Billionaires' Secret Takeover of Solano County: Exposing Big Profits

Billionaires are trying to buy Solano County to create a large city.Photo byPhoto Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

In 2017 the residents of Solano County in the San Francisco Bay area started to get suspicious of real estate purchases that seemed to be extremely secretive in Fairfield, California. Rumors began to swirl saying that wealthy investors were slowly taking over the area rich with free-standing farmland. No one came forward to confirm it though.

The worry has always been there in the last 20 years for Solano County residents. A place with several beautiful farms and free land was always wanted by the ultra-rich. With many Silicon Valley workers moving to Solano County due to the lower housing prices, and beautiful areas, many felt it was just a matter of time before they started eyeing a takeover of the area.

What Was Happening:

In several articles posted starting last year, The New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty helped break the story and found out the truth and it was exactly what was feared. "I got a tip from someone that what was behind the locked doors was the richest people in the world quietly buying all of 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 Andreessen Horowitz, venture capital firm, just really a who's-who of Silicon Valley was involved in this."

In something out of a movie, hours after Dougherty's article was released exposing the company and its owners, a website announcing “California Forever” went up on the internet. It talked about building their utopian city of 400,000 people from scratch.

For the last 7-8 years, gradually the farmland was bought for far above the fair market value. People were slowly selling out making huge profits. Owners of the company say they want to make it into a utopia in the image of Philadelphia or New York. They were asked how is this city going to be for the middle class and their answer was we could keep housing affordable by constantly building new housing. A puzzling idea that doesn't make sense. Has anyone ever seen a cheap new house in California?

Technology companies that lived in Silicon Valley and San Francisco are gone, and the life has been taken out of both places. The areas have lost many of their large tech companies and look much different. The once high-priced buildings and apartments that housed tech workers in both areas are now having trouble filling their vacancies and even traffic is less. The housing and job booms are long gone and now the areas that went all in with them are left with the by-product of it.

https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/24/how-much-big-tech-pulled-back-in-san-francisco/

It's also been noted by Conor Dougherty that California Forever is suing people for not selling out to them. Some of the people have had their families farm the land for over 100 years.

Another thing that is being seen is a massive public relations campaign that is sparing no expense in getting residents to buy into the idea. Outside stores, hired workers are passing out handouts and sharing the message of just how magical California Fever would be and how it would make it a great place to live. Many aren't buying it though, and feel they are just looking for huge profits from an area they think they can overcome.

Many residents over the years have feared that people would want to come into Solano County and it seems that it's been happening for the last 7-8 years one property at a time. And most don't seem very happy about it.