Mysterious Solano County buyers include tech billionaires

For years now, a mysterious company has been snapping up land in Solano County, including near Travis Air Force Base. Even as the company, known only as Flannery Associates, amassed 52,000 acres of land, becoming the largest single property owner in the county, it was never clear who exactly was making all these purchases or what they planned to do with the land. The acquisitions border the Air Force base on three sides, sparking concerns about national security.

On Friday, the New York Times seemed to have solved part of the mystery of who, exactly, owns all that land. According to the Times, several of the individual names behind the Flannery Associates shield are Bay Area mainstays, including Michael Moritz, the billionaire tech investor; Reid Hoffman, the venture capitalist who co-founded LinkedIn; and Marc Andreessen, of Andreessen Horowitz fame. The coalition also includes Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of the late Apple CEO, and is overall a “who’s who of Silicon Valley,” the Times wrote.

The Times’ reporting relied on three unnamed sources “who were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans,” although Brian Brokaw, a spokesperson for the investor group, did confirm in the story that Flannery Associates is a collective of “Californians who believe that Solano County’s and California’s best days are ahead.” 

The Times also reportedly viewed a pitch document Moritz had sent to a potential investor in 2017, in which he described building a walkable new city in an underdeveloped and inexpensive part of the Bay Area. SFGATE reported earlier this week that a survey had circulated to Solano County residents asking for their opinions on the potential development of “a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over ten thousand acres of new parks and open space.” 

The survey was the first indication of what Flannery Associates may be planning to do with the land. The only other clue came from a lawsuit that Flannery Associates filed in May, which accused area landowners of colluding to drive up prices after learning of the investment group’s interest in the properties. As SFGATE’s Katie Dowd reported earlier this month:

“Despite its land grab, Flannery Associates has never made public what it intends to do with 52,000 acres of Solano County — an empire that is nearly double the size of the city of San Francisco. In the suit, Flannery only details the ways in which it won’t alter the land: It claims it told landowners that they could keep ‘existing income streams from wind energy and natural gas storage,’ could ‘continue using these properties rent-free for decades,’ and would receive ‘significant grants from Flannery for charitable giving, to be used at the [landowners’] discretion to support local schools and other non-profits.’”

The group acknowledged spending at least $800 million on parcels in its May suit, although the Times reported that it was “unclear” how much each investor had contributed to the total. In a story published last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the group has now spent close to $1 billion on Solano County properties.