Mysterious new California city backed by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, report says

Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs dealer, has been quietly working to construct an city utopia in California nestled close to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. But just some years after the mysterious venture acquired underway, it’s going through rising scrutiny from native officers and residents.

According to a report from The New York Times on Friday, Sramek is the brains behind an organization known as Flannery Associates, which has spent greater than $800 million scooping up hundreds of acres of farmland. According to the report, the agency desires to make use of the land to rethink authorities and the way buildings are constructed, though there are few different particulars for the plan. A separate report from Bloomberg stated the plans name for a “mega-city.”

The firm has attracted a few of the largest buyers in tech, together with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; Marc Andreessen, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz; and billionaire enterprise capitalist Michael Moritz, the report stated.

It will not be instantly clear how a lot these backers invested.

Until just lately, Flannery Associates has been shrouded in thriller. Local residents have been unnerved by the corporate because it purchased up increasingly more land, in keeping with the report. A Democratic consultant in a neighboring area in California advised the Times he had been attempting to establish the corporate for years.

Flannery Associates solely turned identified to the official after the corporate reached out to arrange a gathering, which was its first try to talk with native representatives. But whilst the corporate eases into the general public eye, it faces an uphill battle because it contends with lawsuits from locals and thorny rules akin to California’s strict zoning legal guidelines.

As of now, it’s unclear if town will ever make it previous the drafting board.

Read extra at The New York Times.