Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Wikimedia Commons
The Silicon Valley billionaires seeking to scheme and bully their way into building a utopian new city 50 miles northeast of increasingly dystopian San Francisco face a barrier that voters established to stop a similar project four decades ago.
Back in 1982, San Francisco real estate developer Hiram Woo real announced plans to establish Manzanita, a new city of 5,000 residents on an expanse of agricultural land in Solano County, California. He spoke of building 2,000 solar-powered homes surrounded by open space laced with walking and biking trails. He said there would be schools and shopping and recreation facilities.
But one thing Woo did not offer was a reason why Solano needed a city in addition to the seven that already existed in a county of ranchers and farmers, some of whom had been working the same land for generations.