Silicon Valley Billionaires Plan New City Near San Francisco

They’re not quite ready to colonize Mars, so they’ll have to settle for their own county in California.

Sitting between San Francisco and Sacramento is an arid patch of brown hills bisected by a two-lane highway in the eastern part of Solano County.

The area, known locally as Jepson Prairie and the Montezuma Hills, is sparsely populated, home mainly to ranches, wind turbines, miles of power lines and, to the northwest, Travis Air Force Base. But all of that may be about to change, in a big way.

During the past five years, a secretive group of Silicon Valley billionaires has spent an estimated $800M buying up tens of thousands of acres in the area, more than 140 properties from more than 400 owners.

According to a report in the New York Times, this group—calling itself Flannery Associates, with an all-star team of some of the tech industry’s biggest names as investors—is about to begin a public campaign for its dream project: A new city with tens of thousands of new homes—powered by a huge solar farm—and 10,000 acres of new parks and open spaces, including an orchard with a million trees.

Flannery was started in 2017 by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who began courting Silicon Valley heavyweights with a vision of building a tech version of Shangri-La in Solano County.

According to the NY Times, investors in Flannery include billionaire venture capitalists Michael Moritz and Marc Andreessen; Reid Hoffman, the Linked-In co-founder; Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs; and Patrick and John Collison, co-founders of the payments company Stripes. 

For most of the past five years, the group has been quietly acquiring land in Solano County. Flannery has been offering incentives including allowing sellers to retain income from wind turbines on their property, as well as sale-leaseback deals.

The company made offers to every landowner in the area, sometimes paying several times the market rate, whether the land had been listed for sale or not, the report said.

The acquisition effort became public earlier this year when Flannery filed a lawsuit in US District Court accusing some landowners of colluding to raise prices to $20,000 per acre.

The newspaper report said Flannery is preparing to launch a public effort, possibly including a ballot initiative, to rezone a large portion of eastern Solano County. Brian Brokaw, a representative for the investor group, said in a statement that the investors are “Californians who believe that Solano County’s and California’s best days are ahead.”