The family of powerful venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, one of the investors behind the ambitious project. California Forever utopian city Apple is planning a major community development in Solano County, California, 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. A limited liability company run by Arrillaga Andreessen’s brother, known as A&P Children Investments, has begun planning for a mixed-use development with more than 1,000 homes.
The area is on the edge of Vacaville, about 10 miles from the proposed California Forever project, according to property records, planning documents and deed registry information reviewed by TechCrunch. A&P plans to eventually sell the property to Arrillaga Andreessen and her brother, John Arrillaga Jr., an A&P representative said at a community meeting in March.
Andreessen, Arrillaga-Andreessen and Arrillaga Jr. did not respond to requests for comment.
Two other parcels of land owned by a limited liability company that are not part of the proposed Vacaville project are closer to California Forever. That land — about 600 acres — is across the highway and several miles from where California Forever hopes to build its solar farm.
In all, the Arrillaga family owns at least three of these parcels, totaling about 730 acres in the area. They were originally purchased by their father, billionaire real estate developer John Arrillaga Sr., and his business partner Richard Perry in 1985, records show. Perry’s children would also likely benefit from any sale of the properties, as he is listed as a co-director of A&P in official paperwork. A company spokesperson said: Perry ArrillagaThe real estate company founded by the two men declined to comment.
California forever is Proposed planned communitywhich will be carved out of more than 60,000 acres of land that several members of the Silicon Valley elite have been quietly buying up in Solano County since 2017. Investors in the land include Andreessen, as well as Mike Moritz, Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs, who have collectively spent nearly $1 billion in pursuit of one goal: building a new utopian city free of the diseases that plague places like San Francisco, according to New York Times.
California Forever Project leaders were unaware of Andreessen’s wife and son-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 company spokesman said.
“We didn’t know that the Arrillaga and Perry families owned any land in Solano County until about two years ago, when we had already started the project five years ago,” the company spokesperson said, adding that there was “nothing exciting” about how the project was discovered. “We were looking for who owned land near ours and we saw A&P. We looked up A&P and saw that it was owned by the Arrillaga and Perry families.”
Erin Morris, Vacaville’s community development director and overseer of the East of Leisure Town Road specific plan, which includes the A&P Children’s Investments property, has not spoken to the A&P owners. “I don’t think anyone on staff has either,” she said.
She added that plans to develop the land were in the works “before we heard about California Forever,” later explaining that the beginnings of A&P Children’s development can be traced back to 2015 — two years before California Forever was founded.
Building a residential project would likely be more profitable for Arrillaga Andreessen and her brother than selling the vacant land — especially if interest in the area increases because of plans for a nearby high-profile project like California Forever.
“It’s time to build”
For many years, Andreessen’s slogan, “Time to build,” has become a rallying cry as Pay for more housing All over the country (Except in his own neighborhood).
California Forever, about 60 miles from San Francisco, could be one answer to that call. But the project suffered a major setback last month when it was forced to postpone a crucial ballot measure for two years, citing Lack of local trust and support.
Whether or not the planned community can get the approvals it needs to move forward as planned, Solano County is a hotbed of profitable development. Demand for housing is so high that “anything you build in Vacaville will sell,” says Curtis Stocking, a Vacaville-based real estate agent who has had several clients sell land to California Forever.
A&P Children Investments LLC certainly took a different approach to getting approvals for its proposed development than California Forever.
California Forever CEO Jan Sramek, who is tasked with buying up large tracts of the county, has reportedly faced a wave of criticism from local politicians and residents, many of whom have publicly criticized him for visiting the county. Great plans, few details.
Meanwhile, A&P Children’s Vacaville redevelopment is making significant progress. At a city council meeting in April, A&P Children’s representative Greg Brune called the proposed redevelopment plans “visionary.”
“What we’re trying to do here is something unique to Solano County and indeed to most of California,” he said. He said this was their opportunity to plan for a major development “that doesn’t have the problems that have plagued it in the past.”
Morris, who works for Vacaville, echoed that sentiment. Developers typically draw up a plan for the land and submit it to the city for review, she said. But A&P Children’s, along with the owners of adjacent land being developed, “basically gives the city money” to oversee the plan’s preparation and hire its own environmental consultants and land-planning experts.
While it’s still very early in the process, A&P has shown city officials rough A master-planned community plan includes duplexes, multi-story townhomes and small-scale detached single-family homes “along a range of affordability levels.” All of these “will 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 likely include a 3.9-acre mixed-use commercial district, two 1.5-acre parks, and 4.9 acres of additional parks and open space with trails.
The owners are not “passing investors,” but a family that has owned the land for decades, according to meeting records, Brune stressed.
Real estate records bear out those claims, though the elder Arrillaga was not a local who spent years living side-by-side with residents. He was a real estate developer who made his fortune quietly buying up land in the Bay Area in the years before Silicon Valley boomed and tech companies built massive campuses there. He and Perry kept the vacant lots in Solano County as an inheritance for their children.
“It was a long-term investment for their children,” Brun said.
Lessons from his father-in-law, a real estate mogul
In the 1960s, Arrillaga Sr. expected This was the case in the then-nonexistent Silicon Valley. At the time, the Bay Area consisted mostly of orchards and farmland. But Arrillaga Sr., a Stanford graduate, saw the emerging semiconductor industry and made a smart bet: He teamed up with Perry to buy thousands of acres of cheap land and immediately built a series of empty concrete office buildings. Together, they built the bones of Silicon Valley and waited for the real companies to follow.
By the 1980s, their wait was over. Companies like Oracle and Cisco had grown in size and were desperate for more space, and Arrillaga Sr. and Perry were happy to provide it. According to Fortune magazine. The duo quickly became real estate moguls, building offices for LinkedIn, Apple and Google and making themselves billionaires in the process.
In 1985, the couple’s focus shifted north, according to property records obtained by TechCrunch. They purchased 730 acres in Solano County, divided across three rectangular blocks of mostly farmland, and transferred the land to Arrillaga Sr.’s children in 1998. In 2006, Arrillaga Sr. and the children transferred ownership of the land for a final time to A&P Children’s Investments, which is run by Perry and Arrillaga Jr., according to filings with the California Secretary of State.
About a decade later, Andreessen followed in his father-in-law’s footsteps by investing in a city that didn’t yet exist — one that was to be built just a few miles from the land that Arrillaga Sr. had bought 30 years earlier. Andreessen told Fortune in 2014 that he often sought advice from Arrillaga Sr. He is now the chief financial officer of the Arrillaga Sr. Foundation, according to a TechCrunch review of California state records.
California Forever Strategy Arillaga mirrorsBoth targeted cheap agricultural land, both operated largely in secrecy, and both sought to create large cities before there was any obvious demand for them.
The A&P Children Investments-owned parcels across the highway from the planned California Forever project are not currently zoned for urban development, meaning they will remain fallow for now. The Vacaville parcel, however, is further along. Morris said the city has begun a three-year planning process, before the development plan could be approved.
Although A&P Children’s is taking a very different approach than California Forever, the project still faces residual anger from the controversial utopia. At an April meeting, one resident cited the ambitious project while cautioning the city council against giving the green light to further development. “We don’t know what the Magic City next to Rio Vista is going to be,” he said of California Forever. “Why should we rush?”
During that meeting, every town resident opposed further development. “Ask yourself if this is the dream,” said Wendy Breckon, a Vacaville resident. “For the people here, this is not the dream.”
But the Andreessen family may have an easier victory in Solano County thanks to the A&P project. Vacaville is “a really nice area,” Stocking said, adding that “the demand for housing is really high.”