Vacaville
Article
Vacaville is a recurring place 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 “nearby towns of Vacaville”; “the nearby towns of Vacaville (30 sqm)”; “Having been to Vacaville, I don’t think noise will be a problem”. It most often appears alongside Beyabu, California Forever, Duna Residences.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: September 04, 2023
- Last seen: September 11, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- Beyabu (2 shared issues)
-
- California Forever (2 shared issues)
-
- Duna Residences (2 shared issues)
-
- Ecuador (2 shared issues)
-
- Flannery (2 shared issues)
-
- Flannery Associates (2 shared issues)
-
- Honduras (2 shared issues)
-
- ICSID (2 shared issues)
-
- Niklas Anzinger (2 shared issues)
-
- Praxis (2 shared issues)
-
- Princess Washington (2 shared issues)
-
- Prospera (2 shared issues)
External Links
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.
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.
Having been to Vacaville, I don't think noise will be a problem.
You'll hear planes, but it will be like living in Vacaville.