Marc Andreessen’s Family Plans to Build a ‘Visionary’ Subdivision in California

Marc Andreessen is always trying to build stuff. For years, his motto has been “it’s time to build,” which I think he means metaphorically, though lately he’s been literally trying to build stuff. As a prominent backer of the California Forever project—the troubled effort to build a brand new metropolis on thousands of acres of Bay Area farmland—Andreessen has been laboring to take billionaire-backed urban planning to the next level. And while that effort may have stalled, it would appear that those close to him are still very much interested in building stuff in the Bay Area, albeit on a much smaller scale.

TechCrunch reports that Andreessen’s family is looking to create a new housing subdivision on a large spread of land near Vacaville. The outlet reports that an LLC dubbed A&P Children Investments, which is operated by Andreessen’s brother-in-law, John Arrillaga Jr., recently began planning a “mixed-use development” involving over 1,000 homes. The development will be built on a property that is located only some 10 miles from where California Forever would’ve been built (and could, someday, still be built). Eventually, the property may be sold so that Andreessen’s wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and her brother, John, can make some money, the outlet writes.

In other words, those close to Andreessen want to build a subdivision—a quite large subdivision, which one overly enthused person attached to the project, A&P rep Greg Bun, has comically referred to as “visionary.” It’s not a new city, exactly, but I guess it’ll have to do until the new city gets here—if that day ever comes.

Despite the fact that these designs seem similar in nature and physical proximity to the California Forever project, developers say the two aren’t related. The subdivision plans reportedly predate California Forever’s sizable land acquisitions. “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,” a spokesperson for California Forever told TechCrunch.

Gizmodo reached out to Andreessen via a16z and to California Forever for comment.

Building a suburb is going to be a whole lot easier than building a new city, which was always a moonshot. The tech billionaires backing the quixotic project seem to have envisioned it as a paradigm shift for the field of urban development. However, the project’s backers screwed up its launch so badly that it never really went anywhere. By majorly pissing off sizable portions of the local community via a misplaced litigation effort, California Forever got off on the wrong foot with the regional denizens that it needed to woo. After much pushback, project developers withdrew their effort bid to cram through legislation that would mandate the city’s creation. While the project may not be officially dead yet, it certainly isn’t moving much. It appears to be laying, motionless, in a field, and it’s unclear from a distance whether it’s breathing or not.