California Forever

California Forever, a tech billionaire-backed project to develop a new city on hundreds of acres of Bay Area farmland, is entering a critical phase. After buying nearly a billion dollars worth of land in Solano County, the project’s developers now need to convince at least 13,000 county residents to support a ballot initiative that would authorize the development of that land. If voted for in November, the project would finally be able to move ahead.The Fujifilm X100VI is the Most Fun I’ve Had With a Camera in YearsTo get…

The details of a group of Silicon Valley titans’ secretive land grab in Solano County, California are starting to come into focus, even as residents say a lot is still up in the air.VC giant Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs are among the tech giants who banded together to purchase over 60,000 acres of land about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. California Forever, as the group calls itself, revealed last year that it hopes to create a whole new city in the middle of the…

From the moment I heard about tech billionaires’ weird plans to create a bustling new city in the heart of California’s Solano County, I was preoccupied with one basic question: Who is actually going to run this thing? Why Bitcoin won’t reach $1,000,000Libertarian dreams of creating a new community from scratch are all well and good but, at the end of the day, you can’t operate a municipality of any real size without a team of boring, dysfunctional bureaucrats to decide what the local zoning laws are and how to spend the…

California Forever, the quixotic, billionaire-backed project to build a new city in the Bay Area, is chugging along. Despite the fact that locals seem to hate it, the Silicon Valley dreamers behind the project remain undeterred. The team planning the city released more details about their proposed development this week, including a map of what the hypothetical future city might eventually look like.Remake this Sci-Fi Film with Peter Capaldi!Project developers updated their website Wednesday to include new information…

California Forever, the quixotic, billionaire-backed effort to craft a new city out of $800 million in Bay Area farmland parcels, continues to struggle. The project, which is owned by an opaque parent company, Flannery Associates, and backed by a slew of Silicon Valley luminaries, envisions a utopian new community nestled in Solano county. Backers of the project have promised locals new jobs, economic growth, a vibrant, “walkable” community, and local infrastructure improvements, but, so far, opposition has been…