How Big Tech’s scheme for a California utopia is tearing apart a farming community

Kathy Threlfall and her husband moved 42 years ago to a 240-acre ranch in Solano County, California, that was originally owned by her great-grandparents. Now 75, she still lives in the 150-year-old house on the property. She stayed after her husband died, even after she retired from farming a few years ago. Her daughter got married at the ranch, under an arch that Threlfall’s grandmother added in the 1930s; her son, who lives in Los Angeles, comes to visit for weeks at a time.

“I have a grandson who is 5 years old, and this is his favorite place in the world,” Threlfall says. On the ranch, 60 miles northeast of San Francisco and nestled in a county that’s less than a thousand square miles, she says she feels a sense of communion with the past. “I’m with my uncle who I fed cows with,” she says. “I’m with my grandma who I gathered eggs with.”

So when a group of anonymous investors calling themselves Flannery Associates approached Threlfall about five years ago with an offer to buy the land, she said no. And when they came back last year offering $4.5 million, more than twice as much, she said no again. It was life-changing money, but “there was no way I was going to do business with an entity I didn’t know,” she says.

In late August, The New York Times revealed that Flannery Associates represented a group of Silicon Valley billionaires that includes VC giant Marc Andreessen, Stripe cofounders Patrick and John Collison, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs. Operating under the parent company California Forever, they’ve spent more than $800 million buying up over 50,000 acres in Solano County. Frustrated by the slow pace of housing development in existing cities, these Silicon Valley leviathans plan to create a new one from scratch over the coming decades. “We’re looking to build a middle-class community,” says California Forever founder and CEO Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader.