Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

> The group only recently started interacting with local officials and residents, according to media reports, and had sued landowners who sold their land over what it deemed an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy”.

> “To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a conversation about the future of Solano county,” the group writes.

> The group pledges a decades-long conversation with residents and officials for “a chance for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space”.

> The group has already sent out opinion polls to local residents to gauge their feelings on an initiative that could appear before county voters, according to SF Gate.

> California Forever said in a statement that the group had met with the county’s congressional and state legislative delegation this week and would soon meet with county officials and mayors.

So they secretively bought up a bunch of land and sued some folks, but want to “engage with the local community” (via polling and through the interface of elected officials) and want to start a conversation about how the locals can work for them?

If you want to join a community, you can just, like, go join it. This seems more like an invasion of aliens from Planet Rich. Look out, soon enough they’ll work out how to fully emulate human behavior.

Nice renders though, look almost vaguely solarpunk inspired.

Building a city makes the land more valuable. If you tell people that you plan to invest a ton of money into the area they will include that information in their calculations when you are trying to buy their land. Some will then only sell their land for skyhigh prices, and some won’t sell at all in the hopes that they can sell it for even more once the city has been built around them. This can strangle the project in its infancy.

> If you want to join a community, you can just, like, go join it.

Yeah and that works perfectly well if you want to buy a single farm. You negotiate with the seller, you do the contract stuff, you pay, you move in. All good. But that is not what they plan.

It is almost as if you haven’t thought about why they do what they do at all.

Yes indeed, they are being deceptive to the local community to try to rip them off.

I’m not sure that straightforward, the value of the land will only really increase if the project is somewhat successful and the landowners (not necessarily part of the “local community”) expect to be paid the already inflated price without having to take on any risk.

Both sides are just trying to maximize/minimize their gain/cost, introducing some moral angle just seems weird to me.

Especially when any attempt to significantly expand the housing supply (considering the current situation) should surely be viewed as a net positive for the society as a whole?

No, they are being private about their future plans to avoid being ripped off themselves.

Gentrification for me but not for thee.

Well supposedly after all the rich people move into this “utopian” willing there will be more housing left for everyone else?

Yeah right we're a free society in the West are we, so you're free to buy my disused Santa Barbara property or the condo with view onto Central Park that I only saw once after buying it, or sleep under a bridge or whatever. Suit yourself this is a free country.

Nah, in theory you’d buy/rent a house somebody sold to move into slightly nicer one [repeat 5 times] somebody who bought the Central Park condo.

Gentrification for thee but not for free!

I get that part, I just don’t care about the financial details of how they are buying a community, they are just a boring little side detail. I was commenting on the fact that they are using the language of community engagement, but they are just blatantly buying a town, not engaging with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com