The tech billionaires trying to build the California Forever ‘utopia’

Catherine Moy first heard the name Flannery Associates when she received a phone call from a farmer in her hometown of Fairfield, a 45-minute drive from San Francisco.

Moy, a local politician who is now Fairfield’s mayor, was told that the mysterious organisation was raising hackles by secretly buying up tens of thousands of acres of rural land.

After some digging, she found that the firm, a Delaware-incorporated corporation whose registration means it does not disclose its backers, had offered sellers several times the market rate for purchases, spending $800m (£630m) on property and becoming the largest landowner in the local county.

Farmers selling their land have profited but the project has aroused suspicions: much of the land neighbours a major air force base. Local politicians have spent years seeking to force Flannery’s backers to reveal themselves. Government officials launched an investigation into the purchases this year, fearing that they could be financed by foreign adversaries.

The truth, when it finally emerged, was just as strange. Last week, the New York Times revealed that some of Silicon Valley’s most famous investors were behind the company, which aims to build at least one and as many as three new cities in the region.

Sir Michael Moritz, the Welsh-born billionaire who invested in Google and Yahoo; Marc Andreessen, the Netscape founder and Facebook investor; Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs; and Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, are reportedly among the venture’s financiers. Sir Michael has been deeply involved, sounding out co-investors as early as 2017 for a vision of a walkable metropolis powered by renewable energy.

Work on the unnamed city project is now starting in earnest. Local residents have begun receiving emails asking for their thoughts on a new city “with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over 10,000 acres of new parks and open space”.

The project is being 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 him as a “machine” who moonlighted at a hedge fund while doing his degree.

After years of protecting its secrecy, the company has started to contact local politicians ahead of a potential public vote on allowing a city to be built in the area.

On Friday, a website for the project titled “California Forever” first appeared, featuring drawings more reminiscent of the Tuscan countryside and relaxed European towns than America’s suburban sprawl and huge highways.

The project’s ambition is to build a new town with affordable housing, “good paying local jobs” and a walkable community. Backers are “eager to begin a conversation about the future of Solano County”, the website says.

Moy is sceptical.

“Flannery have not been good actors,” she says. “It really has caused a lot of heartache. I’m not gonna call them enemies, but they are suspicious no matter who they are.”

This year Flannery Associates sued a group of local landowners, claiming they had conspired to push up land prices in an attempt to force the company to overpay.

Moy adds that since the project’s backers have been revealed as Silicon Valley billionaires, hundreds of her voters have contacted her.

“Maybe 96pc of the folks want them to go away and don’t want anything to do with it,” Moy says, arguing that they should channel their funds into housing in Silicon Valley.

Billionaire entrepreneurs have long had an obsession with creating utopias from scratch. Walt Disney spent much of his later years planning to build a city of the future (after he died in 1966, the site became the home of the giant Disney World theme park).

Techies have been the biggest boosters of the idea in recent years, in part motivated by the problems of San Francisco, which suffers from punishing housing costs, rampant homelessness and sclerotic government.

In 2016, Y Combinator, the famous start-up backer that has supported Airbnb, Stripe and Instacart, said it would study building new cities. “We think it’s possible to do amazing things given a blank slate,” a blog post said at the time. Proposals included limiting the city’s laws so they could all fit onto 100 pages and banning human-driven cars.

Seven years later, Y Combinator has made no follow-up announcement, suggesting the project has petered out.

In 2021, Marc Lore, the billionaire founder of Walmart-owned ecommerce website Jet.com, dramatically announced that he was quitting the retail giant to build a “city of the future”.

Telosa, as the project was dubbed, would see driverless cars harmoniously share the streets with pedestrians and bicycles. Vegetables would be grown in soil-free “aeroponic” farms. Roofs would be covered in solar panels.

The project’s website says it will have five million people by 2050. Officially, Telosa is still scouting for locations although updates have been thin on the ground in the last year.

Jeffrey Berns, a cryptocurrency millionaire, has bought up thousands of acres of Nevada desert as part of plans to build a smart city named Painted Rock that would run on blockchain technology. A spokesman for the county told Bloomberg that there had been no updates on the project since local commissioners voted against a proposal for a new government.

Bigger players have had no better luck. Sidewalk Labs, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet run by Dan Doctoroff, a former official in Mike Bloomberg’s New York government, planned to build a high-tech neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront laden with sensors and cameras.

The project was shut down by overwhelming local opposition and Alphabet shut down Sidewalk Labs in 2021.

At the more ambitious end, Elon Musk has proposed SpaceX could build cities on Mars and the PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel has funded the San Francisco based Seasteading Institute, which aims to build autonomous floating cities on the ocean, unencumbered by countries’ laws.

Rachel Cooper, a professor of design management and policy at Lancaster University who has advised the Government on the future of cities, says building cities from the ground up has a particular appeal for techies.

“Retrofitting technology into existing cities is complex and expensive, with planning and regulatory restrictions,” she says. 

Cooper adds that technologists’ ideas for new cities envision ideas like digital twin simulations to help planning, driverless cars and drones, which are harder to introduce in towns that have been built up over centuries.

However, Mike Batty, an urban planning expert at University College London’s Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, says that top-down cities, such as the UAE’s Masdar, and PlanIT, an abandoned project in Portugal, are rarely successful.

“These sorts of towns tend to be idealistic, and do not really take account of human behaviour very easily, because it’s very hard to do,” he says. “Eventually, they kind of revert to the way towns look.”

The billionaire backers behind California’s proposed utopia have invested too much to back out now.

But Moy, the Fairfield mayor, says locals are not going to make life easy. “This is an experimental plaything,” she says. “And we are not to be played with.”