The cohort of Silicon Valley tech titans who have been hoovering up Bay Area farmland in hopes of turning it into a new city have been accused of deploying “strong-arm tactics” and a “divide and conquer” strategy to gobble up as much arable acreage as possible. Several local farmers say Flannery Associates, the parent company behind the quixotic California Forever project, has used underhanded tactics in its pursuit. of regional real estate hegemony. The allegations were disclosed in a recent court filing connected to a lawsuit involving land disputes.
In August, the New York Times reported that Flannery, then a total mystery company, had managed to buy $800 million of farmland in the Solano County region. The Times also revealed that Flannery was backed by a coterie of influential Silicon Valley billionaires, including the likes of Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman and a variety of other big names in the tech industry. It was revealed that Flannery’s grand plan was to use the land he had purchased to create a new utopian city, which Flannery’s cohort calls “California Forever.” This supposed city is purely hypothetical for now, but his backers say it could one day be a beautiful, bustling city of the future.
Of course, the first step in building this new libertarian wonderland was to buy up as much land as possible, and to do that, Flannery had to buy out the people who already lived there. For the most part, the people already living there were the operators of long-established family farms.
In some cases, negotiations between the company’s lawyers and the prospective sellers did not go the way Flannery wanted and, in May, The company sued several farmers, alleging that they were engaged in anti-competitive practices and price fixing. The farmers, in turn, have accused the billionaire-backed corporate entity of trying to intimidate and manipulate them and their families into selling their land. In the recent court filing, the farmers dismissed the lawsuit’s claims, alleging that Flannery had repeatedly engaged in “strong-arm tactics” in an effort to loosen the land.
Those tactics allegedly included attempts to “play one family against another by misrepresenting the families’ intentions with respect to Flannery’s offers, in the hope that otherwise unwilling Los families would feel pressure not to disappoint their friends and neighbors,” the filing states. In one specific case, the farmers claim Flannery approached one family member, acquired one-eighth of a large tract of family-owned land from them, and then sued the other seven family members. in an attempt to acquire the entire parcel.
On its website, California Forever has denied the allegation that it has acted in any unfavorable manner and has instead characterized the farmers in question as “a small group. of individuals [who] have engaged in a selective campaign to slander Flannery associates” and who are involved in a nefarious “secret conspiracy.”
Overall, it seems very difficult to imagine this project ever materializing. Even if Flannery somehow manages to smooth things over with For the locals, the project still needs to clear several state and regional regulatory hurdles. Those hurdles seem doubtful, as many local politicians have expressed doubts about the project’s viability. If those hurdles are overcome, the project’s backers have to build the majestic metropolis the developers are envisioning. After that, people have to move there and the city has to maintain a certain level of population density for the foreseeable future. The developers have to run the city… you know, forever.
This inspires a lot of questions. For example, will California Forever have a government? If so, what kind of government is it…is it going to be…or is it just going to be some sort of series of corporate-owned planned communities, sort of like an expanded version…of Disney’s Storyliving? This all seems like a giant, expensive disaster that is doomed to fail, but I suppose one should never discount the disruptive factors. potential of a tech mogul’s insatiable hubris.