Judge Sides with Tech Billionaires in California Forever Case Against Family Ranchers

California Forever , the tech billionaire-backed effort to create a new city on hundreds of acres in the Bay Area, has faced a number of challenges, including a legal dispute between the project’s backers and a number of families who are longtime residents of the area where developers want to build.

Last May, California Forever’s parent company, Flannery Associates, sued some of those families , accusing them of engaging in a “price fixing” conspiracy and demanding half a billion dollars in damages. The farmers accused California Forever of deploying “strong-arm tactics” to pry loose their land.

Now, it appears that a California judge sided with the tech billionaires. Judge Troy Nunley, of Sacramento, denied an effort by the landowners to get California Forever’s litigation thrown out of court, The Mercury News reported Monday. Nunley claimed that messages exchanged between property owners two years ago provided “direct evidence” of a price-fixing effort.

Those messages have been shared in court, including text messages from one land owner to another saying that they shouldn’t allow California Forever developers to engage in “bullying the last of the property owners.” The same land owner asserted that the “remaining property owners should be in agreement on what we would want to sell our properties” so that California would be unable to “play owners against owners.”

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