Tech Entrepreneur Asks Trump for Development Approval

A Silicon Valley entrepreneur is hoping to build a sprawling tech campus in Alameda — with some help from President Donald Trump.

Investor James Ingallinera shared his plans on social media for Frontier Valley, a 512-acre waterfront complex at the former Alameda Point naval base that would combine residential buildings with space to launch drones and rockets, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“Our call to action for the Trump Administration: President Trump, Vice President Vance, the Trump Admin at large, and Elon Musk: We need your help now to actually make this happen,” Ingallinera said in a video on Musk’s X. “President Trump, in order to make this project officially happen, we need you to sign an executive order, which we’ve included a full draft of on our website. This order will reclaim the federal plot of land in west Alameda and will approve for the immediate development of Frontier Valley exactly as described.”

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to build 10 so-called “Freedom Cities,” or deregulated areas designed as incubators for new technology, using emergency declarations across the country. Ingallinera aims to secure the special jurisdiction status on the spit of land to operate independently from local and state governments.

The problem with Ingallinera’s plea for help: The land has already been claimed and is slated for redevelopment.

The parcel is set to receive a Veterans Administration medical facility and columbarium already authorized and funded by Congress, a city of Alameda spokesperson told the Chronicle. The site is also poised to house a 158-acre open space park created in partnership with the East Bay Regional Park District.

Local officials all but laughed off Ingallinera’s proposal.

“No reasonable fact supports the proposed declaration of emergency at Alameda Point,” city spokesperson Sarah Henry said in a statement to the Chronicle. Instead, she envisions the area one day becoming a “vibrant community of commercial, industrial and residential uses, including many high-tech and bio-tech uses.”

Alameda City Council member Tony Daysog similarly brushed off the idea.

“I’ll give them an A-plus for vision,” he said. “And a C-minus for doing basic-level homework.”

Ingallinera pitched Frontier Valley as “a wholly new, self-contained Silicon Valley 2.0” in the East Bay free of stringent California state regulations. The entrepreneur called it “the Manhattan Project of our time,” with renderings showing a “Jetsons”-like city of hovercrafts and tall glass towers.

Ingallinera previously worked as an analyst for Bain Capital and spent nearly a decade as CEO of Tribe Coliving, a coliving space designed for tech engineers to sleep in bunk beds and use shared bathrooms, according to his LinkedIn. The company rebranded as Hive Coliving following his 2023 departure.

— Chris Malone Méndez