A Czech financier has angered the super-rich farmers in the US: He is buying up their ranches and wants their votes

Czech banker Šrámek (37) from the village of Dřevohostice made a big splash in financial circles years ago, when the editors of the Financial News announced him as one of the hundred rising stars – as the youngest investment banker in history, at just 22 years old. He worked for the investment giant Goldman Sachs, but he didn’t last long there.

He decided to solve the real estate crisis of San Francisco and the adjacent region of Silicon Valley, where technology companies are concentrated – they are collectively called the Bay Area (literally, the Bay Area, i.e. San Francisco and San Pablo Bays).

“California Forever’s goal is to ensure that the Bay Area remains the center of innovation and prosperity it has been for the past 50 years. And that’s what we want to achieve by building a new city, the first new big city in the Bay Area in the last 50 years,” Šrámek described the plan in a debate published on a16z. The city is supposed to accommodate 400 thousand people – like Brno.

Weaned on Hollywood

And why California? “Culturally, I grew up on Hollywood culture, movies and TV shows. The 1990s were incredibly optimistic in America, probably the most optimistic time in America in a long time. And I kind of soaked it all up. And I think that the culture that one consumes, especially during adolescence, is somehow etched into one’s brain. And so for me America was a place of idealism and opportunity, California was a deeply optimistic place,” he described.

But, according to him, this optimism has disappeared, now the state is still rich and prosperous, but it faces a number of problems – including housing. There are simply not enough houses and apartments in the area. “Communities began to fall apart, we created a tournament where people fight each other for housing,” summed up the financier.

He founded the obscure company Flannery Associates, which began buying up individual plots of land in Solano County – and at the same time attracting more and more investors, who will go with him. On board, for example, it has money from Apple, namely the widow of Steve Jobs, Lauree, or the co-founder of the LinkedIn social network, Reid Hoffman.

They chose an area about a hundred kilometers northeast of San Francisco, said to be quite barren, according to the website of the California Forever project. Even so, many farmers have been working there for generations, from whom he gradually buys their plots. He usually offered quite generous terms – on the one hand high sums, but also the fact that he does not need the land right away. He lets the owner farm for another ten or twenty years, nor does he want a share of their sales, as would be usual in the case of an investor in agriculture, summarized the New York Times podcast.

The locals began to wonder what the unknown company registered on the other side of the USA was actually about. It is based in the state of Delaware, whose legislation allows limited liability companies to keep their owners secret. The corporate lawyer answered the interviewers that a few rich families simply want to diversify their portfolio, in short, save part of their money in agricultural land.

However, not everyone believed it, various conjectures spread. Maybe Disney or someone like that is buying such an area to build another giant amusement park there. Or that the Chinese want there – the land is next to a strategically important US Air Force base.

This had reservations, but they recently agreed, Šrámek’s project slightly modified the plans so that the city would maintain a proper distance from the military airport.

They have already bought at least 140 ranches, an area of ​​240 square kilometers, for about 900 million dollars (almost 21 billion CZK). Part of the area should be available for pleasant living and living so that people can walk to all important services. Other areas will be occupied by wind and solar power plants, the rest should be pleasant greenery.

However, the blemish on the beauty is the cases of land owners who did not want to sell – namely the indiscriminate approach of Flannery Associates. The company is suing some. “The way you are treating the community now is unacceptable,” one of them read to the company at the public hearing. “I would like you to explain how you view farmers whose land is more important to them than your money. Why we are the problem.’

“And how do they want the people of the district to trust them now?” asks the host of the NYT podcast. They can’t just ignore the residents, even though they have already bought most of the land. The formalities of the city’s founding parties will be the subject of a local referendum, held in November concurrently with the presidential and other elections. In addition to financial matters, Šrámek et al. they basically started the pre-election campaign.