Mystery company has methodically spent $1B to purchase all the land surround Travis AFB

[joosoon]

Originally Posted by 2sleepy

And as far as calling the plaintiff's claims "accurate information", maybe you should give it some time and wait for the defendants response, dontcha think?

I said "actual information", as in, reading the complaint rather than relying wholly on media reporting which tells very little of the details.


I'll ask this again: Why didn't Flannery sue the other 140 landowners they dealt with? / What made the handful of plaintiffs they did sue different from the others?. I doubt the case would've gotten very far if they just swung a big stick around looking for targets. There's some documented impropriety in the complaint and as they point out, it's a textbook example of price fixing. They're obviously not dummies and wouldn't have just filed a frivolous case for the heck of it.


But you're right. The courts will decide. If I was juror and this was presented to me, I'd be inclined to see it for what it is.

[joosoon]

Originally Posted by HereOnMars

I think this whole venture may have been more embraced or accepted or whatever word a person wants to use, if they had been more open about it. Instead, rumors started asking who the mysterious buyers were and no one knew anything except the people who sold their land, the investment group and a handful of businesses who processed the sales.

They explain this in their documents:


We knew that to build a complete, sustainable community, we would need to assemble a large holding. The only way to avoid creating a rush of reckless short-term land speculation was to not share our specific plans until we finished acquiring the properties. We are now excited to move on to the real work of building a thoughtful and consensus-minded plan for eastern Solano.


That behavior isn't unusual for big developers.
The irony is, the plaintiffs in that suit banded together and tried to illegally drive up an artificial price floor for a few of the properties Flannery was looking to buy. In other words, some of the sellers themselves engaged in reckless (and illegal) short-term speculation.

[JGC97]

Originally Posted by joosoon

That behavior isn't unusual for big developers.
The irony is, the plaintiffs in that suit banded together and tried to illegally drive up an artificial price floor for a few of the properties Flannery was looking to buy. In other words, some of the sellers themselves engaged in reckless (and illegal) short-term speculation.

Maybe so. I guess I'm now conditioned to believe the worst in people. I question their "good intentions" not just once in a while but all the time. Not sure how it happened. I wasn't always this way. Maybe too much time on social media.

[Vision67]

Silicon Valley billionaires’ Solano County utopia plan, ballot initiative revealed

Congressman worries company could sell up and run

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2024/01...weasn2tivpai2t

"Hundreds of thousands of residents. Thousands of well-paid jobs. Hundreds of millions of dollars in support for home purchases and low-income housing. Tens of millions of dollars in grants for education and training. Offices. Factories. Roads. Schools. Transit. Parks.

These are the promises from California Forever, the controversial company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires planning to build a new city from the ground up in Solano County. On Wednesday, the company revealed new details about the for-profit development and a proposed November ballot initiative to change the county’s general plan and zoning, which the project would require.

“Our proposal is for a walkable, medium-density, mixed-use community on 18,000 acres in eastern Solano County,” the company’s planning chief, Gabriel Metcalf, said at a news conference in Rio Vista near massive swaths of land the group has bought for the project. Metcalf is a former CEO at Bay Area civic-planning non-profit SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association."

[sav858]

Yet still no mention of how people will get in and out of that absurdly placed new city.

[JGC97]

This story's back in the news. The group held a meeting on Wednesday and hoping to get this initiative on the ballot for voters. It does seem as though that there's still a lot of skepticism among residents. Could be a long term battle for the tech titans before their dream California Forever city materializes.

Thus far, the project has been greeted with a mix of skepticism and staunch opposition by everyone from existing ranchers to environmentalists and elected officials.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/...y-18611011.php

[2sleepy]

Originally Posted by sav858

Yet still no mention of how people will get in and out of that absurdly placed new city.

I don't think they want you to focus on that. If they are closer to Suisun they will take 12 to 80, if they are closer to Rio Vista and want to go to Contra Costa County they will probably take the Antioch bridge with a $7 fare. The area sucks and it is so windy. I can't help but think that there is some other motive in this plan.

[sav858]

Originally Posted by 2sleepy

I don't think they want you to focus on that. If they are closer to Suisun they will take 12 to 80, if they are closer to Rio Vista and want to go to Contra Costa County they will probably take the Antioch bridge with a $7 fare. The area sucks and it is so windy. I can't help but think that there is some other motive in this plan.

My point was there is absolutely no way any of those roads could handle the traffic from a development that size. They would need to turn all of them into multi-lane freeways and build an entirely new bridge to Antioch. And even if they did then what? 4 is miserable, 680 would need to be widened too. It's impossible to widen 80 through Vallejo. I don't get it either. Perhaps they chose the area simply because of the water rights and actually do want to build a city there.

[Vision67]

The Farmers Had What the Billionaires Wanted

In Solano County, Calif., a who’s who of tech money is trying to build a city from the ground up. But some of the locals whose families have been there for generations don’t want to sell the land.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/b...smid=url-share

"For six years a mysterious company called Flannery Associates, which Mr. Sramek controlled, had upended the town of 10,000 by spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy every farm in the area. Flannery made multimillionaires out of some owners and sparked feuds among others. It sued a group of holdouts who had refused its above-market offers, on the grounds that they were colluding for more.

The company was Rio Vista’s main source of gossip, yet until a few weeks before the meeting no one in the room had heard of Mr. Sramek or knew what Flannery was up to. Residents worried it could be a front for foreign spies looking to surveil a nearby Air Force base. One theory held the company was acquiring land for a new Disneyland.

Now the truth was standing in front of them. And somehow it was weirder than the rumors.

The truth was that Mr. Sramek wanted to build a city from the ground up, in an agricultural region whose defining feature was how little it had changed. The idea would have been treated as a joke if it weren’t backed by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who included Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, the investor and co-founder of LinkedIn; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective and the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. They and others from the technology"