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A mystery company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has purchased tens of thousands of acres of land for more than $800 million to build a new city near San Francisco (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 1 year ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology

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[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summary

A mystery company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has been snatching up land in a northern California county in an apparent bid to build an entirely new city in the state.

The company, Flannery Associates, has spent $800 million to purchase thousands of acres of farmland in Solano County, which sits northeast of San Francisco, court documents obtained by Insider show.

Flannery's backers include Andreessen, Powell Jobs, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and others, according to the report.

In 2017, Flannery Associates pitched an idea to turn the Solano County land into a walkable city powered by clean energy and housing tens of thousands of residents, The Times reported.

In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that was filed in July, the landowners said that they have "either engaged in good-faith, arms-length transactions for the sale of land, or were not tempted by Flannery's prices, because they had no desire (or ability) to sell."

In 2016, Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup accelerator, began looking into how it could build a city that could address California's affordable housing crisis.

Saved 66% of original text.

[–] throws_lemy@lemmy.nz 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good bot but there is a big concern

The Wall Street Journal reported that Flannery has purchased about 52,000 acres of farmland around Travis Air Force Base since 2018. According to the report, government officials began investigating the purchases due to concerns that foreign interests may be behind the company.

"So the entire base is encircled now," Catherine Moy, mayor of Fairfield, told ABC 7 News. "So there's no part that isn't touched by Flannery."

Little is known about Flannery Associates or its specific city plans.

[–] porkins@lemmy.basedcount.com 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I were to create a city that can withstand the downfall of society, I would want to put a defensive military fortress at its center. Right now, they don’t run it, but when the shit hits the fan, they can inherit an arsenal of protection.

[–] kinttach@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

Since it’s an Air Force base it could also be used as an airport for tech billionaires’ private jets.

[–] noughtnaut 1 points 1 year ago

Bad bot.

It seems the spoiler annotation is not working (for me, on liftoff, on android). But also, there's no need to wrap it in spiller tags to begin with.

I'm looking forward to changing my vote on you. 😍