California farmers had what billionaires wanted
Tech executives’ vision: Pave ranches to solve urban housing crunch
When Jan Sramek walked into the American Legion post in Rio Vista for a town hall meeting last month, everyone in the room knew he was really just there to get yelled at.
For six years a mysterious company called Flannery Associates, which Sramek controlled, had upended the town of 10,000 by spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy every farm in the area. Flannery made multimillionaires out of some owners and sparked feuds among others. It sued a group of holdouts who had refused its above-market offers, on the grounds that they were colluding for more.
The company was Rio Vista’s main source of gossip, yet until a few weeks before the meeting no one in the room had heard of Sramek or knew what Flannery was up to.
The truth was Sramek wanted to build a city from the ground up, in an agricultural region whose defining feature was how little it had changed.
The idea would have been treated as a joke if it weren’t backed by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires including Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, an investor and co-founder of LinkedIn; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective and widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. They and others from the technology world had spent some $900 million on farmland in a demonstration of their dead seriousness about Sramek’s vision.
Rio Vista, part of Solano County, is technically within the San Francisco Bay Area. Sramek’s plan was billed as a salve for San Francisco’s urban housing problems. But paving over ranches to build a city of 400,000 wasn’t the sort of idea you’d expect a group of farmers to be enthused about. Flannery had become the largest landowner in the region, amassing an area twice the size of San Francisco.
Christine Mahoney, 63, whose great-grandfather established her family’s farm when Rutherford B. Hayes was president, said like it or not, Sramek was now her neighbor. Mahoney had refused several offers for her land, and Flannery’s lawsuit — an antitrust case in federal court — described her as a conspirator who was out to bilk his company.
But she had never met the man in person, so she came to say hello.
When Mahoney and her husband, Dan, 65, approached him, Sramek said, “Hi, Christine!” as if they had met several times before and he wasn’t currently suing her.
“I’d like to welcome you as our neighbor, but it’s kind of difficult,” Christine Mahoney said.
She talked about how much stress the lawsuit had put on her family.
Sramek nodded, as if she were talking about someone else, not him. Then he asked the couple to dinner. The Mahoneys agreed.
Last week, Sramek’s company officially filed a proposed ballot initiative that would ask voters to buy in. Specifically, the measure aims to amend a long-standing “orderly growth” ordinance that protects Solano County’s farms and open space by steering development to urban areas.
The initiative includes a long list of promises like new roads, money to invest in downtowns across the county and a $400 million fund to help Solano residents buy homes.
Sramek frames his proposal as part of an ideological project to revive Californians’ appetite for growth. If the state is serious about tackling its dire affordable housing problem, he argues, it has to expand its urban footprint with new cities.
The Mahoneys sold Flannery a few hundred acres early on. But as Flannery gobbled more of the land around them, the family stopped selling. After years of back and forth, Flannery’s entreaties made clear the Mahoneys had one property the group coveted above the others: Goose Haven Ranch. But Goose Haven was the one the family was most protective of.
Wednesday, Sramek returned to the American Legion post in Rio Vista. This time he had arrived as part of a kickoff event for the ballot initiative. Inside, slides of maps and renderings were presented to the press, and details about design were discussed.
The maps had a curious detail: On the edge of the proposed community’s downtown was Goose Haven Ranch.
The night before the meeting, the Mahoneys sold it. They got about $23 million.