Is an American Singapore going to be built in Northern California?, by Steve Sailer - The Unz Review
This is a pretty interesting project by tech zillionaires such as Marc Andreessen, Patrick Collison, and the Widow Jobs. From the New York Times news section:
The Silicon Valley Elite Who Want to Build a City From Scratch
A mysterious company has spent $800 million in an effort to buy thousands of acres of San Francisco Bay Area land. The people behind the deals are said to be a who’s who of the tech industry.
By Conor Dougherty and Erin Griffith
Aug. 25, 2023In 2017, Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist, sent a note to a potential investor about what he described as an unusual opportunity: a chance to invest in the creation of a new California city.
The site was in a corner of the San Francisco Bay Area where land was cheap.
Whether the proposed site is actually in the mild climate San Francisco Bay area or the severe climate Central Valley of California sounds like a key question that I don’t know the answer to.
Mr. Moritz and others had dreams of transforming tens of thousands of acres into a bustling metropolis that, according to the pitch, could generate thousands of jobs and be as walkable as Paris or the West Village in New York.
In this century, urban living came back in fashion, which is why much of the tech industry, which in the Intel era had concentrated in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, moved north in the Facebook era to San Francisco. But, San Francisco’s squalor, disorder, and political dysfunction has proven unsatisfying, to say, the least.
So, it’s natural for Bay Area business people familiar with Singapore to imagine building from scratch an American Singapore as clean and bum-free as Palo Alto, yet as dense as San Francisco.
This would probably appeal to Chinese immigrants, just as the old planned city of Irvine, CA in Orange County is 44 percent Asian.
He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. And it would all be a short distance from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. “Let me know if this tickles your fancy,” he said in the note, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.
Since then, a company called Flannery Associates has been buying large plots of land in a largely agricultural region 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The company, which has little information public about its operations, has committed more than $800 million to secure thousands of acres of farmland, court documents show. One parcel after another, Flannery made offers to every landowner for miles, paying several times the market rate, whether the land had been listed for sale or not. …
The land that Flannery has been purchasing is not zoned for residential use, and even in his 2017 pitch, Mr. Moritz acknowledged that rezoning could “clearly be challenging” — a nod to California’s notoriously difficult and litigious development process.
To pull off the project, the company will almost certainly have to use the state’s initiative system to get Solano County residents to vote on it.
This is pretty funny:
The purchases burst into public view this spring when lawyers for Flannery filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, accusing landowners of colluding to inflate prices.
We’re not colluding, we are a corporation and there is only one of us, so you are the ones who are colluding. The question all seems rather metaphysical.
A couple of NYT commenters offer some local insight:
John Mann
MarylandHaving grown up in the area, I know the reason it’s farmland, it’s hot in the summer and foggy, damp and cold in the winter and in the summer the wind howls from the SF Bay “gap” up into the Sacramento valley. If you go 10 miles north you enter “wine country” where the coastal range shelters the land from the onshore winds and the heat is tempered by gentle winds off the Pacific.
Maybe the summer wind is a good thing? (Except during fires, but there doesn’t seem to be all that much to burn nearby.)
Randy
CAThe area they are talking about is inland and more like Kansas than San Francisco. Flat, windy and boring. Ok, ok…. To be fair, there are a few differences: The area around Travis afb has higher crime than Kansas, higher home prices, way more traffic, and higher taxes. So, essentially, all of the downside of California with none of the benefits.
On the other hand, northern California has a lot of different microclimates, so it’s possible they’ve found some better than average spot.
Water seems like an obvious problem, but perhaps a dense city doesn’t need as much for lawns and the like as a suburb.
Water rights in California are endlessly complicated — for example, Palm Springs has a ridiculous number of golf courses in the low desert due to a law that says you can drill for all the water you want to pump up so long as you use it locally and don’t sell it to Los Angeles or San Diego. So there may be some local twist to water rights that makes this project more feasible than it sounds. Or maybe the zillionaires didn’t think about water before spending so much money?
Anyway, I shall follow the future progress of this idea with interest, although I doubt I’ll live long enough to see anybody move in. We are talking about California, after all.
It’s time for my August iSteve fundraiser.
I rely on the generosity of my readers to let me keep going rather than getting a real job.
I really like getting money, so thanks in advance.
Here are ten ways for you to help me carry on:
First : Most banks now allow fee-free money transfers via Zelle .
Zelle is really a good system: easy to use and the fees are nonexistent.
If you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay/Zelle . Just tell WF SurePay/Zelle to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrAT aol.com— replace the AT with the usual @). ( Non -tax deductible.) Please note, there is no 2.9% fee like with Paypal or Google Wallet, so this is good for large contributions.
Zelle contributions are not tax deductible.
Second : if you have a Chase bank account (or even other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay/Zelle ( FAQ ). Just tell Chase QuickPay/Zelle to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com— replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it’s StevenSailer with an n at the end of Steven. ( Non -tax deductible.) There is no 2.9% fee like with Paypal or Google Wallet, so this is also good for large contributions.
Third , Zelle might work with other banks too. Here’s a Zelle link for CitiBank . And Bank of America .
Fourth : You can use Paypal ( non -tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. Paypal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual. (Monthly is nice.)
Fifth : You can mail a non -tax deductible donation to:
Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617
Sixth : You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here .
Please don’t forget to click my name at the VDARE site so the money goes to me: first, click on “Earmark your donation,” then click on “Steve Sailer:”
This is not to say that you shouldn’t click on John’s fund too, but, please, make sure there’s a blue dot next to my name.
VDARE has been kiboshed from use of Paypal for being, I dunno, EVIL. But you can give via credit cards, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, check, money order, or stock.
Note: the VDARE site goes up and down on its own schedule, so if this link stops working, please let me know.
Seventh : send money via the Paypal-like Google Wallet to my Gmail address (that’s isteveslrATgmail .com — replace the AT with a @). ( Non -tax deductible.)
Eight : You can send me Bitcoin. Bitcoin payments are not tax deductible.
Here’s my Bitcoin address:
1EkuvRNR86uJzpopquxdnmF23iA3vzdDuc
Here’s the OCR
Please let me know if this works, ideally by sending me Bitcoin. Or let me know what else you’d like to send me.
If you’re sending to a crypto address that belongs to another Coinbase user who has opted into Instant sends in their privacy settings , you can send your funds instantly to them with no transaction fees. This transaction will not be sent on chain, and is similar to sending to an email address.
Learn more about sending and receiving crypto .
Send off-chain funds
Mobile
- Tap
at the bottom
- Tap Send
- Tap your selected asset and enter the amount of crypto you’d like to send
- Enter the Receiver’s crypto address or scan their crypto QR code to see if the address belongs to a Coinbase user
Computer
Sign into Coinbase.com
Click Send at the top right
Click your selected asset and enter the amount of crypto you’d like to send
Enter the Receiver’s crypto address or scan their crypto QR code to see if the address belongs to a Coinbase user
Obsolete: Below are links to two Coinbase pages of mine. But these don’t work anymore. I will try to fix them. This first is if you want to enter a U.S. dollar-denominated amount to pay me.
Pay With Bitcoin (denominated in U.S. Dollars)
This second is if you want to enter a Bitcoin-denominated amount. (Remember one Bitcoin is currently worth many U.S. dollars.)
Pay With Bitcoin (denominated in Bitcoins)
▲ ▼ Ninth : I added Square [which is now Block] as a fundraising medium, although I’m vague on how it works. If you want to use Square, send me an email telling me how much to send you an invoice for. Or, if you know an easier way for us to use Square, please let me know.
Tenth: Venmo : https://account.venmo.com/u/SteveSailer
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