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The family of powerhouse venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, one of the investors behind the hoped-for California Forever utopian city in Solano County, California, is planning a substantial community development in the area, TechCrunch has learned.
Andreessen is married to Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, whose Silicon Valley real estate mogul father bought land in Solano County decades before his death in 2022, according to county records obtained by TechCrunch. An LLC operated by Arrillaga-Andreessen’s brother that’s known as A&P Children Investments, has begun the planning process for a mixed-use development with more than 1,000 homes.
This area is on the edge of the city of Vacaville, 10 miles away from the proposed California Forever development, according to property records, planning documents, and business registry information viewed by TechCrunch. A representative for A&P said at a community meeting in March that A&P plans to ultimately sell the property for the benefit of Arrillaga-Andreessen and her brother, John Arrillaga Jr.
Andreessen, Arrillaga-Andreessen and Arrillaga Jr. did not respond to requests for comment.
Two other parcels of land owned by the LLC that are not part of the proposed Vacaville development are even closer to California Forever. This land — roughly 600 acres — is across the highway and down several miles from where California Forever hopes to build its solar farm.
All told, the Arrillaga family co-owns at least these three parcels totaling around 730 acres in the area. These were originally bought by their billionaire real estate developer father, John Arrillaga Sr., and his business partner, Richard Peery, in 1985, records show. The sale of any of the properties would likely also benefit Peery’s children, as he is listed as a co-director of A&P in state paperwork. A spokesperson for Peery Arrillaga, the real estate company founded by the two men, declined to comment.
California Forever is a proposed master-planned community, to be carved from over 60,000 acres of land that several members of Silicon Valley’s elite have quietly been buying in Solano County since 2017. Investors in this land include Andreessen, as well as Mike Moritz, Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs, who have collectively sunk nearly $1 billion in pursuit of one goal: to build a new utopian city free of the ills that plague places like San Francisco, according to the New York Times.
The project leaders of California Forever didn’t know of Andreessen’s wife and brother-in-law’s connection to A&P Children Investments when they began land acquisitions in 2017 and “never made an offer” on the LLC’s land, a spokesperson says.
“We were not aware that the Arrillaga and Peery families owned any land in Solano County until about two years ago, when we were already five years into the project,” the spokesperson said, adding that there was “nothing dramatic” about how the project found out. “We were looking at who owned parcels near ours and saw A&P. We looked up A&P and saw it was owned by the Arrillaga and Peery families.”
Erin Morris, Vacaville’s community development director overseeing the East of Leisure Town Road Specific Plan, which includes the A&P Children Investments property, has never spoken to A&P’s owners. “I don’t think anyone on staff has either,” she said.
She added that the plans to develop this land had been in the works “before we ever heard about California Forever,” clarifying later that the beginnings of the A&P Children development can be traced back to 2015 — two years before California Forever’s founding.
Building a housing project is likely to be more lucrative for Arrillaga-Andreessen and her brother than selling the vacant land would have been — especially if interest in the area increases from the plans for a nearby, high-profile project like California Forever.
The A&P-owned properties are situated near the California Forever project. View larger. Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch/OpenStreetMap
“It’s time to build”
For years, Andreessen’s motto “it’s time to build” has become a rallying cry as he has pushed for more housing across the country (except in his own neighborhood).
California Forever, located about 60 miles away from San Francisco, could be considered one type of answer to that call. But the project hit a major setback last month when it had to postpone a crucial ballot measure by two years, citing a lack of local trust and support.
Whether or not that planned community can gain the zoning and approvals it needs to proceed as envisioned, Solano County is a hotbed for lucrative development. The demand for housing has grown so high that “anything you build in Vacaville is going to be sold,” said Curtis Stocking, a Vacaville-based real estate agent who had several clients sell land to California Forever.
The A&P Children Investments LLC has certainly taken a different approach in gaining approvals for its proposed development than California Forever.
California Forever CEO Jan Sramek, tasked with buying up large swaths of the county, has reportedly faced a barrage of criticism from local politicians and residents, many of whom publicly lambasted him for dropping into the county with grand plans and few details.
Meanwhile, A&P Children’s Vacaville development is making progress. At a city council meeting in April, Greg Brun, a representative for A&P Children, called the proposed development plans “visionary.”
“What we’re looking to do here is something that’s unique to Solano County and actually to most of California,” he said. He emphasized that this was their chance to plan a large development that “doesn’t have the issues you’ve had in the past.”
The A&P Children proposal to the city of Vacaville.Image Credits: City of Vacaville
Morris, who works for Vacaville, echoed this. She explained that, normally, developers create the plan for the land and then submit it to the city for review. But A&P Children, along with the owners of adjacent parcels that are being developed, are “essentially giving the city the money” to oversee the preparation of the plan and hire its own environmental and land-planning consultants.
While it is still very early in the process, A&P has shown city officials a rough outline of a master-planned community that includes duplexes, townhomes and micro-lot single-family detached homes “along a spectrum of affordability.” These will all “fit seamlessly into existing residential neighborhoods to the north and south of the project and support walkability,” the group wrote in April. The community would potentially include a 3.9-acre commercial mixed use area, two 1.5-acre parks, and 4.9 acres of additional park and open space with trails.
Brun emphasized that the owners were not a “fly-by-night investor” but a family that has owned the land for decades, according to meeting records.
Real estate records prove those statements to be true, although Arrillaga Sr. wasn’t exactly a local who had spent years living alongside residents. Rather, he was a real estate developer who made his fortune by quietly buying up the land in the Bay Area in the years before Silicon Valley boomed and tech conglomerates built massive campuses there. He and Peery held on to the vacant Solano County parcels for their children’s inheritance.
“It was a long-term investment for their kids,” Brun said.
Lessons from a real estate tycoon father-in-law
In the 1960s, Arrillaga Sr. foresaw a Silicon Valley that didn’t yet exist. Back then, the Bay Area was mostly orchards and farmlands. But Arrillaga Sr., a Stanford University graduate, saw the burgeoning semiconductor industry and made a prescient bet: He teamed up with Peery to buy up thousands of acres of cheap land and immediately erected a series of empty concrete office buildings. Together, they built the bones of Silicon Valley and waited for the actual businesses to catch up.
By the 1980s, their wait was over. Companies like Oracle and Cisco ballooned in size and were desperate for more space, which Arrillaga Sr. and Peery were happy to supply, according to Fortune. The duo were quickly anointed real estate kingmakers, building offices for LinkedIn, Apple and Google. They became billionaires in the process.
In 1985, the pair’s focus drifted northward, according to property records obtained by TechCrunch. They scooped up the 730 acres in Solano County, split across three mostly rectangular blocks of agricultural land, and transferred the land to Arrillaga Sr.’s children in 1998. In 2006, Arrillaga Sr. and the children transferred ownership of the land a final time to A&P Children Investments, which, according to filings with the California secretary of state, is operated by Peery and Arrillaga Jr.
About a decade later, Andreessen fell into the footsteps of his father-in-law by investing in a city that didn’t yet exist — a city to be built a few miles from parcels Arrillaga Sr. bought 30 years prior. Andreessen told Fortune in 2014 that he often sought advice from Arrillaga Sr. He currently serves as the chief financial officer of Arrillaga Sr.’s Arrillaga Foundation, according to a TechCrunch review of California state records.
California Forever’s strategy mirrors Arrillaga’s: Both targeted cheap agricultural land, both operated largely in secrecy, and both set out to establish metropolises before there was any obvious demand for them.
The parcels owned by A&P Children Investments that lie across the highway from the planned California Forever are not currently zoned for urban development, meaning that, for now, they’ll lie fallow. The parcel in Vacaville, however, is further along. Morris said the city is beginning a three-year planning process, before the development’s plan is potentially approved.
Despite A&P Children taking a distinctly different approach than California Forever, the development has still faced residual anger from the controversial utopia. At the April meeting, one resident cited the ambitious project as he cautioned the town council to be careful greenlighting more development. “We don’t know how the magical city over by Rio Vista is going to turn out,” he said, referring to California Forever. “Why should we hurry?”
During that meeting, townsperson after townsperson pushed back against further development. “Ask yourself if this is the dream,” said Wendy Breckon, another Vacaville resident. “To the residents here, this is not the dream.”
But Andreessen’s family might still have an easier victory in Solano County with the A&P project. Vacaville is “such a beautiful area,” Stocking said, adding that “there’s already a big enough demand for housing.”
