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I would argue that, for better or worse, Marfa, TX in West Texas is a real manifestation of this essay. It's only a town of about 5000, completely walkable, and

I would argue that, for better or worse, Marfa, TX in West Texas is a real manifestation of this essay. It's only a town of about 5000, completely walkable, and homes that were selling for $20k before news got out that it was a secret artist enclave just 10 years ago are now going for north of $1 million (even more eye popping when the median single family home price in the most expensive metro areas of the state, Austin and Dallas, are around $500k). Outside the town is farmland and oil fields. Inside the town is a collection of bars, restaurants, hotels, museums, and high art, all from a once-dying/repurposed small town on a defunct train line. "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine. See (also mentioned in that article) Seaside, Florida. https://www.themanual.com/culture/marfa-texas/ https://www.themanual.com/culture/marfa-texas/ https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unlikely-art-oasis-in-a-desert-town https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unli...

helen___keller 5y ago
There are plenty of small towns that can be managed and organized according to the principles of the article, and personally I think it's a great idea. I'm referring more to the idea of building a small town, presumably starting from scratch, as if you were playing Sim City or Cities: Skylines. I've never heard of Marfa but wikipedia suggests it was originally built around the 1880s as a Railroad Water Stop. The analogue today would be a "town" around a highway rest stop, which is generally not going to be built at human scale or with pre-war zoning and architecture. > "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine Absolutely. The major issue here is that if you're building a small town from scratch, it's not a desirable place to live / visit until it is built. And it's not "built" until you have several hundred people, at least, living there. But those people aren't going to want to build houses and live there if it's not a desirable place to live. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.
- lmm 5y ago
  The whole point of deliberately starting a new town with human-scale architecture etc. is to get around that chicken-and-egg problem, precisely because moving to a highway rest stop town would have all the problems you mention.
klyrs 5y ago
So... a secretive group of artists could build a town, live there 'til the word gets out, sell at 10x the price, and move on to the next secret location? This sounds like a fun way to live.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Marfa isn't valuable because of a secretive bunch of artists, it is valuable because it has been exporting real estate appreciation from Manhattan for over fifty years. Judd, the artist who brought all the wealth to Marfa, bought the building at 101 Spring Street for nothing and throughout his life borrowed against its value to acquire property in Texas. Today the building is worth at least $100 million.
- closeparen 5y ago
  Substitute "move into a dead urban neighborhood" for "build a town" and you have the gentrification cycle everyone's been talking about for decades.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Right. If you build a new art-town, it's not gentrification.
jeffbee 5y ago
Marfa is the same population as advised in this article but it's ten times larger. There are plenty of recent examples of development on the scale that this article suggests. The area just to the west of Warm Springs BART station in Fremont, California is 90 acres. The New Urbanist polestar of Hercules, California is about 150 acres.
- thebradbain 5y ago
  It's true that it's legal geographic size is ~1.5 square miles. However if you look at Google Maps a good 30% of it is just empty/undeveloped land previously (still?) owned by the military. So yes, it's still bigger geographically, but it still only takes 15-20 minutes to walk from one end to the other; I've visited a few times. I'm not very familiar with either location you mentioned, but I would say for Marfa to be 3 hours away from the next-largest town (El Paso), have no commercial airport or passenger train line, and still be a self-sustaining walkable town is impressive. I'm possibly mistaken, but the first example you pointed out looks to be an apartment complex next to a train station within a larger city and Hercules, CA is a 20 square mile (maybe I'm looking at the wrong city?) suburb of SF; I don't think those are examples of what this article is saying?
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    The New Urbanist part of Hercules is very small and easy to overlook. It does not hit every point that the article mentions, but it is an example of some of them. https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0160237,-122.2779782,3a,75y,232.42h,93.69t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s0DNh9JQmrSpibd7ahPgrYA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0160237,-122.2779782,3a,75y,...
pryelluw 5y ago
I decided to browse available properties and it’s ridiculous: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/307-S-Dean-St_Marfa_TX_79843_M99705-40267 https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/307-S-Dean...
- oblio 5y ago
  0.5 baths???
  - zinckiwi 5y ago
    You clean your top half, then flip around and clean your bottom half.
  - turtlebits 5y ago
    Meaning no shower or bathtub. Just a sink a toilet.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Clearly that is for the half-acre lot, but still, I bet those bricks are probably worth more than the house. Reclaimed clay bricks are a thing: https://www.reclaimedbrick.com/ https://www.reclaimedbrick.com/
  - thebradbain 5y ago
    Lot size is funny in Texas -- not even 2 miles away from that listing you can get 5 acres for less. Of course, then you're not "in the town" https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Antelope-Hills-Rd-40-Marfa-TX-79843/2070925973_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Antelope-Hills-Rd-40-Marf...
  - pryelluw 5y ago
    I wasn’t aware of the reclaimed brick market. Thanks for posting. Seems rather strange but there’s probably some good reason to use the older bricks.
nonameiguess 5y ago
Marfa is a really weird and unique place. It was originally famous for UFO sightings and then somehow became that artists enclave and achieved some sort of cult status to the point that it was a prevalent pre-tinder dating app meme for women to have pictures in front of the fake Prada storefront art installation there. That made it a really hip place for anyone who knew it, and yeah, eventually word got out and now it's super expensive. But I don't see how that is repeatable. Trying to build a new town from scratch can't realistically have the plan of UFO sightings and cult-status house-size art installations to get people to want to live there.
- pram 5y ago
  Not UFO sightings, the main tourist trap was the Marfa lights. That was the primary draw in the 80s/90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights
pram 5y ago
Marfa is hilarious to me. I'm from west Texas and I've driven highway 90 dozens of times, there is literally nothing out there. A complete wasteland. It's painfully boring. I don't believe anyone buying these properties are living there year round. Alpine is a much more scenic town and it's just up the road. I'd probably buy a house there instead.
- qdog 5y ago
  Yeah, just the idea of getting to Marfa hurts me to think about. Made the drive from El Paso to Austin a few times, can't imagine regularly visiting that area for pleasure or wanting to live there.
  - yourapostasy 5y ago
    > ...just the idea of getting to Marfa hurts me to think about. I suspect there are quite a few owners of that Marfa property are flying and not driving in. Marfa Municipal airport as about 20+ airplanes per day [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_Municipal_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_Municipal_Airport
qdog 5y ago
Marfa is in the middle of nowhere, the jobs seem to be of the landscaper/service industry type unless you are arriving with money from somewhere else. Sounds more like a touristy set of rich estates at this point, I expect the laborers live in the surrounding area and drive into town just like a large city. I did some labor during HS and in the summer it was driving 20-40 miles from our small town in nowhere Texas for the jobs we did. During the early 80's oil boom there were several small towns in Texas that kinda looked like OP's model, but once the boom went to bust they started dying and never recovered. Probably around the Austin area in the 60's a lot of places looked more idyllic (there were no stoplights between downtown Austin and I think Lampasas at that point), but it's all sprawled out and become a Metropolis at this point. Not clear that any sufficiently attractive area would not end up being encompassed in suburbia or a high-end enclave (Westlake by Austin comes to mind).
- thebradbain 5y ago
  Eh, I don't know about that re: Marfa demographics. There's certainly been tension about property values forcing some out of town -- but the town is still majority Hispanic (67%) and the median household income is $39k. It's got attractiveness to tourists driving up property values, but it is very much still a real town with real people. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/marfa-tx/ https://datausa.io/profile/geo/marfa-tx/
  - qdog 5y ago
    I mean the people paying $150,000 for a lot in Marfa (looking at listing on Zillow) are probably not locals from those $39k income households. Perversely, the way property taxes in Texas work, this likely means that anyone under 65 is watching the property taxes climb faster than their income, increasing pressure to sell and move to a cheaper property. It's a real town, but the service folks are largely priced out at this point (although I'd expect this real estate bubble might not last as there might not be that many people willing to buy at Austin prices in Marfa).
    - lmm 5y ago
      > Perversely, the way property taxes in Texas work, this likely means that anyone under 65 is watching the property taxes climb faster than their income, increasing pressure to sell and move to a cheaper property. What's perverse about that? When there's suddenly high demand for a limited housing supply, we should encourage those who happened to randomly live in a particular place to consider selling to those who especially want to live in that place.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rmah 5y ago
The only reason the houses could possibly cost that much is if the town is restricting new construction. I.e. the old guard is making real estate there expensive.
chasd00 5y ago
I got married in Marathon and my wife and I spend a lot of time in and around Marta. That part of West Texas is pretty unique/strange for a number of reasons. I would hesitate before drawing any parallel between the area and anything else. Terelinqua is even worse/better, the population consists of corporate burnouts and bandits pretty much.
- ryanmarsh 5y ago
  Laughed at the bandit part. I grew up mule deer hunting in Terlingua and I recall nearly every person I met gave off that "fugitive from the law hiding out in the desert" vibe.
whymauri 5y ago
There's a few places like this popping up in Western and Northwestern Arkansas. There are enclaves of artistic and queer-friendly spaces.
brudgers 5y ago
Marfa started as railroad infrastructure and grew around the Army airfield (and chemical mortar firing range per Wikipedia) south of town. There’s room in West Texas for one of them. Nobody’s gonna build a second Dairy Queen on US 90 in Marathon or Valentine. But even with a DQ, living there is only practical because there’s a Walmart in Van Horne. Dallas and El Paso are too far for underwear. And of course Marfa is full of air conditioners. As is all of Texas…a place I suspect the article’s author has not spent much time…football ain’t played on pitches in Texas.

helen___keller 5y ago

There are plenty of small towns that can be managed and organized according to the principles of the article, and personally I think it's a great idea. I'm referring more to the idea of building a small town, presumably starting from scratch, as if you were playing Sim City or Cities: Skylines. I've never heard of Marfa but wikipedia suggests it was originally built around the 1880s as a Railroad Water Stop. The analogue today would be a "town" around a highway rest stop, which is generally not going to be built at human scale or with pre-war zoning and architecture. > "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine Absolutely. The major issue here is that if you're building a small town from scratch, it's not a desirable place to live / visit until it is built. And it's not "built" until you have several hundred people, at least, living there. But those people aren't going to want to build houses and live there if it's not a desirable place to live. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.

lmm 5y ago
The whole point of deliberately starting a new town with human-scale architecture etc. is to get around that chicken-and-egg problem, precisely because moving to a highway rest stop town would have all the problems you mention.

klyrs 5y ago

So... a secretive group of artists could build a town, live there 'til the word gets out, sell at 10x the price, and move on to the next secret location? This sounds like a fun way to live.

jeffbee 5y ago
Marfa isn't valuable because of a secretive bunch of artists, it is valuable because it has been exporting real estate appreciation from Manhattan for over fifty years. Judd, the artist who brought all the wealth to Marfa, bought the building at 101 Spring Street for nothing and throughout his life borrowed against its value to acquire property in Texas. Today the building is worth at least $100 million.
closeparen 5y ago
Substitute "move into a dead urban neighborhood" for "build a town" and you have the gentrification cycle everyone's been talking about for decades.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Right. If you build a new art-town, it's not gentrification.

jeffbee 5y ago

Marfa is the same population as advised in this article but it's ten times larger. There are plenty of recent examples of development on the scale that this article suggests. The area just to the west of Warm Springs BART station in Fremont, California is 90 acres. The New Urbanist polestar of Hercules, California is about 150 acres.

thebradbain 5y ago
It's true that it's legal geographic size is ~1.5 square miles. However if you look at Google Maps a good 30% of it is just empty/undeveloped land previously (still?) owned by the military. So yes, it's still bigger geographically, but it still only takes 15-20 minutes to walk from one end to the other; I've visited a few times. I'm not very familiar with either location you mentioned, but I would say for Marfa to be 3 hours away from the next-largest town (El Paso), have no commercial airport or passenger train line, and still be a self-sustaining walkable town is impressive. I'm possibly mistaken, but the first example you pointed out looks to be an apartment complex next to a train station within a larger city and Hercules, CA is a 20 square mile (maybe I'm looking at the wrong city?) suburb of SF; I don't think those are examples of what this article is saying?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The New Urbanist part of Hercules is very small and easy to overlook. It does not hit every point that the article mentions, but it is an example of some of them. https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0160237,-122.2779782,3a,75y,232.42h,93.69t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s0DNh9JQmrSpibd7ahPgrYA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0160237,-122.2779782,3a,75y,...

pryelluw 5y ago

I decided to browse available properties and it’s ridiculous: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/307-S-Dean-St_Marfa_TX_79843_M99705-40267 https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/307-S-Dean...

oblio 5y ago
0.5 baths???
- zinckiwi 5y ago
  You clean your top half, then flip around and clean your bottom half.
- turtlebits 5y ago
  Meaning no shower or bathtub. Just a sink a toilet.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Clearly that is for the half-acre lot, but still, I bet those bricks are probably worth more than the house. Reclaimed clay bricks are a thing: https://www.reclaimedbrick.com/ https://www.reclaimedbrick.com/
- thebradbain 5y ago
  Lot size is funny in Texas -- not even 2 miles away from that listing you can get 5 acres for less. Of course, then you're not "in the town" https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Antelope-Hills-Rd-40-Marfa-TX-79843/2070925973_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Antelope-Hills-Rd-40-Marf...
- pryelluw 5y ago
  I wasn’t aware of the reclaimed brick market. Thanks for posting. Seems rather strange but there’s probably some good reason to use the older bricks.

nonameiguess 5y ago

Marfa is a really weird and unique place. It was originally famous for UFO sightings and then somehow became that artists enclave and achieved some sort of cult status to the point that it was a prevalent pre-tinder dating app meme for women to have pictures in front of the fake Prada storefront art installation there. That made it a really hip place for anyone who knew it, and yeah, eventually word got out and now it's super expensive. But I don't see how that is repeatable. Trying to build a new town from scratch can't realistically have the plan of UFO sightings and cult-status house-size art installations to get people to want to live there.

pram 5y ago
Not UFO sightings, the main tourist trap was the Marfa lights. That was the primary draw in the 80s/90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights

pram 5y ago

Marfa is hilarious to me. I'm from west Texas and I've driven highway 90 dozens of times, there is literally nothing out there. A complete wasteland. It's painfully boring. I don't believe anyone buying these properties are living there year round. Alpine is a much more scenic town and it's just up the road. I'd probably buy a house there instead.

qdog 5y ago
Yeah, just the idea of getting to Marfa hurts me to think about. Made the drive from El Paso to Austin a few times, can't imagine regularly visiting that area for pleasure or wanting to live there.
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  > ...just the idea of getting to Marfa hurts me to think about. I suspect there are quite a few owners of that Marfa property are flying and not driving in. Marfa Municipal airport as about 20+ airplanes per day [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_Municipal_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_Municipal_Airport

qdog 5y ago

Marfa is in the middle of nowhere, the jobs seem to be of the landscaper/service industry type unless you are arriving with money from somewhere else. Sounds more like a touristy set of rich estates at this point, I expect the laborers live in the surrounding area and drive into town just like a large city. I did some labor during HS and in the summer it was driving 20-40 miles from our small town in nowhere Texas for the jobs we did. During the early 80's oil boom there were several small towns in Texas that kinda looked like OP's model, but once the boom went to bust they started dying and never recovered. Probably around the Austin area in the 60's a lot of places looked more idyllic (there were no stoplights between downtown Austin and I think Lampasas at that point), but it's all sprawled out and become a Metropolis at this point. Not clear that any sufficiently attractive area would not end up being encompassed in suburbia or a high-end enclave (Westlake by Austin comes to mind).

thebradbain 5y ago
Eh, I don't know about that re: Marfa demographics. There's certainly been tension about property values forcing some out of town -- but the town is still majority Hispanic (67%) and the median household income is $39k. It's got attractiveness to tourists driving up property values, but it is very much still a real town with real people. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/marfa-tx/ https://datausa.io/profile/geo/marfa-tx/
- qdog 5y ago
  I mean the people paying $150,000 for a lot in Marfa (looking at listing on Zillow) are probably not locals from those $39k income households. Perversely, the way property taxes in Texas work, this likely means that anyone under 65 is watching the property taxes climb faster than their income, increasing pressure to sell and move to a cheaper property. It's a real town, but the service folks are largely priced out at this point (although I'd expect this real estate bubble might not last as there might not be that many people willing to buy at Austin prices in Marfa).
  - lmm 5y ago
    > Perversely, the way property taxes in Texas work, this likely means that anyone under 65 is watching the property taxes climb faster than their income, increasing pressure to sell and move to a cheaper property. What's perverse about that? When there's suddenly high demand for a limited housing supply, we should encourage those who happened to randomly live in a particular place to consider selling to those who especially want to live in that place.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rmah 5y ago

The only reason the houses could possibly cost that much is if the town is restricting new construction. I.e. the old guard is making real estate there expensive.

chasd00 5y ago

I got married in Marathon and my wife and I spend a lot of time in and around Marta. That part of West Texas is pretty unique/strange for a number of reasons. I would hesitate before drawing any parallel between the area and anything else. Terelinqua is even worse/better, the population consists of corporate burnouts and bandits pretty much.

ryanmarsh 5y ago
Laughed at the bandit part. I grew up mule deer hunting in Terlingua and I recall nearly every person I met gave off that "fugitive from the law hiding out in the desert" vibe.

whymauri 5y ago

There's a few places like this popping up in Western and Northwestern Arkansas. There are enclaves of artistic and queer-friendly spaces.

brudgers 5y ago

Marfa started as railroad infrastructure and grew around the Army airfield (and chemical mortar firing range per Wikipedia) south of town. There’s room in West Texas for one of them. Nobody’s gonna build a second Dairy Queen on US 90 in Marathon or Valentine. But even with a DQ, living there is only practical because there’s a Walmart in Van Horne. Dallas and El Paso are too far for underwear. And of course Marfa is full of air conditioners. As is all of Texas…a place I suspect the article’s author has not spent much time…football ain’t played on pitches in Texas.