[HN] Silicon Valley elites revealed as buyers of $800M of land to build utopian city

Note that their idea of utopia is everyone else's idea of dystopia.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The group Flannery Associates – backed by a cohort of Silicon Valley investors – has quietly purchased $800m worth of agricultural and empty land, the New York Times has reported.

Their goal is to build a utopian new town that will offer its thousands of residents reliable public transportation and urban living, all of which would operate using clean energy.

The project was spearheaded by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former trader for the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, and is backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors including Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linkedin; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the philanthropic group Emerson Collective and wife of Steve Jobs; Marc Andreessen, an investor and software developer; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payment processor Stripe; and the entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, the Times reported.

Flannery has purchased land from farmers for several times more than the market value and become the biggest landowners in Solano county, an area 60 miles north-west of San Francisco.

It has also been sending out opinion polls to local residents to gauge their feelings on an initiative that could appear on Solano county voter’s ballots, according to the newspaper SF Gate.

The poll also asks if residents would support the project if it was placed in an area with “bad soil that only contributes 5% of the county’s agricultural production,” according to a Facebook post from Catherine Moy, the mayor of Fairfield, the closest city to Flannery’s purchases.

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