9 ms·

Delaware's Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia

163 points by jamesbowman 9y ago

wonder_er 9y ago
While I might not want to live in Arden, I love the experimental approach to self-organization. I feel like a dozen of similar experimental communities allowed to succeed or fail, and they might bubble up some useful heuristics for how cities/towns organize themselves. I feel like the dominant model of town organization in the USA leaves much to be desired.
- mlinksva 9y ago
  There are many. Success among them seems to mean longevity, not scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Intentional_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Intentional_communiti... (on English Wikipedia, the article about Arden is in a sub-sub-category of this one). Reading the Strong Towns site for awhile about the "traditional development pattern" https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/?tag=traditional+development+pattern https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/?tag=traditional+develop... ie cities and towns wordwide pre-car makes me think that whatever idiosyncratic motivations for various intentional communities, in form they're just following the traditional development pattern. There's no need for idiosyncratic experimentation to take and apply everywhere lessons from millennia of human settlements that we've strayed from in the car era. I'm a fan of idiosyncratic experimentation but see zero evidence of potential (because of tiny scale) or need (above) for bubbling up of heuristics from them.
- gumby 9y ago
  > I feel like the dominant model of town organization in the USA leaves much to be desired. What is that dominant model? I've lived in Massachusetts and California. In both states what's common is that the town decides (pretty much "has decided" at this point, esp in Mass) to organize itself, writes a local charter, and has local folks run a council. Town hall meetings are open to everyone. The council members are amateurs. School districts and utility self govern and are rarely completely coextensional with towns. This can go wrong, of course, for example in Palo Alto the city managers weren't given enough oversight and overstaffed with middle managers; also real estate interests can take over the council for a while. But by an large it's not that different in principle. In California, in fact, most of the state isn't part of organized towns; most "towns" are just vaguely defined areas under the county rules; various groups do things like run a water utility, manage the local park, etc. In fact barely a quarter of the counties have charters; most themselves run under default state rules. So that's much closer to the Arden idea.
  - mlinksva 9y ago
    I'm with you right up to the last sentence. Isn't minimizing private rents from land ownership central to the "Arden idea"? I don't see that anywhere in the organization of California jurisdictions.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Indeed, it's quite a rarity to find an unincorporated township in New England. Mine is just a letter. The rules are pretty minimal, the municipal services do not exist, and the large animals vastly outnumber the people. I read this article and was fascinated. I will visit there in my next expression of wanderlust. What a curious place.
  - wonder_er 9y ago
    While I'm not too familiar with "the dominant model", I guess I should have clarified: > The results of the dominant model of town organization in the USA leaves much to be desired Way over-priced homes, auto-oriented urban/rural design, an excessive love for parking lots, houses all look the same... Towns across the US share way too much in common for it to be something that spontaneously arose out of millions of tiny decisions. The developed parts of California cannot be anywhere close to the Arden idea - there's endless rules, zoning restrictions, boards and commissions to try to sway, etc.
    - majormajor 9y ago
      The dominant model in the US has downright cheap homes. Partly because of the parking lots and auto-oriented organization (if you can keep building out, you have a lot less upwards pressure on price). CA/NY is not representative of home prices in most of the country. It's not perfect, but neither is the NY model, the London model, the Tokyo model, the Beijing model...
      - TimJYoung 9y ago
        Just to clarify: most of NY state has inexpensive housing (at least compared to NYC). Also, much of it is turn-of-the-century houses, not necessarily the 50s+ auto-oriented suburban tract houses, although it does have its share of those, also.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  I imagine its population-dependent to some extent. I had never heard of Arden before this post and by god it looks beautiful. It seems important to note that it's population is ~439-450 people. I'm not in disagreement, though. I grew up in a small town (~4500-6000 people throughout my life there) and it had a mixed population between hardline skilled and unskilled labour in the steel and fishing industries, bikers, and aging hippies - as well as a small subsection of Government of Canada and University of Guelph environmental scientists. There was a notable difference in opinions for that reason. I imagine its simpler at this point in time to run a village society in that way with a group of like-minded, read people. Other kinds of lives lived by people tend to inform other kinds of opinions: I work hard all day, I don't want to think about that kind of thing, I understand a hierarchy with firm structure, I like to know who the boss is, etc. I'm oversimplifying it for the sake of being concise, and I hope my point is coming across. Hopefully when the political temper settles a little, those kinds of conversations about how life can be better can resume.
jawbone3 9y ago
> "The idea that children could be out without a parent hovering was just completely unknown to them," Macklem recalls. "And the fact that the kids talked to someone who they obviously knew but who was not a parent." I didn´t know the situation in the US was quite so dystopical that kids on their own was any surprise...
- crooked-v 9y ago
  http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/20/living/feat-md-free-range-parents-under-attack/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/20/living/feat-md-free-range-pare... http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-son-park/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-so... http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/07/mom-arrested-for-letting-kids-walk-to-mc http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/07/mom-arrested-for-letting-k...
  - qznc 9y ago
    Wow. This is not a single police weirdo. This is three different states. Ok, it is not normal otherwise it would not be in the news. Still, moving to the US became scarier to me (and Silicon Valley is tempting). For a contrast, I'm in Germany. My oldest son will go to school next year. It is considered normal to train him now to go to and from kindergarten alone. The biggest perceived danger is crossing roads. The kid of an acquaintance uses the tram for a few stops on the way to school. The first week in first grade the mother escorted her. Then she was on her own. Not alone though. The tram is packed with kids and they look out for each other (more or less, they are still kids). Still, we also see that congestion at schools is increasingly a problem. More and more parents seem to drop of their kids at school.
    - sethhochberg 9y ago
      As with most things in the US, urban/rural/suburban and class divides matter much more than regional or state ones. In the urban metro areas I've lived as an adult, seeing kids take transit to school alone or in groups is totally normal - admittedly from a slightly older age than your example in Germany, but definitely still grade-school kids. In the suburbs where I grew up, it was typical for kids to ride bikes to school. There wasn't any transit other than the school district's buses, and many kids were dropped off by their parents in cars, but some degree of independence was still there. This was a middle-class suburban area outside of a major city in FL where most parents worked in two-income families. The horror stories you hear about "helicopter parenting" in the US mostly come from wealthier exurbs where, for lack of better way to put it, there aren't any real problems... so bored homemakers micro-manage every aspect of their community and worry themselves senseless about silly things. These are often master-planned communities, often built in isolated semi-rural areas, where it is difficult to go _anywhere_ without a car, and transit aside from buses to/from school is nonexistent, so the very idea of a child even having somewhere to go or something to do without a parent escorting them there in a car is seemingly insane. It contributes a lot to the perception that kids shouldn't be alone without an adult until they turn 16, can operate a car, and then can travel safely from the confines of a vehicle. Its horrible for a whole bunch of reasons. If you want to move to the US, there are definitely still plenty of areas where kids can a normal, independent young life - but especially in the SF Bay area, I'd be very careful about picking a town/neighborhood where such a thing is accepted. It won't be universal.
sutble 9y ago
>After the prisoners' sentences were completed, the town celebrated with a circus. The performance included an arrest of its own: A clown dressed as a cop entered the audience, grabbed a surprised Sinclair, and marched him away from the show. Surely the author meant to write a cop dressed as a clown?
- ISKthrow 9y ago
  Wat? No, a cown dressed like a cop. Pretty explicit. A cop dressed as a clown would not be recognized for anything else than a clown. A clown dressed as a cop will be seen as a clown dressed as a cop. Or maybe I'm crazy...
- bmelton 9y ago
  The previous paragraphs insist that they had no police department, so unless they skipped or abridged the timetable, it seems most likely that it was a clown dressed as a cop.
neogodless 9y ago
Well that was odd. Tried to read page two on my Android Oreo device, had "virus" like alerts springing up. Sorry, this is off topic, but I think there's reason to suspect that web page.
- trav4225 9y ago
  Lots of reasonably decent sites seem to participate in ad networks that apparently allow malicious ads that hijack browsers... It's not clear to me why this is still an unsolved problem after so many years... :-/
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    Because the profits from serving the malware are concentrated while the harm is diffuse.
Animats 9y ago
I knew about Freehope, which is another single-tax community. But not this one.
- mtg 9y ago
  Fairhope! (grew up there)
LVTfan 9y ago
As a part time resident, and a passionate Georgist, I love the Ardens. The three villages function separately for governance, but socially they're one, and there is a lot going on. The history is fascinating. (If you have access to newspapers.com, read it chronologically. I'm still working through it.) If you're in the area in early September, don't miss the Arden Fair.
- mlinksva 9y ago
  Did you move for your passion, or did you learn your passion from living there? If you have the inclination, please add references to the relevant Wikipedia articles as you read old news! Thank you. :)
  - LVTfan 9y ago
    I moved there because it was lovely, and was consistent with something I have long felt strongly about. My late grandparents were lifelong Georgists, and never mentioned the Ardens to me. (I'm a late-bloomer -- I shared their perception of the problems, but kept thinking there had to be another way to solve them; when I failed to find it, I looked more closely at what Henry George had to say, and found it very persuasive.) For a recent article, look at Michael Kinsley's, in the September Vanity Fair. But people from across many spectra embrace George's analysis and George's remedy; it is a third way, coming out of the traditions of classical economics, not the neo-classical economics that is widely taught today. George's most famous book was entitled "Progress and Poverty" ... it was dedicated, "to those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment." Its subtitle is a mouthful:"an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth ... The Remedy." The book is quite analytical, a logical analysis. If you want to see where it is going, jump to the final "book" before you read the rest. Or you might start with a collection of essays entitled "Social Problems." They still read well today, and, among other things, show why a Constitution written in the 18th century simply can't be frozen in time, and needs to be reconsidered in light of 21st century realities. Some of my favorite quotes are from "Social Problems." Both books are online and at Amazon or schalkenbach.org; there is also a fine modern abridgment of P&P, and audio is available at hgchicago.org.
rootw0rm 9y ago
I'm from a super tiny town in socal with ~35k people, i can't imagine living any place smaller than that.
trumpownsyou420 9y ago
weirdos.
jawns 9y ago
Delawarean here. Growing up, I had the impression that Arden was just a place for aged hippies, history buffs, and the overeducated idle class to have space to live out their utopian fantasies without bothering the rest of us. I mean, if you think about the town meetings in "Gilmore Girls," where you have these people who are really into town meetings, you probably know that they're meant to be an exaggerated parody of the handful of people who show up at town meetings and are really, uh, passionate about their viewpoints. Only in "Gilmore Girls," the whole town is like that. Well, I would much rather have them all in Arden, duking it out, than spread out more generally in North Wilmington and northern New Castle County, causing eye rolls everywhere. That said, Arden is not nearly as much of an insulated place anymore. I think, for the majority of residents, it's just an address and not a philosophy.
- loteck 9y ago
  Why is civic participation so eyeroll-inducing to you? My sense is that the groups you're rolling your eyes at have taken over the top levels of national government and are now working backwards to states and cities, largely thanks to reviving the lost act of participating.
rdl 9y ago
I’m not sure how I feel about LVT. It seems like the most fair form of taxation, but physical land is decreasingly tied to productivity and wealth, so it seems to make less sense than in the past.
- spoonie 9y ago
  Why are most “high-productivity” software and knowledge jobs in cities where land costs are high? I would argue that it’s because that land is productive! At least LVT would incentivize people to move to areas with cheaper land, or to increase density.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    It's interesting to look at how that distribution of jobs has changed over the last 40 to 50 years, though, and whether or not seeking to reverse the centralization could be useful.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    Software and knowledge jobs take very little space - just whatever a single employee takes up. Even in a small private office setup not much, but even less in open plans - here's perhaps a hit to why open plans are popular in offices that are predominantly on expensive land. There is very little space required for storage and for moving large objects around, no loading bays etc. A 10,000 employee software "plant" take up a lot less space than a 10,000 employee manufacturing plant. It's exactly because these industries are high-productivity (per land unit) that they are practical on high value land.
- ScottBurson 9y ago
  Land is absolutely still tied to productivity. Why do so many technically-oriented people want to live in the SF Bay area? Because of all the other such people who are already here, and all the opportunities that exist here for that reason.
chmaynard 9y ago
This version is formatted for printing: http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/14/delawares-odd-beautiful-conten/print http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/14/delawares-odd-beautifu...
agumonkey 9y ago
Henry George is said to be the inspiration behind the game Monopoly

163 points by jamesbowman 9y ago

While I might not want to live in Arden, I love the experimental approach to self-organization. I feel like a dozen of similar experimental communities allowed to succeed or fail, and they might bubble up some useful heuristics for how cities/towns organize themselves. I feel like the dominant model of town organization in the USA leaves much to be desired.

mlinksva 9y ago
There are many. Success among them seems to mean longevity, not scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Intentional_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Intentional_communiti... (on English Wikipedia, the article about Arden is in a sub-sub-category of this one). Reading the Strong Towns site for awhile about the "traditional development pattern" https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/?tag=traditional+development+pattern https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/?tag=traditional+develop... ie cities and towns wordwide pre-car makes me think that whatever idiosyncratic motivations for various intentional communities, in form they're just following the traditional development pattern. There's no need for idiosyncratic experimentation to take and apply everywhere lessons from millennia of human settlements that we've strayed from in the car era. I'm a fan of idiosyncratic experimentation but see zero evidence of potential (because of tiny scale) or need (above) for bubbling up of heuristics from them.
gumby 9y ago
> I feel like the dominant model of town organization in the USA leaves much to be desired. What is that dominant model? I've lived in Massachusetts and California. In both states what's common is that the town decides (pretty much "has decided" at this point, esp in Mass) to organize itself, writes a local charter, and has local folks run a council. Town hall meetings are open to everyone. The council members are amateurs. School districts and utility self govern and are rarely completely coextensional with towns. This can go wrong, of course, for example in Palo Alto the city managers weren't given enough oversight and overstaffed with middle managers; also real estate interests can take over the council for a while. But by an large it's not that different in principle. In California, in fact, most of the state isn't part of organized towns; most "towns" are just vaguely defined areas under the county rules; various groups do things like run a water utility, manage the local park, etc. In fact barely a quarter of the counties have charters; most themselves run under default state rules. So that's much closer to the Arden idea.
- mlinksva 9y ago
  I'm with you right up to the last sentence. Isn't minimizing private rents from land ownership central to the "Arden idea"? I don't see that anywhere in the organization of California jurisdictions.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Indeed, it's quite a rarity to find an unincorporated township in New England. Mine is just a letter. The rules are pretty minimal, the municipal services do not exist, and the large animals vastly outnumber the people. I read this article and was fascinated. I will visit there in my next expression of wanderlust. What a curious place.
- wonder_er 9y ago
  While I'm not too familiar with "the dominant model", I guess I should have clarified: > The results of the dominant model of town organization in the USA leaves much to be desired Way over-priced homes, auto-oriented urban/rural design, an excessive love for parking lots, houses all look the same... Towns across the US share way too much in common for it to be something that spontaneously arose out of millions of tiny decisions. The developed parts of California cannot be anywhere close to the Arden idea - there's endless rules, zoning restrictions, boards and commissions to try to sway, etc.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    The dominant model in the US has downright cheap homes. Partly because of the parking lots and auto-oriented organization (if you can keep building out, you have a lot less upwards pressure on price). CA/NY is not representative of home prices in most of the country. It's not perfect, but neither is the NY model, the London model, the Tokyo model, the Beijing model...
    - TimJYoung 9y ago
      Just to clarify: most of NY state has inexpensive housing (at least compared to NYC). Also, much of it is turn-of-the-century houses, not necessarily the 50s+ auto-oriented suburban tract houses, although it does have its share of those, also.
52-6F-62 9y ago
I imagine its population-dependent to some extent. I had never heard of Arden before this post and by god it looks beautiful. It seems important to note that it's population is ~439-450 people. I'm not in disagreement, though. I grew up in a small town (~4500-6000 people throughout my life there) and it had a mixed population between hardline skilled and unskilled labour in the steel and fishing industries, bikers, and aging hippies - as well as a small subsection of Government of Canada and University of Guelph environmental scientists. There was a notable difference in opinions for that reason. I imagine its simpler at this point in time to run a village society in that way with a group of like-minded, read people. Other kinds of lives lived by people tend to inform other kinds of opinions: I work hard all day, I don't want to think about that kind of thing, I understand a hierarchy with firm structure, I like to know who the boss is, etc. I'm oversimplifying it for the sake of being concise, and I hope my point is coming across. Hopefully when the political temper settles a little, those kinds of conversations about how life can be better can resume.

jawbone3 9y ago

> "The idea that children could be out without a parent hovering was just completely unknown to them," Macklem recalls. "And the fact that the kids talked to someone who they obviously knew but who was not a parent." I didn´t know the situation in the US was quite so dystopical that kids on their own was any surprise...

crooked-v 9y ago
http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/20/living/feat-md-free-range-parents-under-attack/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/20/living/feat-md-free-range-pare... http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-son-park/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-so... http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/07/mom-arrested-for-letting-kids-walk-to-mc http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/07/mom-arrested-for-letting-k...
- qznc 9y ago
  Wow. This is not a single police weirdo. This is three different states. Ok, it is not normal otherwise it would not be in the news. Still, moving to the US became scarier to me (and Silicon Valley is tempting). For a contrast, I'm in Germany. My oldest son will go to school next year. It is considered normal to train him now to go to and from kindergarten alone. The biggest perceived danger is crossing roads. The kid of an acquaintance uses the tram for a few stops on the way to school. The first week in first grade the mother escorted her. Then she was on her own. Not alone though. The tram is packed with kids and they look out for each other (more or less, they are still kids). Still, we also see that congestion at schools is increasingly a problem. More and more parents seem to drop of their kids at school.
  - sethhochberg 9y ago
    As with most things in the US, urban/rural/suburban and class divides matter much more than regional or state ones. In the urban metro areas I've lived as an adult, seeing kids take transit to school alone or in groups is totally normal - admittedly from a slightly older age than your example in Germany, but definitely still grade-school kids. In the suburbs where I grew up, it was typical for kids to ride bikes to school. There wasn't any transit other than the school district's buses, and many kids were dropped off by their parents in cars, but some degree of independence was still there. This was a middle-class suburban area outside of a major city in FL where most parents worked in two-income families. The horror stories you hear about "helicopter parenting" in the US mostly come from wealthier exurbs where, for lack of better way to put it, there aren't any real problems... so bored homemakers micro-manage every aspect of their community and worry themselves senseless about silly things. These are often master-planned communities, often built in isolated semi-rural areas, where it is difficult to go _anywhere_ without a car, and transit aside from buses to/from school is nonexistent, so the very idea of a child even having somewhere to go or something to do without a parent escorting them there in a car is seemingly insane. It contributes a lot to the perception that kids shouldn't be alone without an adult until they turn 16, can operate a car, and then can travel safely from the confines of a vehicle. Its horrible for a whole bunch of reasons. If you want to move to the US, there are definitely still plenty of areas where kids can a normal, independent young life - but especially in the SF Bay area, I'd be very careful about picking a town/neighborhood where such a thing is accepted. It won't be universal.

sutble 9y ago

>After the prisoners' sentences were completed, the town celebrated with a circus. The performance included an arrest of its own: A clown dressed as a cop entered the audience, grabbed a surprised Sinclair, and marched him away from the show. Surely the author meant to write a cop dressed as a clown?

ISKthrow 9y ago
Wat? No, a cown dressed like a cop. Pretty explicit. A cop dressed as a clown would not be recognized for anything else than a clown. A clown dressed as a cop will be seen as a clown dressed as a cop. Or maybe I'm crazy...
bmelton 9y ago
The previous paragraphs insist that they had no police department, so unless they skipped or abridged the timetable, it seems most likely that it was a clown dressed as a cop.

neogodless 9y ago

Well that was odd. Tried to read page two on my Android Oreo device, had "virus" like alerts springing up. Sorry, this is off topic, but I think there's reason to suspect that web page.

trav4225 9y ago
Lots of reasonably decent sites seem to participate in ad networks that apparently allow malicious ads that hijack browsers... It's not clear to me why this is still an unsolved problem after so many years... :-/
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Because the profits from serving the malware are concentrated while the harm is diffuse.

Animats 9y ago

I knew about Freehope, which is another single-tax community. But not this one.

mtg 9y ago
Fairhope! (grew up there)

LVTfan 9y ago

As a part time resident, and a passionate Georgist, I love the Ardens. The three villages function separately for governance, but socially they're one, and there is a lot going on. The history is fascinating. (If you have access to newspapers.com, read it chronologically. I'm still working through it.) If you're in the area in early September, don't miss the Arden Fair.

mlinksva 9y ago
Did you move for your passion, or did you learn your passion from living there? If you have the inclination, please add references to the relevant Wikipedia articles as you read old news! Thank you. :)
- LVTfan 9y ago
  I moved there because it was lovely, and was consistent with something I have long felt strongly about. My late grandparents were lifelong Georgists, and never mentioned the Ardens to me. (I'm a late-bloomer -- I shared their perception of the problems, but kept thinking there had to be another way to solve them; when I failed to find it, I looked more closely at what Henry George had to say, and found it very persuasive.) For a recent article, look at Michael Kinsley's, in the September Vanity Fair. But people from across many spectra embrace George's analysis and George's remedy; it is a third way, coming out of the traditions of classical economics, not the neo-classical economics that is widely taught today. George's most famous book was entitled "Progress and Poverty" ... it was dedicated, "to those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment." Its subtitle is a mouthful:"an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth ... The Remedy." The book is quite analytical, a logical analysis. If you want to see where it is going, jump to the final "book" before you read the rest. Or you might start with a collection of essays entitled "Social Problems." They still read well today, and, among other things, show why a Constitution written in the 18th century simply can't be frozen in time, and needs to be reconsidered in light of 21st century realities. Some of my favorite quotes are from "Social Problems." Both books are online and at Amazon or schalkenbach.org; there is also a fine modern abridgment of P&P, and audio is available at hgchicago.org.

rootw0rm 9y ago

I'm from a super tiny town in socal with ~35k people, i can't imagine living any place smaller than that.

trumpownsyou420 9y ago

weirdos.

jawns 9y ago

Delawarean here. Growing up, I had the impression that Arden was just a place for aged hippies, history buffs, and the overeducated idle class to have space to live out their utopian fantasies without bothering the rest of us. I mean, if you think about the town meetings in "Gilmore Girls," where you have these people who are really into town meetings, you probably know that they're meant to be an exaggerated parody of the handful of people who show up at town meetings and are really, uh, passionate about their viewpoints. Only in "Gilmore Girls," the whole town is like that. Well, I would much rather have them all in Arden, duking it out, than spread out more generally in North Wilmington and northern New Castle County, causing eye rolls everywhere. That said, Arden is not nearly as much of an insulated place anymore. I think, for the majority of residents, it's just an address and not a philosophy.

loteck 9y ago
Why is civic participation so eyeroll-inducing to you? My sense is that the groups you're rolling your eyes at have taken over the top levels of national government and are now working backwards to states and cities, largely thanks to reviving the lost act of participating.

rdl 9y ago

I’m not sure how I feel about LVT. It seems like the most fair form of taxation, but physical land is decreasingly tied to productivity and wealth, so it seems to make less sense than in the past.

spoonie 9y ago
Why are most “high-productivity” software and knowledge jobs in cities where land costs are high? I would argue that it’s because that land is productive! At least LVT would incentivize people to move to areas with cheaper land, or to increase density.
- majormajor 9y ago
  It's interesting to look at how that distribution of jobs has changed over the last 40 to 50 years, though, and whether or not seeking to reverse the centralization could be useful.
- mseebach 9y ago
  Software and knowledge jobs take very little space - just whatever a single employee takes up. Even in a small private office setup not much, but even less in open plans - here's perhaps a hit to why open plans are popular in offices that are predominantly on expensive land. There is very little space required for storage and for moving large objects around, no loading bays etc. A 10,000 employee software "plant" take up a lot less space than a 10,000 employee manufacturing plant. It's exactly because these industries are high-productivity (per land unit) that they are practical on high value land.
ScottBurson 9y ago
Land is absolutely still tied to productivity. Why do so many technically-oriented people want to live in the SF Bay area? Because of all the other such people who are already here, and all the opportunities that exist here for that reason.

chmaynard 9y ago

This version is formatted for printing: http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/14/delawares-odd-beautiful-conten/print http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/14/delawares-odd-beautifu...

agumonkey 9y ago

Henry George is said to be the inspiration behind the game Monopoly