Rural places as sacrifice zones, from California to China

I've been following this story out of California for a few months or so--the story of how a company called Flannery Associates has been buying up thousands of acres of farm and other rural land in Solano County, between Sacramento and San Francisco.   The Wall Street Journal first reported in July under a headline more focused on national security concerns than anything else, "Investors Bought Nearly $1 Billion in Land Near a California Air Force Base. Officials Want to Know Who Exactly They Are."  The speculation then was that foreign investors might be buying up the land as they are elsewhere in the United States, creating a threat to our food security.  Alternatively or additionally, any foreign threat stem from the proximity to Travis Air Force Base.  

Then, about ten days ago, the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times revealed, nearly simultaneously, that the folks behind Flannery Associates are Silicon Valley elites hoping to aquire enough land to build a new city--obviously in the orbit of the Bay Area--from scratch.  

The San Francisco Chronicle describes what the area is now:  "rural back roads that snake the dry farmland around Jepson Prairie and Montezuma Hills."  There's also this: 

For more than a century, the rangeland in southeast Solano County didn’t change much. Cattle and sheep grazed. Wheat and barley grew. Ranches were passed down from generation to generation in this swath of wide open territory between Vallejo and Sacramento.

This excerpt from the New York Times story about Flannery's aspiration similarly characterizes the place's starting point as rural:

Take an arid patch of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert it into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation and dense urban life.

Elsewhere, the utopia the investors aspire to build is compared to Paris or the West Village in New York City in terms of walkability, a "bustling metropolis that ... could generate thousands of jobs."  

The Chronicle story provides this on Flannery's business practices--and an interesting legal strategy that reminds me of the old adage, "the best defense is a good offense": 

From the beginning, Flannery has been relentless in its drive to buy up parcels of land in southeast Solano County, often paying three or four or five times appraised value. But while it has willingly offered to pay well above market value, the company has also accused the ranchers of colluding to force prices even higher. In May, Flannery filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Sacramento, accusing a group of ranchers of an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy” that caused them to spend $170 million in “overpayment for properties.” The lawsuit seeks $510 million in damages.

Lisa Shipley, manager of the Solano County Farm Bureau, said the accusations of collusion have had a chilling effect on the tight-knit community, with ranchers wary of talking to each other lest they be accused of conspiring against Flannery.

Shipley is quoted:

Flannery has done some slimy, underhanded stuff to these long-term, multigenerational farmers.  Everyone is afraid to talk. They are afraid of getting sued. My members are afraid to talk to me. It’s a messy situation.

Flannery is only now starting to talk to local government officials regarding their plans.  Given that the land is zoned agricultural and there is little water available, big hurdles remain.  The story quotes Solano County Administrator Bill Emlen, who said he's been looking into Flannery for five years.  

We approached them a while back and said, ‘We’ve noticed you have been making a lot of large acquisitions and we’d like to set up a meeting to talk about zoning and the general plan and what your intentions are.'  They said they were investors in family farms and their intention was to continue with grazing and farming and that was their plan.

Emlen noted that the county's policies have long been to approve only "large scale residential development takes place in the cities," including Vacaville, Dixon, and Fairfield, and thus to preserve the rural parts of the county. 

With these California events fresh in my mind, I couldn't help think of a partial California-China parallel when the Washington Post reported here a few days ago from a rural part of Hebei province, home of Beijing.  The headline is, "Rural areas sacrificed for Xi Jinping’s new city, satellite imagery shows."  The story tells of government efforts to build a whole new metro area, Xiong'an New Area, in the orbit of Beijing.  Xiong'an New Area, which will be twice the size of New York City, has been under construction for six years.  When the new metro was recently threatened by flooding from Typhoon Doksuri, Chinese officials used rural parts of the province as a sacrifice zone to save their investment in the new city. 

Here's an excerpt from the Post's story.

[W]hile the effort diverted water away from Xiong’an and other urban areas, it directly contributed to the devastation of rural villages in Hebei, destroying homes and livelihoods. Satellite images reveal that authorities’ actions led to a dramatic increase of water across those areas, covering at least 95 square miles — almost 46,000 football fields. In one of the clearest examples, more than 20 square miles of farmland near Xiong’an’s high-speed railway station were still underwater on Aug. 5.

* * * 

The idea that rural areas are better suited to take the brunt of flooding dates to as early as the 1950s and 1960s, when most of the country’s flood zones — areas that are deliberately flooded to absorb excess water — were built. But such areas are no longer as sparsely populated as they once were. Local governments have allowed towns in designated flood zones to grow, despite regulations meant to control the number of residents living there.

We can also see instances--even recent ones--of rural places being sacrifice zones to urban ones when flooding strikes in the United States.  I wrote about it this spring from California, but it's also been a practice when flooding has threatened the Mississippi River Valley.