\n<\/p>\n
Some say it was the Gold Rush and others the Golden Age of cinema, but no one really knows how the California Dream came about. Didion and Kerouac wrote reams on the subject; Steinbeck portrayed it as a place of boundless potential, replete with fertile valleys, an endless coastline, and trees far as the eye can see. Snap back to reality, and anyone who\u2019s witnessed California\u2019s warts can tell you that life there is just as much Grapes of Wrath<\/em> as it is East of Eden.<\/em> From pollution<\/a> to homelessness<\/a> to wildfires<\/a> to drought<\/a>, the Golden State has, by many measures, lost its luster, leading some to believe that, like the American Dream, California\u2019s might<\/a> also<\/a> be<\/a> fizzling<\/a> out<\/a>.<\/p>\n Few people have dedicated more time, money, and effort to resurrecting the state\u2019s past glory than 36-year-old Jan Sramek,<\/strong> founder and CEO of Flannery Associates, the corporation with designs to develop a large tract of California\u2019s Solano County into a town, so named California Forever, from scratch. Since 2017\u2014with the help of billionaires Laurene Powell Jobs,<\/strong> Reid Hoffman,<\/strong> Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz,<\/strong> and others of their ilk\u2014Sramek has been secretly buying agricultural land, accumulating at least<\/a> 50,000 acres to the tune of $900 million. His proposal is nothing if not ambitious: A walkable community (unthinkable by most in California) of an initial 20,000 homes\u2014and eventually as many as 400,000 people\u2014just northeast of San Francisco that includes its own roads, parks, schools, offices, restaurants, and public transit, with wind and solar farms to boot. \u201cIn California,\u201d Sramek told<\/a> reporters months ago when explaining the impetus for the idea, \u201cwe have dug ourselves into such a deficit in terms of housing. We can deliver a big solution to the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n If you have any doubts about the feasibility of this project, you\u2019re in good company. Plenty of ink has been spilled on the myriad obstacles sure to arise when it comes to permitting<\/a>, water<\/a>, traffic<\/a>, weatherization<\/a>, city culture<\/a>, and environmental protection<\/a>. That\u2019s also to say nothing of the $510 million lawsuit Sramek filed<\/a> back in May, accusing about 40 Solano farmers of price-fixing their land, which they\u2019ve adamantly denied. However, the most daunting challenge for Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader whose surreptitious venture was exposed<\/a> by The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> last August, will be procuring ballot approval from a community hardly predisposed to trust him.<\/p>\n The reason for this is simple: If affordable housing in the Bay Area is dying, then the birth of Silicon Valley was its grim reaper. When companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple first migrated to the region as part of the dot-com bubble of the \u201990s and early aughts, they were riding on such an overwhelming wave of techno-optimism that it was hard to appreciate what damage would be left in its wake. It was a period of \u201cirrational exuberance,\u201d Robert Shiller,<\/strong> the Nobel Prize\u2013winning economist who predicted the subsequent crash, wrote in 2000, warning that the market was investing \u201ctoo much in business start-ups and expansions, and too little in infrastructure, education, and other forms of human capital.\u201d As the tech craze continued, the cultural consequences bore out: The gradual influx of well-educated and highly-paid workers led to the housing boom, the widespread<\/a> razing<\/a> of<\/a> older<\/a> developments<\/a>, and<\/a> the<\/a> displacement<\/a> of longtime dwellers in San Francisco, Oakland, and Palo Alto, fueling an epidemic of gentrification scarcely seen before in America. (Earning $104,000 a year in San Francisco now qualifies<\/a> you as \u201clow-income.\u201d)<\/p>\n It\u2019s unnerving to many that a coterie of tech billionaires, whose business escapades have contributed to California\u2019s housing crisis, would now consider themselves uniquely qualified to fix it. But such is the god complex<\/a> of tech titans, whose plagues and panaceas arrive and depart with Biblical cyclicity. For instance, where social media engenders<\/a> and exploits<\/a> the crisis of American loneliness, scores of mental health start-ups are now proffering chatbots<\/a> and \u201cvirtual communities<\/a>\u201d to ease the pain. Where AI opened a Pandora\u2019s box for plagiarism<\/a> and financial fraud<\/a>, tech entrepreneurs are now in a mad<\/a> dash<\/a> to develop software that can detect all manner of both, setting off what will no doubt be an AI evasion-detection arms race with no end in sight.<\/p>\n The ills of Silicon Valley, in other words, are not just iterative but recursive. Therefore, it\u2019s reasonable to worry that California Forever will only exacerbate the problems it\u2019s trying to solve. In the county\u2019s largest city, Vallejo, the median house price ($515,500) and household income ($86,112) pale<\/a> in comparison to those of San Francisco ($1.34 million and $136,689, respectively). It also remains one of California\u2019s most racially diverse towns with sizable Black and Hispanic populations, as opposed to the Golden City, which has seen a marked decrease<\/a> in Black residents, a possible harbinger<\/a> of things to come. But it\u2019s only a matter of time before places like Vallejo become the region\u2019s last bastions of affordability, enticing outpriced residents in the East Bay, a phenomenon that<\/a> already<\/a> appears<\/a> to be underway. And it goes without saying that California Forever\u2014which would carve out<\/a> $200 million to \u201crevitalize\u201d Solano\u2019s cities and add another that Sramek has favorably compared<\/a> to the (highly gentrified) West Village in New York or Georgetown in DC\u2014might only douse more fuel onto that fire.<\/p>\n Though unprecedented as it may seem, Sramek\u2019s proposal for a new city is far from the first of its kind. Back in 2008, Peter Thiel<\/strong> cofounded<\/a> the Seasteading Institute, which aims to construct a crypto-loving, tax-hating town off the coast of French Polynesia, where it would float on seaborne platforms that call to mind renderings of the lost Aztec capital, Tenochtitl\u00e1n. In a similar vein, billionaire Marc Lore<\/strong> is pursuing<\/a> the proposed community of Telosa, envisioning a 240-square-mile metropolis that would shine as a beacon of \u201creformed\u201d capitalism, complete with autonomous EVs, high-speed transit, solar roofing, and a massive skyscraper. Remarkably, Lore and Thiel\u2019s are just a few among the many proposed techno-utopias that have surfaced; others<\/a> in the mix<\/a> include Spectra, Neom, Praxis, and Painted Rock. The notion of master-planning the platonic ideal of a city has, as The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> reports, \u201cbeen bouncing around the meetings and salon parties of Silicon Valley\u2019s tech elite for years.\u201d<\/p>\n But Sramek, an avowed Ayn Rand enthusiast and a Wall Street wunderkind who once described<\/a> his own life as a \u201csprint towards excellence,\u201d has taken the idea and indeed sprinted with it like no other, quietly securing funding and a vast expanse of land over half a decade\u2014all while (until recently) keeping the county in the dark. That last part has been a major sticking point. No great city (not even Rand\u2019s own Galt\u2019s Gulch) has been built without some amount of discrete planning. But Sramek\u2019s especially cloak-and-dagger acquisition tactics\u2014which Solano farmers have said are equivalent to \u201cdivide-and-conquer<\/a>\u201d\u2014have understandably roiled<\/a> residents. \u201cIt\u2019s the secrecy,\u201d one told the San Francisco Standard at a town hall hosted by California Forever last November. \u201cI think it nullifies the whole point here of them trying to be open about it.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just locals who feel smarted: One US congressman from California, Mike Thompson,<\/strong> vehemently opposed to California Forever, maintains<\/a> that Flannery, the investor group heading the project, \u201cviolated the trust of the public.\u201d Leaders of the Sierra Club have similarly called California Forever a \u201chostile takeover<\/a>\u201d that openly defies the voter-approved uses of land. \u201cWe do not see any advantages to the project,\u201d said a board member representing the group\u2019s county chapter. \u201cThe only thing we see is billionaires getting richer.\u201d<\/p>\n California Forever, for its part, told Vanity Fair<\/em> that its stealthy buying spree was aimed at preventing a \u201creckless short-term land speculation that would have stopped us from proposing a well-thought-out design for the new community.\u201d It also hoped to dispel any notion that it\u2019s undermining the will of the public: \u201cWe published the full plan in January. The initiative spells out very clearly what the proposal is, and includes ten voter guarantees to ensure accountability,\u201d a company spokesperson added. \u201cWe\u2019re taking this project directly to voters for their approval in the most open and transparent way: by putting it on the ballot in November.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n