Astral Codex Ten

Flannery Associates

5 min read

Flannery Associates

Article

Flannery Associates is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 04, 2023 and September 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “The company involved (Flannery Associates aka California Forever)”; “Since Flannery Associates started buying land six years ago”. It most often appears alongside Beyabu, California Forever, Duna Residences.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 04, 2023
  • Last seen: September 11, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

23: California Dreamin'
September 04, 2023 · Original source
Source: www.californiaforever.com The company involved (Flannery Associates aka California Forever) has been in stealth mode for several years, trying to buy land quietly without revealing how rich and desperate they are to anyone in a position to raise prices. Now they’ve released a website with utopian Norman-Rockwell-esque pictures, lots of talk about creating jobs and building better lives, and few specifics. My in-laws live just north of the area involved. I drive through there regularly. It’s hot, dry, and without a lot going on. There are a few ~100,000 person towns scattered across the county, usually a small core of shops surrounded by suburbs and strip malls. The culture and politics are about 30% of the way along the spectrum from Bay Area Democrats to Central Valley Republicans. Humans outnumber cows, but the cows make a strong showing. Source: www.californiaforever.com Even for these tech tycoons, $800 million is a lot of money. So what’s the business plan? In one sense, nothing could be simpler. Buy lots of farmland cheap. Build housing for the housing-starved California masses. Once it’s a respectable-sized town, sell dear. If you can actually create a Norman Rockwell utopia, great. But Californians will also pay $750 per square foot for somewhere that just has a little less trash and feces than usual. So the bar is low. Some quick numbers: Flannery has bought about 78 square miles of land, but suppose they can only develop half of it for legal and environmental reasons. This would still make them the same size as the nearby towns of Vacaville (30 sqm) and Fairfield (40 sqm). Land value in Vacaville is about $75K per acre. So if they developed their land to the same level as Vacaville, it would be worth $4 billion. But in fact, they’re talking a lot about “walkable, liveable, sustainable communities”, all of which are code words for “dense”. If their town actually looks like the pictures (note the connected row houses with tiny yards) it could easily be $10 billion plus. That’s not even counting any benefit from the community actually being “utopian”.1 In another sense, this is an extremely risky investment with a long and unclear path to profitability. You can make a killing selling housing in California because there’s constricted supply. There’s constricted supply for legal reasons. Building your own town routes around some, but not all, of the legal problems. And it causes new legal problems of its own. Solano County has a so-called “Orderly Growth Measure” saying that new building should happen in existing cities and not on empty land. In order to start building at all, Flannery has to win a referendum granting an exemption. But they already have a powerful coalition of local enemies: Three months ago, Flannery sued a group of local farmers who wouldn’t sell to them, accusing them of “conspiring to inflate the value of the land”. This isn’t implausible - a known risk of trying to buy lots of contiguous land without eminent domain powers is that locals realize you’re desperate and conspire to raise prices. But it’s also not implausible that billionaires trying to get farmers to sell their land are playing legal hardball. In any case, local officials and farming activist groups took the farmers’ side and are now really mad.
Inline links: www.californiaforever.com, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WM7D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30b96ee2-2315-4653-81d4-3d496fa39f65_639x334.webp, 1, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!325S!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc00a6c17-2706-4150-8884-1c66be633c44_640x632.webp, accusing them of
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post
September 11, 2023 · Original source
While California Forever’s announcement fumbled the bag, they weren’t exactly set up to succeed. Since Flannery Associates started buying land six years ago, public opinion has swung dramatically against Silicon Valley, the technology industry as a whole, and (in particular) people who got rich building technology companies.