Silicon Valley in Solano

Or Bay Area billionaires spend $800M to give us all urbanist DLC content

Two weeks ago, Erin Griffith and Conor Dougherty broke the story about a company backed by Bay Area Tech moguls buying up land in Solano county. The area, technically within commuting distance to San Francisco, is predominantly undeveloped farmland with a few smaller cities like Vallejo. There’s also an Air Force base. 

Flannery Associates, the vehicle through which the land purchases are being made, has bought up 55K acres (for scale, San Francisco only occupies 33K), though the parcels aren’t fully contiguous. 

Bay Area Counties

The project’s objective, according to California Forever (Flannery Associates’ parent company) is to create a community with “good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space”. The site also includes images of walkable, tuscan villa / solar punk looking neighborhoods. So…seemingly unobjectionable? Maybe not. 

There’s a lot of hate directed toward the project. Most of which is vibes based (necessarily so, given everything put out by California Forever is super vague). 

One reason may be that people just kinda hate real estate developers and get creeped out when one tries to quietly assemble large holdings. If anything, I’m surprised that Flannery Associates didn’t create multiple shell companies to acquire parcels in parallel just to avoid the holdout problem. Doing it all via one vehicle made it obvious some specific group was trying to assemble the land under single ownership. 

Image from California Forever picturing the type of community they imagine

The larger public relations issue, though, is where Flannery Associates got its funding. Investors include Patrick and John Collison (founded stripe), Marc Andreessen (venture capitalist and multiple time founder), Reid Hoffman (founded Linkedin), Laurene Powell Jobs (see last name), and a bunch of other (tech community) famous folks. 

Without naming names, some of these folks have not always been their best selves online, especially when expressing opinions about politics, policy, or current events. That’s led many observers to code this as a hubris filled attempt by tech billionaires at creating a new society in their own image. The reality is probably much more anodyne. 

The intent seems to be something like a growth friendly (i.e. allows the housing stock to continually expand), technology friendly (i.e. open to autonomous everything) master planned community. The best analogue I can think of is The Woodlands, Texas. 

The Woodlands is technically a special district (as opposed to an incorporated city) and was set up on the periphery of Houston as a bedroom community for folks in the oil industry. Fast forward 50 years and it has a population of over 100K and employers like ExxonMobil and Anadarko have set up offices in town to save employees the commute into Houston proper.

If Flannery Associates wants to spend the next 50 years building a solar punk version of The Woodlands for San Francisco tech…why not. More housing is more housing and if transportation technologies like eVTOLs take off (pun intended), housing in Solano County becomes as close to San Francisco as BART adjacent housing in Oakland is today. 

Solar Punk Northern California, maybe?

My overall read is that this will be less impactful than the funders hope and much more of a giant nothing burger than detractors fear. As far as I can tell, Jan Sramek (founder and CEO of Flannery Associates) convinced a bunch of billionaires to give him money — not because they wanted to get into the planned community game, but because they liked the idea of creating a city out of whole cloth. Specifically, creating a city within the economic ecosystem they like, but outside the political environment they don’t.

Whatever happens, it’ll take several decades to materialize. Partially because large scale real estate development takes a while. Also because the project is going to face resistance. Now that it’s clear who’s cutting the checks, local landowners have every incentive to hold out for much bigger payouts. CEQA, in all its grotesquery, is also likely to rear its head the second Flannery Associates tries to actually build anything. On top of all that, purchasing large tracts of land adjacent to an air force base has freaked out the feds. 

Representative John Garamendi had been investigating Flannery Associates for two years, fearful that it was a front for the Chinese Communist Party. Apparently the Treasury Department and the FBI had taken notice as well. In fact, Flannery Associates seems to have alienated or otherwise weirded out just about every relevant elected official or bureaucrat that might have anything to do with their plans. Oh, they’re also suing a bunch of farmers who wouldn’t sell on the basis that said farmers are colluding to hold out and exact higher prices for their land. Whatever the facts of the case or the legality of the situation…not a great look for the buy side. 

All in all, this is not billionaires recreating Rapture on dry land. It’s also no Neom (there’s tech elite wealthy and then there’s monarchical petro state wealthy). Like I said before, something in the category of The Woodlands seems most likely and if a bunch of billionaires want to fund solar punk North Houston in California, the good and great have certainly tried to do worse.