ech Leaders Emerge Behind Plan to Build New City Near California Air Base
Group has spent nearly $1 billion to buy thousands of acres northeast of San Francisco
A group of high-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors emerged Friday as backers of a group that plans to build a new city in Northern California, after its purchases of land around an Air Force base had raised national-security concerns among U.S. officials.
Flannery Associates said Friday it planned to construct a new housing development in the area. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that it has spent nearly $1 billion over five years becoming the largest landowner in Solano County, northeast of San Francisco.
“We are proud to partner on a project that aims to deliver good-paying jobs, affordable housing, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, open space and a healthy environment to residents of Solano County,” Brian Brokaw, a spokesman for the group, said in a statement. “We are excited to start working with residents and elected officials, as well as with Travis Air Force Base, on making that happen.”
The group’s investors include a high-wattage list of technology entrepreneurs and investors, according to a person familiar with the group. They include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; former Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz; and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, who are general partners at Andreessen Horowitz.
Other investors include Patrick Collison and John Collison, co-founders of Stripe, a payments processor to internet companies; Laurene Powell Jobs, a philanthropist and the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs; and Nat Friedman, the former chief executive officer of GitHub.
The project was spearheaded by Jan Sramek, according to people familiar with the group. Sramek, a 36-year-old former trader at Goldman Sachs, had been considered a rising star in the financial world. After leaving Goldman in 2011, he founded two startups before doing advisory work, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The revelation that Flannery’s backers include many well-known American tech titans and the group’s first public comments on how it plans to develop the land it has acquired provide some answers to the residents, local and federal officials, and the region’s congressional delegation. The questions surrounding Flannery’s purchases had fueled concerns of foreign ownership and prompted federal probes, the Journal has reported.
The Air Force has been investigating the identity of Flannery’s backers for months, and Reps. John Garamendi and Mike Thompson, Democrats who represent the area, called for a national-security panel known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. to investigate the land deals.
The lawmakers said Friday that Flannery representatives had requested meetings for next week.
People in the area this past week received anonymous text surveys seeking their opinion on the creation of a city with “tens of thousands of new homes,” along with a large solar energy farm, orchards and open space, according to screenshots viewed by the Journal.
Officials have said the survey was most likely commissioned by Flannery. A spokesman for Flannery declined to say if the firm was behind the poll.
Garamendi said in an interview Friday that he still had many questions about Flannery and what its plans would mean for Travis Air Force Base. “There’s just a whole host of questions about their megacity,” he said. “What are you guys doing with Travis? What are your intentions here?”
Most of the land owned by Flannery is currently zoned for agricultural use, and building a housing development there would require voter approval, among other possible hurdles, according to local residents and officials.
On Friday, Sramek updated his LinkedIn page to include his residence as Fairfield, Calif.—the Solano County seat—and with a new profile image illustrating housing construction. He added to his bio: “California forever.”
A representative for Greylock, where Hoffman is a partner, said she couldn’t comment on his personal investments. Moritz didn’t respond to a request for comment. A representative for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
A spokesman for Stripe declined to comment on whether the company’s co-founders had invested in Flannery. Friedman declined to comment. A representative for Jobs didn’t immediately return an inquiry seeking comment. The names of investors were reported earlier by the New York Times.
Flannery sued dozens of landowners in a federal price-fixing lawsuit in May, alleging that they had colluded to drive up real-estate prices. It told the court that it was a wholly owned subsidiary of Flannery Holdings, a limited liability company registered in Delaware. LLCs registered in Delaware don’t have to publicly disclose the identity of their owners. Lawyers for the landowners rejected these allegations in court documents, but didn’t return requests for comment.
“Flannery Associates has developed a very bad reputation in Solano County through their total secrecy and mistreatment of generational family farmers,” Garamendi said in a statement.
Questions surrounding Flannery’s identity raised alarms among some of those who sold land to the group, including the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. SMUD provides power in and around the state capital and sold more than 6,100 acres to Flannery in March.
Flannery paid $45 million for the land and gave an additional $5 million donation to a “sustainable communities” fund that helps low-income residents, according to emails obtained by the Journal under a public-records request.