Silicon Valley elites revealed as buyers of $800m of land to build utopian city

Group Flannery Associates, backed by prominent investors, quietly buy 55,000 acres of farmland in northern California

After weeks of local speculation, the purchasers of 55,000 acres of northern California land have been revealed. The group Flannery Associates – backed by a cohort of Silicon Valley investors – has quietly purchased $800m worth of agricultural and empty land, the New York Times has reported. Their goal is to build a utopian new town that will offer its thousands of residents reliable public transportation and urban living, all of which would operate using clean energy.

Edgar Jamie, 48, the owner of Black Sheep Farms, leases 25 acres of land, which is directly across the biggest Amazon warehouse in the world in Ontario, California. James walks along his farm as the Amazon warehouse looms from the distance. “We only have about two to three more years here—this land is already marked for housing,” James said. “It’s sad that we have rich soil and they [the developers] choose to build warehouses instead of farming.” Pablo Unzueta/The Guardian

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The project was spearheaded by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former trader for the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, and is backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors including Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linkedin; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the philanthropic group Emerson Collective and wife of Steve Jobs; Marc Andreessen, an investor and software developer; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payment processor Stripe; and the entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, the Times reported.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/26/silicon-valley-elites-buy-800m-land-new-city