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.
There has to be more to this story…
If the distinguishing features are public transportation and clean energy, they’re probably not building it to live in themselves. And while there’s a big demand for more housing in the Bay Area generally, Solono County is a bit of a commute for current workers.
It feels like they’re building this as a company town for some yet-to-be-announced new business project that they want to be isolated from existing urban areas.
(edit) I guess I don’t mean “urban areas” so much as areas where employees would have contact with other Silicon Valley firms and culture.
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It’s obvious they’re trying to corner the milk steak market.
Travis AFB may nominally be part of Fairfield, but it’s outside of the urban area surrounded by agricultural fields. And the existing industries in Fairfield proper aren’t the sort that typical Silicon Valley businesses would benefit from being near.
Didn’t they try this decades ago with California city? It’s outside a base and all as well.
Vengeance for those Harry Potter beans.
Agreed, regardless of what this is there’s a 100% chance that it’s a profit scheme and has nothing to do with building anything practical for anyone
Solano isn’t any further than any other place in the bay. Generally speaking. I work in SF and live in Vallejo. Almost all of my coworkers commute just as far.
That’s really not a decent excuse for making a 2+ hour commute. The insanity of the number of people living in places like Vallejo just to commute to San Francisco is staggering to me. Remote work for anyone that can do it should be the norm. The traffic in the Bay Area is back to being just downright awful. When most people were staying home it was actually nice to drive around to different places.
US cities could be easily compressed to be third their size with people having access to green areas, walkable neighborhoods and basic convenience by the door but having 5 square meters of grass in front of their porch and F-350 parked outside is just too important for them.