California Forever? Never say never.

Tech billionaires want to build a utopian city twice the size of San Francisco. Why am I so suspicious of this?

Ah, to nestle in the warm, comforting bosom of suburbia. Source: Midjourney.

I have long believed that if all the billionaires in Silicon Valley got together and decided to donate, say, 10 percent of their immense wealth, they could solve the homelessness problem in San Francisco.

The solution: Pool their money, buy a large tract of underused land, and build a community where people can get the services (mental and physical health, drug rehab, etc) they need in a safe and secure community. It would be a way to get these people off the streets, as well as help those for whom homelessness is temporary, not chronic, to re-enter mainstream society.

And unlike all those awful cut-every-cost-possible-in-order-to-squeeze-out-a-profit cement cinder-block public housing projects, which inevitably turn into hellholes of drug abuse and crime, make it a nice place to live. You know, with trees and shit. [1]

And look! They've gone ahead and done it.

Check out California Forever [2], a shining oasis of humanity in the heart of The Bay Area. A place for people on the short end of the multi-trillion-dollar high-tech industry to finally call home.

Welcome to California Forever. Just like Leave it to Beaver, but without that duplicitous m*therf*cker, Eddie Haskell. Source: Flannery Associates LLC.

Oh, wait. My mistake. California Forever is not for homeless people. But exactly who it is for is... kind of a mystery.

Over the last last six years, a company known as Flannery Associates has been secretly buying up 50,000+ acres of farmland in Solana County, midway between San Francisco and Sacramento. Until last week, the people behind Flannery Associates — and the reason they were buying up all this land — was a mystery to everyone involved.

Thanks to a story in the New York Times, we now know it was a cabal of tech billionaires, including Reid Hoffman (Linkedin), Lauren Jobs (Apple), the Collison brothers (Stripe), Michael Mortiz (Sequoia Capital), and the 900-pound gorilla of venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz. You know: People with license plate holders on their BMW i7s that say "My other car is a 300-foot superyacht."

Their intent, according to their newly minted website, is to take land populated mostly by cows and windmills and turn it into a shining new city on the hill — a solar-powered Eden of walkable streets, good schools, trees, parkland, and people whose faces appear to be missing.

I'd bet the price of a trenta mocha latte they used AI to generate these images. Source: Flannery LLC.

Flannery O’Conmen

All of that sounds good, except for the ways in which it doesn't.

The secrecy is certainly a concern. Nobody, not even government officials or the folks at Travis Air Force Base, which is encircled by the land now owned by Flannery, knew who this group was or what its plans were until roughly a week ago.

I get it. If you own swampland in Central Florida and a six-foot-tall rodent with four fingers on each hand shows up on your doorstep and makes an offer for it, you're likely to raise the price a notch or two. But when large landholders started holding out for more, Flannery did what soulless, rapacious corporate entities always do: It sued them for $510 million, claiming that the farmers were "conspiring" against the company in violation of US antitrust law. Per a Reuters report on the brief Flannery filed in May:

"If the conspirators had acted independently, they could have each individually negotiated a sale with Flannery and made tens of millions of dollars in profits," Flannery's attorneys said in the complaint. "But the conspirators wanted to make hundreds of millions."

How dare these farmers try to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, said the people who routinely make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

Another problem is who regulates the facilities Flannery has already purchased, which include "sites previously used for animal testing and military purposes with toxic red flags..." as well as land that uses human biosolids [3] as fertilizer.

This area, which is nearly the twice the size of San Francisco, is served by exactly one freeway: Highway 80, perhaps the most miserable stretch of road in all of California. [4] There's no BART line to Solano, or any other public rail transit. Who's going to pay for the new freeways and transit lines? Here's a hint: It won't be mega-billionaires notoriously allergic to paying taxes.

And then, of course, there's the issue of water. As in, where the hell is it going to come from? Have they not noticed that California has been running out of water for decades?

The website punts on this issue:

We cannot, of course, solve a multi-county drinking water supply problem on our own, but we want to be part of a larger solution to bring clean and reliable water to existing cities as well as our project.

The only other question remaining is, How many of the streets in this new urban paradise will be named after characters from Ayn Rand novels? (Answer: All of them.)

Utopia, Me-topia

After news broke about Flannery's real stakeholders, the company scrambled to control the narrative, throwing up the aforementioned quickie website (replete with typos), along with a bunch of placeholder accounts on Linkedin, (not) Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. These are ghost towns at the moment, with virtually no content — a clear sign these people were totally caught off guard by their sudden visibility.

The site is packed with the kind of brochure-speak used to sell timeshares.

California was built on its pioneering spirit, its boundless optimism, and the steadfast conviction that if we work hard, and together, that our best days still lie ahead, waiting to be built, for our children, and their children, and for all the generations to come.

Also, importantly, California Forever CEO Jan Sramek just purchased a home there for himself and his wife, "their toddler daughter, her soon-to-arrive little brother, and golden retriever Bruce."

Awww. A golden retriever? I feel so much better now. Go on, build whatever you like, environment be damned.

Only some of the people in this illustration are zombies. Source: Flannery LLC.

Underlying all of this is the odd belief that people who excel at building companies will also be good at building communities. I can't think of a single example that bears this out. But I can think of plenty of business people who've destroyed communities.

You see this kind of thing on (not) Twitter all the time, in particular with VCs. People who have confused getting lucky with being smart and now believe they're experts on everything. It's the same arrogance that causes people like Vivek Ramaswamy (and Andrew Yang before him) to not only believe they have the gravitas to be President of the United States, but that they somehow deserve it. [5]

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for sustainable, pedestrian friendly, safe, well-planned communities. I just don't trust these guys to build one.

Hey ma, that's me up there on the satellite jukebox

A programming note: A few weeks ago I was interviewed by CBS News' Gil Gross about a couple of stories I wrote for Forbes about AI and changes to the workforce. If you're desperate to hear me sounding like I know what I'm talking about, you can tune into archived versions of the show here.

First interview starts at six minutes into Hour 2; the second begins 19 minutes into Hour 3.

Would you live in a town like California Forever? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[1] Not literal shit.

[2] Originally called California Uber Alles, until the Dead Kennedys objected. (Just kidding.)

[3] Literal shit.

[4] I imagine the i405 reading this and saying, "Hold my beer."

[5] Can we please bury the notion once and for all that success in business makes you a good candidate for president? Has there ever been an example that bears this out? I can think of a couple that didn't.