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Why tech billionaires are trying to create a new California city
Starting back in 2017, something mysterious was going on just 90 minutes northeast of San Francisco: a secretive group was purchasing farmland – lots of it, some 60,000 acres – in rural Solano County. Many feared it might be a Chinese government plot to try to set up shop near Travis Air Force Base.
But as The New York Times’ Conor Dougherty (who helped break the story) found out, the truth was even stranger than the rumors.
“Like a lot of people, I was chasing it and running into the usual locked doors,” said Dougherty. “I got a tip from someone that what was behind the locked doors was the richest people in the world quietly buying all this farmland: Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a venture capitalist; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective and Steve Jobs’ widow; Marc Andreessen of Andreesen Horowitz, venture capital firm, just really a who’s-who of Silicon Valley was involved in this.”
Something else surprising: Within hours of Dougherty’s big scoop, this mysterious company launched a website and publicly identified itself as California Forever, an ambitious plan to build a brand-new kind of city for as many as 400,000 residents.
California Forever
Jan Sramek, a 37-year-old Czech-born, former Goldman Sachs trader-turned-aspiring city-builder, is trying to convince the public that the project isn’t just an oasis for billionaires or some high-tech city of the future. His vision: turn all this farmland into a walkable city in the mold of Savannah, Philadelphia, or New York City’s West Village.
“Instead of taking all of these well-paying jobs that are being created in Northern California and sending them to Texas or Florida, let’s create a place where we can send them to Solano County,” he said.
California Forever/Sitelab Urban Studio
So, how could such a city remain a place that middle-class people could even afford? “By continuing to build for a long time,” said Sramek. “If we look at why places have become unaffordable, it’s because they’ve just stopped building.”
The project’s fate will ultimately be decided this November by the voters of Solano County, who have to decide whether or not to overturn a three-decades-old law restricting where new development can go. Sremek’s charm offensive have been met with, let’s just say, a healthy amount of skepticism by many locals.
“We’re gonna have total gridlock,” said one man at a public meeting about the proposal.
Locals Al Medvitz and Jeannie McCormack are two of the last holdouts here. Most of their neighbors have sold to California Forever (at far over market value), but they’ve turned down millions to keep farming the 3,700-acre ranch that has been in Jeannie’s family for more than a century. “Having developers come was always a fear [throughout] my whole childhood,” said McCormack, “because California was just changing so fast with development in farm areas.”
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Many of their neighbors who didn’t sell have been sued by California Forever, who has accused them of colluding to raise land prices in the area (a charge they deny).
“The housing is important, there’s no question about it,” said Medvitz. “But there are appropriate ways to do it.”
California Forever is sparing no expense to try to win over county residents, in what The New York Times’ Conor Dougherty says could be the most expensive political campaign in the history of Solano County.
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Burbank asked, “The idea that this tech money is being redirected to this very kind of brick-and-mortar thing as an investment is kind of weird to me. Is it just that there’s that much money to be made potentially?”
“Everyone thinks I’m crazy when I say this, but I just don’t think it’s principally about money,” said Dougherty. “I think that many of the people involved are extremely frustrated that the pace of change in the physical world has lagged so far behind the pace of change in the digital world.” He believes California Forever’s motivation is, “If we could redesign everything and not have to deal with all the inherited problems that cities come with, then that would make everything so much easier.”
California Forever still has plenty of hurdles to clear, some that may prove impossible.
But Sramek insists this idea of designing and building a relatively-affordable walkable city within the nation’s most unaffordable and car-centric state is in fact possible. He says his company has the know-how, the patience, and (critically) the deep pockets to make it a reality.
“To me, success is that, in 10 or 15 years, Solano County is this incredible economic success story that people all over America are looking at and saying, can we replicate that here?” Sramek said.
And does he see himself living there? “Yeah, I’ll be moving in the first house!” he replied.
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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Malaysia agrees to launch new search for MH370 plane, which vanished a decade ago with 239 people on board
Malaysia announced on Friday it has agreed to launch a new search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared 10 years ago in one of aviation’s greatest enduring mysteries.
The Boeing 777 carrying 239 people disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Despite the largest search in aviation history, the plane has never been found. Malaysia’s prime minister said 17 days after the plane disappeared that, based on the satellite data, his government had concluded that the plane crashed down in a remote corner of the Indian Ocean, and that there were no survivors.
Transport Minister Anthony Loke said Malaysia had agreed to a new search operation by maritime exploration firm Ocean Infinity, which also carried out an unsuccessful hunt in 2018.
The company’s first efforts followed a massive Australia-led search for the aircraft that lasted three years before it was suspended in January 2017.
Loke said a new 5,800 square mile area of the southern Indian Ocean would be scoured by Ocean Infinity, which is based in the United Kingdom and United States.
“The new search area proposed by Ocean Infinity is based on the latest information and data analysis conducted by experts and researchers,” Loke said.
“The proposal for a search operation by Ocean Infinity is a solid one and deserves to be considered,” he told reporters.
The government said it agreed to Ocean Infinity’s proposal “in principle” on December 13, with the transport ministry expected to finalize terms by early 2025.
The new search will resume “as soon as the contract is finalized and signed by both parties”, Loke said.
“They have informed us that the ideal time for the search in the designated waters is between January and April. We are working to finalise the agreement as quickly as possible,” he added.
“I truly hope there will be an end to the loss of MH370. May all questions be answered,” Malaysian Rosila Abu Samah, 60, the stepmother of one of the passengers, told AFP.
Supian Ahmad/NurPhoto/Getty
Malaysian Shim Kok Chau, 49, whose wife was a flight attendant on the ill-fated flight, said he had come to accept her fate but hopes to know what happened to the plane, “why it happened and who did it.”
Among the other victims was a celebrated group of 24 Chinese calligraphy artists coming from an exhibition of their work. Two young Iranian men on the plane, 18-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad and 29-year-old Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, were traveling on stolen passports to seek better lives in Europe.
Two of the U.S. citizens on the plane were young children, Nicole Meng, 4, and 2-year-old Yan Zhang.
Philip Wood was the only American adult on the flight. The IBM executive had been living in Beijing and was planning to relocate to the Malaysian capital with his girlfriend, Sarah Bajc.
“No find, no fee”
The new search will be on the same “no find, no fee” principle as Ocean Infinity’s previous search, with the government only paying out if they find the aircraft.
The contract is for 18 months and Malaysia will pay $70 million to the company if the plane is found, Loke said.
He said the decision to agree to a fresh search “reflects the Malaysian government’s commitment to continuing the search operation and providing closure to the families of the MH370 victims.”
The original Australia-led search covered 120,000 square kilometers in the Indian Ocean but found hardly any trace of the plane, with only some pieces of debris picked up.
In July 2015, an airplane fragment later confirmed to be a flaperon from MH370 was found washed ashore on the western Indian Ocean island of Reunion. It was the first hard evidence that the plane had gone down in the area. More debris was later found washed up on the coast of eastern Africa.
YANNICK PITOU/AFP/Getty Images
The plane’s disappearance has long been the subject of theories — including that veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah had gone rogue.
A final report into the tragedy released in 2018 pointed to failings by air traffic control and said the course of the plane was changed manually.
Asked if he was confident the plane will be found during the new search, Loke said: “At this point, no one can provide guarantees.
“It has been over 10 years, and it would be unfair to expect a concrete commitment. However, under the terms and conditions, any discovery must be credible. It cannot just be a few fragments; there are specific criteria outlined in the contract.”
A Utah mother who police believe was shot and killed by her husband along with three of their children was a refugee who fled violence in Myanmar and dreamed of thriving with her family in the U.S., relatives said Thursday.
Police believe the husband killed his family before shooting himself, and a teenage son was badly wounded.
The bodies of Bu Meh, 38, along with her daughters Kristina Ree, 8, and Nyay Meh, 2, and son Boe Reh, 11, were found in their home in West Valley City, a Salt Lake City suburb, on Tuesday. A handgun was found under the father Dae Reh, 42, leading police to believe this was a murder-suicide, but no evidence of a motive has been released.
One child, 17-year-old Sha Reh, survived being shot in the head and is hospitalized with a severe brain injury, police said.
Bu Meh, a member of Myanmar’s Karenni ethnic minority, fled what her relatives described as ethnic cleansing in the Southeast Asian nation about 10 years ago. She and her small family lived for a time in a refugee camp in Thailand, then came to the United States “with little more than the clothing on their backs,” the family said in a statement.
She taught herself English, learned new skills and worked hard to support her growing family, achieving a way of life “far beyond the nightmare of her former country or the refugee camp,” the family said.
“For reasons that we cannot comprehend, her husband robbed her and their children of that security and their very lives,” her family said.
Police believe the shooting happened over the weekend.
Police initially went to the home Monday night after a relative asked them to check on the family but did not find any sign of an emergency that would allow them to enter the home. The relative went to the home Tuesday, saw Sha Reh wounded in the garage and called police, who found the bodies inside the home.
In their statement, relatives called Sha Reh their hero and said he faces a “long and complex road to recovery.” An online fundraiser is collecting donations to pay for his care and to help him go to college.
“After moving into their own home and finally enjoying a level of prosperity far beyond the nightmare of their former country or the refugee camp in Thailand in which they lived for a season, and for reasons that we cannot comprehend,” the family wrote, “her husband robbed her and their children of that security and their very lives.”
Neighbors hadn’t reported any gunshots in the area over the weekend, police spokesperson Roxeanne Vainuku said at a news conference Wednesday. The family had no previous reports of domestic violence or other disturbances.
One neighbor spoke to CBS affiliate KUTV about the shock they felt.
“How can a father shoot his children?” neighbor Mike Webster told the station. “I just can’t grasp for that concept at all. I can just see that poor little two-year-old looking at her daddy.”
This Utah case is the 38th mass killing in the United States this year. At least 165 people have died this year in U.S. mass killings, which are defined by the FBI as cases in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer.
Mark Barden, whose child was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, urged Utah lawmakers to pass Red Flag laws after the incident in Utah, KUTV reported.
“When it is recognized that an individual is in crisis, measures to safely and temporarily remove firearms from their possession are proven to save lives,” Barden said.
A journalists’ association says two journalists working for Kurdish media outlets were killed in northern Syria while covering fighting between Turkish-backed fighters and Syrian Kurdish militia.
The Turkey-based Dicle-Firat Journalists Association said Friday that Nazim Dastan and Cihan Bilgin were killed Thursday when their vehicle was reportedly targeted by a Turkish drone on a road near the Tishrin Dam.
Tishrin Dam, located some 56 miles east of Aleppo, has been the scene of clashes between the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, SDF, and the Turkey-backed opposition forces.
There was no immediate comment from Turkish officials.
Bianet, a news website dedicated to human rights issues, said Bilgin was a reporter for the Kurdish Hawar News Agency, while Dastan worked as a freelance journalist for the Firat News Agency, which is associated with the militant group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Turkey considers the SDF a terrorist organization because its main component is a group aligned to the PKK.
The group has been engaged in an armed struggle against the Turkish state since the 1980s in pursuit of its objective of securing autonomy for Kurds in the country.