Remember when a bunch of tech bros bought up thousands of acres in rural California with the idea of creating a modern, "Galt's Gulch," where it would just be them and the hired help?
Not gonna happen. It has permanently been put on hold, because it will actually cost the surrounding county millions and threaten the water supply.
I'm sure that the tech billionaires are shocked. Normally, they get subsidies for this sort of crap, but it appears that the government in Solano County is more sensible than I would have anticipated:
Days after a Solano County report slammed a plan backed by Silicon Valley billionaires to build a utopian new city from scratch near Fairfield, the company behind the “California Forever” project has scrapped the ballot initiative it was to put to county voters in November.
The report released late last week by Solano County said the proposed new city of 50,000 — possibly up to 400,000 decades from now — would likely cost the county billions of dollars and create substantial annual financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production, damaging climate-change resilience and potentially threatening local water supplies. The project, according to the report, “may not be financially feasible.”
It also did not help that the organizers of this concept sued farmers who refused to sell out, alleging collusion, for having the temerity of not giving the Silly Con Valley bros what they wanted.
………
County supervisors on Tuesday were set to consider the report, then vote on whether to approve California Forever’s contentious plan to rezone 17,500 acres of farmland for the city or let voters decide in November.
Instead, California Forever, led by CEO Jan Sramek, will withdraw the ballot measure — approved last month for the November election — and seek approval to amend the county’s general plan and zoning through typical county processes, California Forever said in a website update Monday morning.………
California Forever, which spent more than $800 million buying more than 60,000 acres of mostly agricultural land near Fairfield, earlier last week issued its own study claiming the new city would create billions of dollars in economic activity and tens of thousands of jobs for the county. Marketing materials have depicted utopian scenes of a Mediterranean-style community, with walkable neighborhoods and a mix of businesses from retail shops to technology company offices.
The proposal is funded by billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs. It’s been embroiled in controversy since its real estate arm, Flannery Associates, sued holdout landowners for $510 million, claiming they conspired out of “endless greed” to inflate prices.
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The county’s report, issued July 18, said infrastructure such as roads for the project and public facilities like schools and parks, plus related expenses, would cost an estimated $6.4 billion for the first phase of development and nearly $50 billion to complete the new city.
The report said costs to the county and the local fire-protection district would outstrip revenues, leading to millions of dollars in deficits every year. The now-withdrawn California initiative gave no clear indication of where the money would come from.
Spoiler, the money would come from the ordinary tax payers, you know the peons who the titans of bullsh%$ expect to support them, because they managed to scam their way into wealth.
They sound an awful lot like sports team owners promising that the subsidies would pay for themselves.
Actually, this sounds EXACTLY like sports team owners promising that the subsidies would pay for themselves.
BTW, just in case you are wondering, the tech bros were also selling this as a way to avoid the inconvenience of democracy:
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Yet there’s potentially a more sinister angle. California Forever aligns suspiciously with a cultish dystopian movement to build so-called “network states”—private zones where tech zillionaires can abandon democratic society to live under the rule of their own private micro governments. The secret plot to assemble vast swaths of land and build a new city fits a pattern of wealthy Silicon Valley types attempting to construct similar enclaves around the globe. San Francisco billionaire Michael Moritz, a driving force behind California Forever, appeared to hint at the idea in his pitch to potential investors back in 2017.
“He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought,” reported The New York Times, which first revealed the billionaires’ plan.
Cue the blond kid singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in a brown shirt.
We really need to start enforcing existing laws against these folks. They are a menace to society.
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