Mystery Company Bought Thousands of Acres of Land for $800M to Build New California City

• An organization known as Flannery Associates has been buying land in a county close to San Francisco.
• The corporate has spent as much as $15,000 per acre, court docket paperwork present.
• Silicon Valley has lengthy sought to construct a brand new metropolis from scratch.

A thriller firm backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has been snatching up land in a northern California county in an obvious bid to construct a wholly new metropolis within the state.

The New York Occasions reported these traders embody a few of the Valley’s most recognizable names, from Marc Andreessen to Laurene Powell Jobs.

The corporate, Flannery Associates, has spent $800 million to buy hundreds of acres of farmland in Solano County, which sits northeast of San Francisco, court docket paperwork obtained by Insider present.

The Wall Avenue Journal reported that Flannery has bought about 52,000 acres of farmland round Travis Air Power Base since 2018. Based on the report, authorities officers started investigating the purchases because of issues that international pursuits could also be behind the corporate.

“So the whole base is encircled now,” Catherine Moy, mayor of Fairfield, advised ABC 7 Information. “So there isn’t any half that is not touched by Flannery.”

Little is thought about Flannery Associates or its particular metropolis plans.

Based on the Occasions, the corporate is led by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs dealer.

Flannery’s backers embody Andreessen, Powell Jobs, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and others, based on the report.

It is unclear how a lot they every invested within the firm.

In 2017, Flannery Associates pitched an concept to show the Solano County land right into a walkable metropolis powered by clear power and housing tens of hundreds of residents, The Occasions reported. Actual property information reveals that the present median housing worth within the county is $585,000.

In an e mail obtained by the Occasions, Moritz stated that Flannery had bought about 1,400 acres of land for lower than $5,000 per acre.

However the spending worth has since soared, with Flannery spending as much as $15,000 per acre, legal professionals for Flannery Associates stated in court docket paperwork.

In Could, the attorneys for Flannery filed a lawsuit in opposition to a gaggle of Solano County landowners, saying they conspired to inflate their land costs.

The lawsuit alleges Flannery overpaid the homeowners by about $170,000,000 and is looking for damages of not less than $510,000,000.

In a movement to dismiss the lawsuit that was filed in July, the landowners stated that they’ve “both engaged in good-faith, arms-length transactions for the sale of land, or weren’t tempted by Flannery’s costs, as a result of they’d no need (or potential) to promote.”

Attorneys for Flannery Associates and the landowners didn’t reply to a request for remark outdoors of working hours.

Silicon Valley has lengthy sought to construct a metropolis from scratch, generally with a utopian imaginative and prescient of a “sensible metropolis.”

In 2016, Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup accelerator, started trying into the way it may construct a metropolis that might tackle California’s reasonably priced housing disaster.

“We wish to construct cities for all people — for tech and non-tech folks,” the accelerator wrote. “We’re not interested by constructing ‘loopy libertarian utopias for techies.'”

Tech founders, together with Invoice Gates and Elon Musk, have additionally had visions of their very own cities.

Musk lately bought 3,500 acres of land outdoors of Austin, Texas, to construct a city he intends to name “Snailbrook.”

Sources advised The Journal that he envisioned a “kind of Texas utopia alongside the Colorado River.”