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High-cost cities get their high property values via network effects -- it's the proximity of other people that makes the land valuable. I wonder if a good way
by elihu 9y ago
High-cost cities get their high property values via network effects -- it's the proximity of other people that makes the land valuable. I wonder if a good way to circumvent high home prices is to create new cities deliberately in rural land.
For instance, get a few thousand people to agree to buy a large plot of land in a sparsely populated area. All the early-adopters get a cheap plot of land to build a house on, with most of the lots left unclaimed and managed by a non-profit. As people move in, the value of the land rises and the non-profit generates revenue and pays for infrastructure by selling the remaining lots. In the end, the citizens and town are better off financially because collectively they only paid rural-land prices for high value urban real estate.
This would be more practical if it's near an existing town (for basic necessity, schooling, proximity to hospitals, etc..), and could perhaps be helped along by partnering with a university or large employer wishing to establish a new campus.
There's a lot of ways this could fail, but it seems at least plausible that it could work. There's a lot of mostly-empty land, especially in those west-coast purple areas shown on the map on the linked page.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 9y agoAdd in some gambling and I think you're onto something :).
- stickfigure 9y agoThis has been tried. Check out California's 3rd largest city (by area): http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/california-city-unbuilt-suburb http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/california-city-unbuilt-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California Turns out it's pretty hard to create a critical mass of population.
- elihu 9y agoI would expect most attempts to do this as a get-rich scheme would either fail outright or not become the kind of place people would want to live. If done as more of a crowd-sourced community-driven non-profit project, at least you have everyone's interests more-or-less aligned and some basis of trust.
- dave84 9y agoCanberra[0] and Brasilia[1] were both created to be the capital of their respective countries, but I'd imagine it's easier when you're the government. Ireland did the opposite and tried to decentralise the government among existing towns and cities in an effort to boost local economies. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia#History [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#Decisions_to_start_and_locate_a_capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#Decisions_to_start_an...
- CalRobert 9y agoI always wondered why I send official forms off to random places like Carrick on Shannon (PPS no) or Letterkenny (Child benefit reg)...