Silicon Valley Types Want to Build a City Named Esmeralda

A group of Silicon Valley–ites are in the process of purchasing 267 acres in the small town of Cloverdale, California — 90 miles north of San Francisco — to build their own city called Esmeralda. “Imagine living on a college campus,” the website for the project explains. “You run into friends just walking to class, and everyone is learning and creating side by side together.” Devon Zuegel, a former GitHub employee and one of founders behind Esmeralda, announced the project on Twitter as “living in a small town while being surrounded by creative, high-agency people.” (Low-agency people need not apply?)

Zuegel explained that the “hardware” of the city — what the rest of us might call buildings — would look like an Italian hill town. The “software” of the city is “a culture of learning & building.” The investors behind Esmeralda are not named, but Zuegel told the Press Democrat that they include “people with deep roots in the Bay Area who grew up in Europe or who have family in Europe.”

The creation of a walkable, techno utopia modeled after a college campus is becoming something of a trend — San Francisco transplants tried to do a similar thing by getting “high-agency, emotionally intelligent New Yorkers” to all move to the same neighborhood in Bushwick; in Solano County, tech billionaires under the company California Forever are currently pushing to build a 400,000-person city that has met the opposition of locals. (“No, Esmeralda Land Company is not part of California Forever. :),” the Esmeralda website clarifies.)

A monthlong “pop-up city” called Edge Esmeralda that the founders held in the nearby town of Healdsburg over the summer gives an idea of what might be to come. As the San Francisco Standard reported, some 1,300 cryptocurrency CEOs, app designers, and biohackers — the kind of people who start their days by brushing their teeth with genetically modified bacteria — paid anywhere from $595 to $2,158 to go. Attendees generated the events, which ranged from “Becoming a ChatGPT Power User” and “Becoming Your Own Doctor” to “Fundamentals of Standup Comedy” and “Telepathy With Animals.”

There were $200 discounted tickets for locals. One resident who wrote positively about the event did note a few complaints from others, like the fact that some attendees “were a little too forward about asking residents for a place to crash” and that the discounted ticket didn’t include access to the community dinners, “which left some feeling confused, if not a little left out.” The San Francisco Standard wrote that one group of people actually “rang 39 local restaurants, quizzed them about their ingredients, sourcing and seasoning, and compiled the results into a color-coded chart, which was distributed on Telegram. They asked venues to stock up on Zero Acre’s fermented sugarcane oil.” (Adherents of the longevity movement hate seed oil.)

There are still multiple steps that the Esmeralda Land Company must go through — such as presenting final plans to the city council and locals — before the college campus for adults can be built. And then there’s the fact that the county is at high risk for wildfires. But that’s just a hardware problem.