In This Story
Some Silicon Valley residents have come up with a novel solution to deal with San Francisco’s perpetual housing shortage: they’re purchasing 267 acres in California’s wine country and attempting to build a community modeled on an “Italian hill town.”
The community, nicknamed Esmeralda, will be a walkable community “backed by patient, values-aligned investors who see this as a unique opportunity to create a special place that will bring new opportunities and energy to Northern Sonoma.”
The project’s website compares the hypothetical Esmeralda experience to living on a college campus forever – with spontaneous community activity as a fundamental part of residents’ lifestyles.
“If you dream of living in a small town while being surrounded by creative, high-agency people, we’re building this for you,” Devon Zuegel, one of the project’s founders, posted on X. Zuegel added that Esmeralda will be special in part due to its “hardware” and “software” – which in this context refer to infrastructure and community, respectively.
The group behind Esmeralda has not yet finalized the land purchase but if all goes according to plan, the community would be constructed on the site of a former sawmill that firefighters sometimes use to conduct drills.
This is not the first time that a group of Silicon Valley elites have attempted to build a cloistered community, away from but still adjacent to the center of the tech industry. The Esmeralda website takes pains to distinguish itself from California Forever – a real estate development corporation that bought up 50,000 acres of farm land with the intention of building a new walkable city.
“They are building a large new city built from scratch in a rural, unincorporated area,” the Esmeralda website reads. “We are creating a new neighborhood inside the boundaries of an existing incorporated city, on a former industrial site. The political and social context couldn’t be more different.”
The project’s FAQ page emphasizes its commitment to building a range of housing, to support different income levels and lifestyles – including potential memory care units for the elderly. Esmeralda would also, hypothetically, open up land to the public that was previously closed off.
Despite these promises, however, Esmeralda’s pilot project – a one-month “pop-up city” named Edge Esmeralda – attracted a crowd of Silicon Valley elites, paying $595 to $2,158 to visit the city of Healdsburg.
Some would-be Esmeraldans attended sessions with titles like “Becoming a ChatGPT Power User” and “Telepathy With Animals.” Others called up dozens of local eateries to ensure that restaurants were stocked with non-seed oil, according to the San Francisco Standard.
“The weird people go to the frontier, you know,” Edge Esmeralda attendee and startup founder Samuel Gbafa told the outlet, before jumping into a cold plunge pool.