like the best medical care, nightlife, and shopping that a nearby fancy city could provide.
“The point is that, whatever is built, be it 50 houses or 500, it will have a direct and great impact on Río Vista,” he stresses. And it is that Flannery acquired practically all the land that surrounds this small city.
What worries Mayor Kott and his fellow citizens most, he says, is the potential increased traffic on an already congested motorway and water supply in an area that sometimes deals with scarcity.
“All of that will mean a large investment in infrastructure, maybe the expansion of highways, maybe the construction of another bridge over the Sacramento River, or a new aqueduct, and that is something that will have to be dealt with at the state level,” he argues. .
As if taking note of a week of intense scrutiny in the US media, with changes introduced this Tuesday to its website California Forever is already addressing those concerns, noting that it wants to be part of the solutions.
Only time will tell if the supposedly perfect city dreamed up by the Silicon Valley titans becomes such.
Or if, on the contrary, it joins the list of initiatives that remained just that, in projects, such as the idea put forward in 2013 by the co-founder and former CEO of Google, Larry Page, to create a utopian high-tech city. and minimal regulation.
“To say that we are before a long, long roadis perhaps an understatement”, concludes Mayor Kott.
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See original article on BBC