TRASHFUTURE - PREVIEW: California For-Never ft. Shanti Singh

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

What happens when Venture Capitalists - a bunch of guys whose entire job is throwing money into companies they don't understand and expect to fail try and build a new city from scratch? What happens when those Venture Capitalists are building that city in order to win an online argument about zoning and land use? The answer (AI renderings, money spent, nothing built, no water issues planned for or considered) may not shock you! Bay Area tenant organiser Shanti Singh rejoins Riley, Hussein, and Alice, to explore what the hell is going on in Solano County. Get the full episode on Patreon! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here: https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

But yeah, there's this Ragtag team of venture capitalists, tech billionaires, philanthropists, etc. who have been essentially, well, actually, to go back a little bit, it's been a lot of folks in Slotto County, which is a county, I would say, it's kind of halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. You can call it the Bay Area, but it's really, really the northern extreme of Bay Area. It's getting close to Wine Country, Riley, just noting that for you if you want to visit. But it's noted. Yeah, it's on the highway to Sacramento. It's actually getting closer to Sacramento than it is to San Francisco proper. So that's a lot of county, this very agricultural sort of red basket, pretty chill area in general, not as economically prosperous as other parts of

the Bay Area, but definitely known as farmland. And there have been farmers who have been there for generations and generations. And a few years ago, a mysterious buyer called Flannery Associates started buying all of these farmers out of their land, sometimes bidding, I think up to four or five times what its market value was at the time. And it's only been recently revealed. And I forget if the New York Times broke the news or how it was, or they actually did

kind of leak it or unveil themselves. But it's actually this consortium of Silicon Valley folks who have been, who have spent now, I believe, $800 to $900 million, buying up a huge chunk of Solano County farmland, and they're now going to build a city called, well, I don't know if they're gonna call it California forever, but that's the name of the project.

So it was really a mystery, it was mystifying congressmen, apparently some of the Congressmen and state representatives have been saying that even sort of the military was a little bit concerned because there is a very important Travis Air Force Base in Solano County. So they were concerned maybe there was like a- County, can I just ask you a question quickly? Did they find out do you think about the Air Force base before they started spending the better part of a billion dollar So land around the Air Force base

You know, it's kind of hard to mistravise their first base But I mean I could I wouldn't put it past them. They maybe forgot and I'm sure they haven't forgotten about anything else such as for example Solano's own laws designed to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening or water. Yes, those are the two big things that they definitely forgot. What's the casual 9 tens of a billion dollars? But you can forget a couple of things, who are all human? Maybe we can get to the water later, because that's a whole other thing. But yes, Solano County basically,

and I want to researching this, I didn't actually know this until recently. It was, so they had a, I knew this. They had a ballot initiative, essentially they basically set a policy as a county, maybe like 23rd, or maybe actually even the 80s, to basically say there's like five cities in Solano County, you will pass most of them

if you're on the taking the I-80 from San Francisco to Sacramento or further east. And that they basically limited growth, like urban growth to those five cities. And basically, instead the rest of the land is going to be agricultural land. So in order to build a city, yes, they would have to overturn that via Citizens Initiative.

They made that decision a long time ago. What I did not know was that the guy who spearheaded that initiative in the first place was actually Robert McNamara's son. So I've got some detail about this actually, which is that in 1982, some San Francisco real estate guys rather than tech guys had kind of the exact same plan which was to establish a new city starting up five thousand residents plan from the beginning on agricultural land in salano yeah you build a less equitable society you build your own san francisco in

salano county yeah exact at the city just a little further from by the bay. It's a little bit more expensive and a lot more racist. Yes. So this guy Hiram Wu was going to build 2,000 solar powered homes just from the Daily Beast. He was in great reporting on this surrounded by an open space lace with walking and biking trails with school shopping and recreation facilities. Hold in your mind what he planned and how he's trying to sell it, because yeah, that's um...

Yeah. What a mancinita as well. Which is a lot better than California forever, but I think California forever is just kind of their stalking horse. I think that's what they've chosen to name the campaign to get people on side so that people will be less mad

when they finally unveil that they're calling it like Rand City or whatever. And, and, and, Gold Skulls. And and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and was able to like take and hold contested territory. So it was what happened was this this initiative that you mentioned earlier called the Orderly Growth Committee was then designed specifically to stop rich people from San Francisco building like utopian communities in Solano County. like utopian communities in Solano County. Yeah, pretty much. And I mean, I think I don't think it's a really good sign that they've pissed off everybody who lives there already. Yeah, their plan so far seems to be to walk up to people who own farms,

because most of this is to be on agricultural land. By the way, this land gonna be served with water and power, is it gonna be on the grid, or are they gonna build new roads? I'm gonna assume someone also sort that out, or they're just gonna let us do it. Their strategy so far has been to not tell anyone what they're doing, try to buy as much land as possible, and then when people don't sell them the land to sue them, and then drag them in front of a court on antitrust charges.

They're really doing this in the like most sinister manner possible, which is so funny, because like clearly they can't do it openly because they're not welcome. And so what they're, what they're resorting to doing is this kind of Daniel plane to you shit. But in service of like a slightly like nice place for them to live, they imagine. Oh, they won't be living in Solano. They'll stay living in San Francisco. Okay. Right.

Not even San Francisco, they'll be living in in Athens, you know, they'll still be down on the peninsula. I don't think, I don't think they're going anywhere, but they have I this is my back of the envelope math based off of things I saw in the news so could be wrong. But I believe they bought 8% of the land area of the whole county. Oh, right. Jesus. Yeah.

And the very funny thing is if this doesn't work, which I think is unlikely to, then what will happen is approximately 8% of the agricultural land in Solano, or 8% of the land in Solano County, most of which is agricultural, is going to basically just, we're going to have an experiment where what happens when you allow some of the land in a place to life-fallow for a few years, well people realize they can't do what they wanted to do with it. Yeah, I had a look on their very fancy website, and in their FAQs, one of the cues that they imagine that you will at the F A them is, like, does this mean that the agricultural land isn't going to like produce crops anymore?

And they're like, listen, yes, but like eventually and like a managed way. Yeah, well, it's the, they've bought it. It's going to stop production while they're waiting to build on it. They're not going to build on it and then they're probably going to sell it back for like what it's actually worth. Yeah, this is the most expensive way of not growing alpha ever devised. Like the US government in the 1960s could never dream up such a subsidy scheme. That's what I was that's what I was thinking about too. I mean, there's been plenty.

California is right with stories of, I mean, California as a state has really been built out of whole cloth in the last, I don't know, 150 years. Like none of this was here 150 years ago. You know, even the neighborhood I'm in, which is one of the older ones in San Francisco wasn't as barely here 150 years ago. So it's not like, you know,

obviously you have successful examples, like the Irvine company basically building the nightmare that is Orange County out of nowhere. But to your point, Riley, I don't, I just, I mean, I think what's baffling me is that, like, I keep wanting to find something more diabolical in this, and I'm sure we will, because what they're doing to the landowners is diabolical, but I just don't see this working, and I was

hoping to find, in thinking about this before this episode, some sort of, I don't know, some sort of clever thing that I didn't think of, and I just can't find one. I'm just like, I think they're just going to have to sell it back at five times less than what they bought it, which was market-free. So basically, it's like, that's the same thing as ever, right? If you're a landowner, you win the lottery. It's just these guys, the landowners here probably won the mega lottery.

Like they won the rare billion dollar jackpot. Except for the ones who don't wanna, I saw a news story where they were talking to one of the congressmen who are, a US congressman who represents the area and he was talking to a landowner and recounting, or farmer, recounting what this farmer was telling him, where the flannery person who ever was in charge of squeezing these folks like just couldn't comprehend the

idea that the farmer did not want to sell their land. Like it did it, like he spent 30 minutes explaining, I just don't want to sell it. And the guy on the other end simply just could not understand that. And the guy on the other end simply just could not understand that.