No, that’s in orange county. It’s called Irvine. It’s ran by the Irvine corporation. Obsidian, a game developer in Irvine, made the outer worlds. A game filled with examples of why corporations shouldn’t own a city. It’s pretty hypocritical since obsidian benefits vastly from Irvine corporation.
I mean, they are a bit late to the party covering this, but o.k. It’s been in major news outlets here for years. Anytime that land get snapped up people take notice. Including eyes at Travis, which they didn’t even get into in the article. Between the litigation around purchase costs, regulations which are in place already to protect the interests and security of Travis, to the general development regulations of the state, they are in for a rude awakening if they believe in any pipe dreams on the site. They likely won’t happen as they think they might anyway… There is enough red tape in California real estate development alone to wrap the planet. The only “company” that so far has managed to come even close to building “new city” type agreements has been Google - the only ones who, for obvious reasons, have not even batted an eye at coughing up to date $1B in land investment around the Bay Area with it’s vision for mixed use space within existing city limits in Mountain View and San Jose, and support of more housing development.
They won’t have to pay as much for employees to rent an apartment from their company than they would for their employees to rent a San Francisco apartment.
Yeah, and the absolute worst thing is they’ll be swarmed with applicants. A job and guaranteed housing I can afford? Guaranteed to be able to afford food and lunch etc? Deals on partnered electronics? I’m even willing to bet they’ll allow remote work when you live there. To the average person it looks like a great deal. It makes life simple.
But when you want to switch jobs to boost your salary you’re faced with having to move and finding a new place to live in the bay area isn’t easy. Then the issue of leaving the town meaning leaving friends, changing schools if you have kids and everything that entails. Not to mention if your partner also works there. There will be a lot of people effectively stuck. That feeling of not having a choice, of being stuck is really insidious.
And with depressed wages, which won’t impact them much while they work since they get housing and stuff cheaper. But come retirement the life time of lower earnings will rear its ugly head.
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