A story in The NY Times about a secret plan to buy up a farming community 1 hour outside of San Francisco for development of a new town is numbing. This is a purported solution to the housing crisis in the Golden State.

Something similar almost happened here in Vermont when an out-of-the-mainstream LDS [church did not support this] millionaire (billionaire?) started to buy up farms and property around the Joseph Smith birthplace to establish is utopian (I would say dystopian) vision of a 40,000 person new city. Feisty and enterprising locals (and clever land attorneys) stopped him when they found out what he was doing. Vermont knows how to be hostile to development.

There was even more money at stake in California and tech titans funding it. The mob doesn’t like to loose its money, and sadly, the bad guys won in California. Farmland premiums and developer bullying were too much.