Jan Sramek has opened what may be the largest one-man real estate office in the nation.
The head of Folsom-based Flannery Associates has set up shop in Solano County, where his consortium of Silicon Valley billionaires had secretly bought up 52,000 acres of farmland to build a utopian city with tens of thousands of homes, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
Except now the 36-year-old has redubbed the firm California Forever, and aims to convince voters in the North Bay county to approve the city planned around Travis Air Force Base.
His goal: to put the issue on the November 2024 ballot, he said.
The former Goldman Sachs investor and London School of Economics graduate, a native of the Czech Republic, was revealed by the New York Times last month to have led the mystery company behind $800 million in farmland purchases.
Backed by such billionaires as Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire widow of Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple, he led a five-year campaign to pay top dollar for dirt in order to build more affordable housing.
Last weekend, he moved his family to the county 60 miles northeast of San Francisco, where he’ll work to convince skeptical officials and local residents of the value of a new city next door.
“A lot of these types of projects fail, or they get done badly, because it’s someone sitting in New York or Los Angeles, running a project that’s thousands or hundreds of miles away,” Sramek, now CEO of California Forever, told the Mercury News. “And so it doesn’t impact them if it doesn’t work.
“If we create traffic, I’ll be sitting in the traffic,” he said, “and so it’s very personal.”
“No” is not an option. He wants Solano County residents to know he and the moneyed backers are in this for the long haul, and they’re committed to being good neighbors.
California Forever has taken its time to carefully set up this project, he said, and they’re taking the 40-year view rather than the short-term approach to real estate development.
“We have the patience to do it right over 30 or 40 years,” Sramek said, “but then at the same time, we have an eagerness to get started and start building some of the initial things — whether that’s a solar farm or that’s the first homes — in the next few years.”
For the next four months and into next year, the company will focus on community engagement, Sramek said, who is hoping to meet with elected officials, community organizations and as many locals as possible.
California Forever representatives will meet with the farm bureau, the chamber of commerce, the Rotary Club, environmental groups, and Travis Air Force Base. The firm plans to open up storefronts where locals can view plans, meet with staff and discuss what the project will look like
“What we want to do in the next four months is hear from everyone about how we could design it to work for them,” Sramek said.
— Dana Bartholomew
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