For years, a little-known firm by the title of Flannery Associates has been shopping for up undeveloped land instantly northeast of San Francisco in Solano County. Tons of of landowners who’ve obtained affords for his or her properties, many occasions greater than what the land is definitely valued, have questioned precisely who’s behind these actual property purchases — now hundreds of acres of rolling hills.
A brand new report from the New York Instances particulars what is going on on right here: A bunch of tech elites have come collectively to purchase up land in an try to create a metropolis of their very own. The group contains tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen of the VC agency Andreessen Horowitz, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. (The agency Andreessen Horowitz itself can also be an investor.) Different notable names like Chris Dixon, who leads Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund, in addition to the founders of the fee firm Stripe have invested. Even Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Job’s politically-active widow, is concerned.
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In line with the report, the mastermind behind Flannery Associates is a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs dealer named Jan Sramek. A fast search of Sramek’s title pulls up a flurry of glowing articles on the previous funding banker from a few decade in the past. In these days he was in his 20s, and for a second he was a type of golden baby within the finance world.
A 2017 pitch from Flannery Associates breaks down what the corporate claims its seeking to do: “Take an arid patch of brown hills reduce by a two-lane freeway between suburbs and rural land, and convert [it] right into a group with tens of hundreds of residents, clear power, public transportation and dense city life.”
In mild of its agreeable acknowledged intentions, it is odd that Flannery Associates’ has chosen to maintain the locals residing within the space at nighttime about what it is trying till very not too long ago. The corporate has been working in such secrecy that even native Congresspeople could not determine the identification of these behind it.
Nevertheless, the corporate lifted its cloak of anonymity simply this previous week, reaching out to public officers and requesting conferences to debate its plans.
Why? The reason being possible as a result of Flannery Associates has been largely shopping for up farmland and different property that is not truly zoned for residential use. Which means it should have to foyer officers and persuade the locals to vote on a rezoning effort. The corporate is hoping the promise of jobs, new properties and public areas will win them over.
However present residents simply have to look dozens of miles south at Silicon Valley to see who a metropolis that caters to the whims of the tech elite finally ends up truly being for.