A group of tech titans is buying up land north of San Francisco with aspirations to alleviate the Bay Area’s housing crisis, promote innovation, and experiment with new forms of property governance.
They’ve spent US$800 million already and things haven’t even really started. But, there are some heavyweights in the mix including Reid Hoffman [the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor], Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon [investors at the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm], Patrick and John Collison [the sibling co-founders of the payments company Stripe], Laurene Powell Jobs [ founder of the Emerson Collective], and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross [entrepreneurs turned investors].
They hope to overcome the intractable controls on development in California that virtually prevent any serious high-density construction by creating a completely separate land development entity that is self-governing and regulating. It’s been done before a few times [think Disney in Florida].
It all sounds like super #stratatitle to me, and, I like it!
Read the full report from @NYT here or listen to the Hard Fork podcast episode about it.