Shadowy Bay Area land buyers have strong anti-SF feelings

For months, rumors swirled about the purpose of Flannery Associates’ land grab. Skeptical landowners turned down jacked-up prices. Officials worried about the acres’ adjacency to Travis Air Force Base.

Then, a survey arrived: Solano County residents, SFGATE first reported, were asked their opinions on a “new city,” potentially forthcoming on a county ballot. It would have “tens of thousands of new homes” and various other features — parks, orchards and a solar farm — all combining to “feel like a college town” with a focus on walkability, the survey said.

The New York Times outed some of the mysterious company’s backers and leaked the pitch, reportedly circulated to investors by venture capitalist Michael Moritz. “This effort should relieve some of the Silicon Valley pressures we all feel — rising home prices, homelessness, congestion etc.,” he reportedly wrote.

The reported list of prospective city planners reads like a roll call of Silicon Valley moguls and tech executives with experience making splashy investments. Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow and founder of the Emerson Collective, reportedly invested, as did LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Details have been sparse thus far on the group’s plans. But several other project investors have histories of critiquing both Bay Area culture and California’s incremental housing development, SFGATE found in a review of old writings and interviews. Plus, one seems to see San Mateo County suburb Foster City as the perfect precedent for the group’s plans.

The Welsh-born billionaire and, up until recently, Sequoia Capital partner has turned his gaze at San Francisco repeatedly, writing two high-profile San Francisco callouts in the New York Times and the Financial Times earlier this year. Moritz, an ex-journalist, rails against the city’s political system, targeting the city Board of Supervisors and San Francisco Mayor London Breed in both while promoting TogetherSF — the moderate-leaning civic organization he funded — in the New York Times.

In 2018, Moritz also wrote for the Financial Times about what he perceives as the excesses of Silicon Valley’s labor culture (and, more broadly, California’s culture) — linking gripes about work-life balance and parental leave to complaints about corporate speakers with unsavory politics and “the need for a space for musical jam sessions,” calling them all “unwarranted distractions.” He then goes on to praise Chinese tech companies — and by extension, what he sees as China’s broader culture of frugality, a lack of work-life balance and, curiously, “disregard paid to physical fitness.”  

Marc Andreessen — the man whose surname is one-half of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm better known as a16z — described San Francisco as the “most obviously dysfunctional place in the planet” on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Not one to mince words, he also wrote that he considered leaving Atherton, the swanky Bay Area enclave where he resides (as does Steph Curry). 

He and his family chose to stay, he wrote on X (formerly Twitter), because living in Atherton is like living “in the ruins of a once great civilization.” He then compares California (and ostensibly the Bay Area) to “Rome in maybe 250 AD”: “We live amidst an enormous flowering of culture and creativity, but the roads are becoming unsafe and nobody is quite sure why.”

His solution? To build — and it’s not hard to see where the ambitions of this proposed city lie. “Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building,” he wrote in an essay published on the a16z website in the early weeks of lockdown during the pandemic. (Curiously, he was also one of the many Atherton residents who vigorously opposed a proposal to build dozens of multifamily homes in the area.)

An investor, entrepreneur and one-time GitHub executive, Nat Friedman made a jump into politics in 2017, cofounding the nonprofit California YIMBY, an acronym that stands for “yes in my backyard.” The group purports to fight “NIMBYism,” referring to the acronym for “not in my backyard,” by lobbying for statewide policies to ease the construction of housing developments. 

Donations to Friedman’s nonprofit have rolled in from around the tech industry, even as critics argued that the group’s policy goals would speed gentrification and do little to help poorer renters. As Silicon Valley companies boomed, scores of high-earning tech workers have driven up local rents and cut into the housing supply.

“There are a lot of people in tech who recognize this is a problem not only for tech but for everyone in the region,” Friedman told The Information in 2017, speaking for the nonprofit. “They want to help but don’t know what to do. We’ve provided people with a plausible strategy they can support.”

Friedman moved his family from San Francisco to Menlo Park in 2022, he posted on X, after a break-in and robbery at his Pacific Heights home.

Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison — whose brother and Stripe co-founder John also reportedly invested in Flannery — posed a question on his personal website: “How do we help more experimental cities get started?” 

“​​It seems that the returns to entrepreneurialism in cities remain high,” Collison continued, listing Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai as examples of massive and impactful urban planning. “Maybe there could be far more of them,” he wrote. “Beyond the direct benefits, city-sized areas enable regulatory experimentation that may, in turn, affect much larger regions.”

Last fall, on “The Ezra Klein Show” podcast, Collison complained about the modern tendency to shy away from ambitious infrastructure projects. As a counter-example, he brought up the Bay Area’s Foster City, designed housing-first in the 1960s by real estate magnate T. Jack Foster with what Collison called “founder energy.” 

“I haven’t met anybody pitching me on a similar city on the shores of the Bay in the last couple of years,” he said.