Cows graze on a parcel of land that was recently purchased on Aug. 29, near Rio Vista, Calif. Silicon Valley investors Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon are backing a company called Flannery Associates that has been buying large parcels of land adjacent to Travis Air Force base approximately 60 miles northeast of San Francisco.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Revelations that a group of Silicon Valley investors plans to build a utopian community from scratch in farmland north of San Francisco has generated renewed interest in the promise of an elite, preprogrammed environment shaped by techies’ view of what constitutes a harmonious society.
If you think you’ve seen this movie before, you’re right. While the concept of creating an ideal society is as old as humankind itself, and for most of us is fun dinner conversation, it has become something of a cottage industry for modern billionaires. And these efforts have struggled to turn vision into reality.
Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and several other corporate mastodons have floated plans for their own versions of Nirvana on Earth – and in Mr. Musk’s case, on Mars. So far, however, these efforts have been as much ego plays to see who’s the most visionary among visionaries as they are reality.
The latest effort comes from Flannery Associates, which is led by former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Stramek and includes Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, as well as Laurene Powel Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow. The New York Times revealed last week that the group has spent about US$800-million to buy 22,000 hectares in rural Solano County – about the area of Halifax, Victoria or London, Ont. – with a dream of building a city with tens of thousands of homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million trees, and more than 10,000 acres of parks and open space.
Like other utopia projects, Flannery’s vision could be seen as a glass-half-full example of how business can help shape the future. Or it may simply be an indictment of the sad state of U.S. cities such as San Francisco, where crime, homelessness, failing infrastructure and an exodus of companies have made life difficult and commercial prospects bleak. It is probably a bit of both.
While the idea of company cities dates back to the Industrial Revolution, and has been a staple of industries such as mining and timber, the modern track record for this sort of social engineering is not good.
Perhaps the most spectacular Roman candle has been Belmont, Ariz. – Mr. Gates’s planned smart city outside Phoenix. In 2017, he invested about US$80-million for land for a monument to tech dominance, with all the networking bells and whistles and autonomous cars.
As environmentally conscious as the plan appeared, the idea of adding 200,000 new residents to the nearby Sedona Desert did not sit well with locals, who worried the area’s already limited water supply would be overtaxed by the project. There has been little news about Belmont since.
On Earth, Mr. Musk has bought parcels of land in Texas to create two new full-service communities – Snailbrook and Starbase – to house employees of the Boring Company and SpaceX. As for his Mars colony, he says it will be a chance to “rethink society.”
Mr. Thiel, the venture capitalist behind PayPal, unveiled plans in 2008 for a seastead – a politically independent floating island city – in French Polynesia. Talks with the government stalled in 2018, and the project foundered.
Beyond infrastructure, Flannery will need to define the social aspects of its utopia, mindful that one person’s ideal may be another’s nightmare. Mr. Musk, for example, has suggested access to his utopia might be granted by application, a likely trigger for myriad legal and social issues.
There’s a cautionary tale here in the post-Second World War Levittown communities built in several states to accommodate returning veterans and their families. The houses were cheap and could be built in a day. The towns had parks, pools and recreation centres. The developments boomed.
But the developer, William Levitt, refused to sell to non-white buyers. A Black family who bought a resale property in a Pennsylvania Levittown in 1957 were scorned and attacked. The issue attracted Dr. Martin Luther King, who fought to change home ownership legislation.
Considering the hurdles Flannery needs to clear, and the spotty history of similar prior dream projects, there is another way to make a difference.
Some billionaires are trying to fix what’s already here, rather than run for the hills, the oceans or outer space. Kevin Plank, the founder of Under Armour, has committed US$5.5-billion to revitalize Baltimore, where his company is based. Dan Gilbert, co-founder of Rocket Mortgage, has pledged $US500-million to do the same for his company’s hometown of Detroit.
Sure, they’ll get tax breaks, but they won’t get the ego boost of having their names on the founders’ plaque of a new city. Still, their efforts have a better chance of helping a broader spectrum of people, not just a chosen few.