6 ms·

How to build the world's most extraordinary town

73 points by hammerbrostime 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
tryitnow 15y ago
Interesting. I think this incarnation of the idea is overly idealistic, but if it were more market-oriented and bit more small scale (think neghiborhood instead of town) it could be doable and not a bad way to fight against unsustainable real estate valuations.
jackvalentine 15y ago
There will be massive problems with planning laws. Sad, but I can't think that there will not be. I'd love to live in a town like this, where I can built a 1-2 person house of significantly smaller square footage for $30,000ish but I think without the power of an established player, or getting everyone who pledges money to pay up front and form a corporation before spending millions on lawyers this will go nowhere.
wooster 15y ago
A new 10,000 person town in the North Bay? Great. Except for the county plans for real estate in the counties (20 years each), the zoning laws, the inconvenient lack of open subdivided land, the $120,000 per structure planning/permitting/inspection overhead for new construction, etc, etc. This isn't even close to realistic.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  You may have noticed that they're going to apply the power of the internet and social networking. As you may know, the internet and social networking are perfect tools for drawing the attention of many people to tedious legalities for long spans of time.
  - wickedchicken 15y ago
    The success of YouTube comments and Android Market ratings resoundingly confirms this.
- bherms 15y ago
  10,000 home town. Assume each home houses more than one person and you're looking at 10,000-40,000 or so people. Irrelevant to how terrible (well, unrealistic) of an idea it is, but worth noting.
mkramlich 15y ago
"Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable men." a tip of the hat to whoever's behind this
buff-a 15y ago
Is it just going to be Alphas in this brave new town?
jacques_chester 15y ago
I'd suggest picking a part of the world with less onerous planning laws. Texas, perhaps. For Europeans, Germany has a constitutional 'right to build'.
- ctdonath 15y ago
  Yesterday I stumbled across http://www.cheaplandinamerica.com http://www.cheaplandinamerica.com - among other options you can get 643 acres in TX for $127K. On a related note, sites like http://tinyhouseblog.com/ http://tinyhouseblog.com/ http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/ http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/ depict tiny homes at low cost & complexity. Getting 10,000 people signed up to commit $2.5B for a turnkey socialist utopia may be rather optimistic, but a low-entry-cost growth-oriented plan might work. Put in a road, well, and 3G/4G tower and get this project started!
davidw 15y ago
Sounds interesting, but a couple of points: 1) I live pretty close to someplace with a claim to be one of the more extraordinary towns in the world: http://bit.ly/r2JHIn http://bit.ly/r2JHIn 2) Universal health care & other benefits seem like it might be a lot to chew off. Good on them for giving things a try though.
- hezekiah 15y ago
  Yeah I was thinking, why don't they just move to Europe?
dodo53 15y ago
It's quite a community selection bias to ask people to pay for houses before the whole town is constructed - presumably towards people who are already pretty wealthy (or incredibly risk-tolerant). I also wonder with that kind of money and momentum whether you could e.g. buy a neighbourhood of Detroit and regenerate it.
Klonoar 15y ago
The tone of this site comes across as if it was written by a bunch of hippies with little knowledge of how the world (or people in general) work. This is a process that will take years to even get started properly. They try to condense it into 4 steps, but... well, let's break this down. - Need 10k enrollees. The definition of "enrollee" seems loose here, so given some mindless campaigning this is actually the easy part. Let's give it a modest 3 months. - Ah, nice, so now that we've supposedly got enough people, we need to spin up a little marketing campaign to get people to sign off on it. Alas, this isn't a feel good movie, so we're going to give this a nice... six months (being pretty generous here). - Oh, shit, uhh... hey guys, you all also need to be pre-approved for loans. We didn't really do anything to check this out when we got you all mentally invested (if you're even still interested by this point). We're lucky if we get half of you! Allocate at least a year for this, since there won't be the 10k people that originally got onboard, and numbers need to be shored up again. - Step three begins when we get a board to actually approve all of this. There's really no guarantee this part will work; that said, if it does, we're saying 1.5 years for all of the basic setup. - Step four, huzzah! We're building homes... for another 1.5 years. Can't live here just yet! No worries, though, we've got a super high speed build process... hey, wait, you're not listening, are you? There are so many pitfalls with this it's not even funny (and I'm being incredibly generous with the numbers above). I'm guessing the people behind this are from the Bay area; surprised they never heard of a drop off rate. ;P Speaking of the people behind this, who are they? There's absolutely no information on this site explaining why you should ever bother placing some level of trust in the efforts spearheaded by these people. Then again, maybe this entire thing is a joke. I almost felt certain of it when I read this line: This step is all about social networking. We need 10,000 enrollees to complete this step. Tell your friends, neighbors, cousins, distant acquaintances, cats, dogs, and anyone who will listen. If everyone does this, we will finish this step in about twenty five minutes.
- tomelders 15y ago
  Yeah, it's probably going to be really difficult. May as well not even bother trying. Best to just pick holes in it and offer up no constructive criticism. Well done you (slow clap) I'm so tired of people shooting stuff down for the sake of it.
IAnsari 15y ago
Man, I'd freaking love to do this.. If only my wife felt the same way.. FML..
kolinko 15y ago
0% unemployment? Communists tried that a couple of times, never worked. I wonder how they're planning to be different..
- PakG1 15y ago
  To say nothing of those who want to take a break deliberately... :)
  - sologoub 15y ago
    If you deliberately take yourself out of the labor force, you are not unemployed according to the rules used to gather official statistics ;)
- steve-howard 15y ago
  True that. If we pretend they're not talking about frictional (between jobs) or structural (tech makes people redundant) unemployment, they seem to be claiming that they can eliminate the kind of cyclical unemployment that happens when the world economy goes down the drain. I'd be fascinated if the Power of Social Marketing can fix that.
wickedchicken 15y ago
I legitimately can't tell if this is a troll site or not. "In step four the town chartered bank sells $2.5 Billion in prime mortgage backed securities and construction begins." Groupon jokes aside, who trusts random guys on the internet with 2.5 billion?
noahth 15y ago
exactly one forum post, and it appears to be spam. kudos for the raw ambition though.
- hammerbrostime 15y ago
  Nope, not spam. I'm just a long time lurker.
  - Samuel_Michon 15y ago
    I think Noah was talking about the Omega forum (http://omegaproject.us/index.php/forum http://omegaproject.us/index.php/forum), not HN.
rorrr 15y ago
To build the world's most extraordinary town you first must be outside of US jurisdiction. I suggest you build a modular island out of plastic bottles instead.
- ctdonath 15y ago
  Plastic bottles aside, that was the goal of the libertarian-oriented http://oceania.org/ http://oceania.org/ project.
0ffw0rlder 15y ago
This looks like a leftist version of the free state project, but with slightly more cool-aid.
becomevocal 15y ago
I'm thinking a campaign where they get 'the internet' to all pitch in and buy $25 sponsored bricks would work better. I would do it, knowing my brick might never materialize. Now if a lot of people did that, then you could start offsetting costs to the point where people might actually buy a house.
kokey 15y ago
This is brilliant, they should do this in many regions around the world. Now that we are running out of communist states because they are failing, we need new working examples of why it's a bad idea.
gotrythis 15y ago
I know of a group of people doing something similar near where I live. They have successful serial eco entrepreneurs, experts in land acquisition, builders, teachers, and several doctors, involved at the higher levels. Not exactly a bunch of hippies. (Edit: If they were doing it somewhere more sensible, as in warmer, I'd be on their board as well. I think people should be encouraged to create intentional eco communities.) They want to have full control and not all of the usual infrastructure required for a town like sewers, roads, etc. One of the major problems of course, is zoning laws, which can be circumvented by setting it up as a university... or a religion. I skimmed through the omegaproject site and didn't see where it was planned or who was behind it, two things that would help. Without knowing more about the people involved, it does come across as suspect.
brudgers 15y ago
>"pre-sell the homes, and use the profits to create the most extraordinary town ever built." Profits are what is left over after you build everything. When pre-sales create profits, you have a scam.
Aviwein77 15y ago
Oh man, where is that 250 grand I had lying around... :) Seems like this site is coming under a lot of harsh comments. I am not sure about the sustainability, or even the ability of something like this being created. But (to use their term) with the power of the internet you can reach those who do know how to do it. Someone who knows all the legality of something like this might never have an idea like this. I think the point was 'Hey if realtors can do it, we can too and turn the profit into something useful'. If a realtor knew how to do something like this than it wouldn't take too much to assume that other people would know how to accomplish something like this. From the posts you prove this, you have more insight into this than the creators, but the idea has to start somewhere. One would assume that if they are hoping to build a grand community then they would be willing to take suggestions from their community as to how to build this community. Just because it is idealistic, and secretly maybe you want to be a part of it, doesn't mean it is going to fail.
GoGlobal 15y ago
The most important question is not about the technical etc. of the project per se, but rather about: How can a project like this gain enough traction to really get the first 20-30% funding. At this time (and by showing prominent investors etc.) it could take-off. In it's core the marketing of visions are not different to webpages... They should: 1. Reduce the core msg to 1-2 Sentences ON TOP 2. Give it a better layout and support it with pictures 3. Give examples of interested people etc. and how this project could benefit them ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS 4. Overall a better structure... it's too confusing atm
Sukotto 15y ago
I remember a similar initiative on Slashdot about 10 years ago. The goal there was to get a whole bunch of tech people to all move to the same state and work together as a (mostly) unified voting block to make that state a great place for tech people to live. It seemed a lot better thought out than the OP's plan. iirc, they picked New Hampshire. I don't have a bookmark and my googlefu is failing me. Can anyone else confirm that memory for me? [EDIT] thanks waqf . Yes, those were the guys. Browsing their site, they seem a lot more nutjob than I remember them being. I wonder if that's just me getting old (get off my lawn!), me adding a rosy sheen to my memory, or them shifting focus over the years. [EDIT 2] Looking at their original manifesto it's a combination of me getting old, and a rosy memory. If anything, they've gotten less nutjoby over the years.
- waqf 15y ago
  You're thinking of http://freestateproject.org/ http://freestateproject.org/. It's moving pretty slowly, but they claim it's not dead.
CurtHagenlocher 15y ago
You can't build an extraordinary community. You have to grow it.
SudarshanP 15y ago
http://seasteading.org/ http://seasteading.org/ is an idea on similar lines by the free market libertarians and http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ for the more communist minded libertarians led by Jaques Fresco.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Interesting. I think this incarnation of the idea is overly idealistic, but if it were more market-oriented and bit more small scale (think neghiborhood instead of town) it could be doable and not a bad way to fight against unsustainable real estate valuations.

jackvalentine 15y ago

There will be massive problems with planning laws. Sad, but I can't think that there will not be. I'd love to live in a town like this, where I can built a 1-2 person house of significantly smaller square footage for $30,000ish but I think without the power of an established player, or getting everyone who pledges money to pay up front and form a corporation before spending millions on lawyers this will go nowhere.

wooster 15y ago

A new 10,000 person town in the North Bay? Great. Except for the county plans for real estate in the counties (20 years each), the zoning laws, the inconvenient lack of open subdivided land, the $120,000 per structure planning/permitting/inspection overhead for new construction, etc, etc. This isn't even close to realistic.

jacques_chester 15y ago
You may have noticed that they're going to apply the power of the internet and social networking. As you may know, the internet and social networking are perfect tools for drawing the attention of many people to tedious legalities for long spans of time.
- wickedchicken 15y ago
  The success of YouTube comments and Android Market ratings resoundingly confirms this.
bherms 15y ago
10,000 home town. Assume each home houses more than one person and you're looking at 10,000-40,000 or so people. Irrelevant to how terrible (well, unrealistic) of an idea it is, but worth noting.

mkramlich 15y ago

"Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable men." a tip of the hat to whoever's behind this

buff-a 15y ago

Is it just going to be Alphas in this brave new town?

jacques_chester 15y ago

I'd suggest picking a part of the world with less onerous planning laws. Texas, perhaps. For Europeans, Germany has a constitutional 'right to build'.

ctdonath 15y ago
Yesterday I stumbled across http://www.cheaplandinamerica.com http://www.cheaplandinamerica.com - among other options you can get 643 acres in TX for $127K. On a related note, sites like http://tinyhouseblog.com/ http://tinyhouseblog.com/ http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/ http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/ depict tiny homes at low cost & complexity. Getting 10,000 people signed up to commit $2.5B for a turnkey socialist utopia may be rather optimistic, but a low-entry-cost growth-oriented plan might work. Put in a road, well, and 3G/4G tower and get this project started!

davidw 15y ago

Sounds interesting, but a couple of points: 1) I live pretty close to someplace with a claim to be one of the more extraordinary towns in the world: http://bit.ly/r2JHIn http://bit.ly/r2JHIn 2) Universal health care & other benefits seem like it might be a lot to chew off. Good on them for giving things a try though.

hezekiah 15y ago
Yeah I was thinking, why don't they just move to Europe?

dodo53 15y ago

It's quite a community selection bias to ask people to pay for houses before the whole town is constructed - presumably towards people who are already pretty wealthy (or incredibly risk-tolerant). I also wonder with that kind of money and momentum whether you could e.g. buy a neighbourhood of Detroit and regenerate it.

Klonoar 15y ago

The tone of this site comes across as if it was written by a bunch of hippies with little knowledge of how the world (or people in general) work. This is a process that will take years to even get started properly. They try to condense it into 4 steps, but... well, let's break this down. - Need 10k enrollees. The definition of "enrollee" seems loose here, so given some mindless campaigning this is actually the easy part. Let's give it a modest 3 months. - Ah, nice, so now that we've supposedly got enough people, we need to spin up a little marketing campaign to get people to sign off on it. Alas, this isn't a feel good movie, so we're going to give this a nice... six months (being pretty generous here). - Oh, shit, uhh... hey guys, you all also need to be pre-approved for loans. We didn't really do anything to check this out when we got you all mentally invested (if you're even still interested by this point). We're lucky if we get half of you! Allocate at least a year for this, since there won't be the 10k people that originally got onboard, and numbers need to be shored up again. - Step three begins when we get a board to actually approve all of this. There's really no guarantee this part will work; that said, if it does, we're saying 1.5 years for all of the basic setup. - Step four, huzzah! We're building homes... for another 1.5 years. Can't live here just yet! No worries, though, we've got a super high speed build process... hey, wait, you're not listening, are you? There are so many pitfalls with this it's not even funny (and I'm being incredibly generous with the numbers above). I'm guessing the people behind this are from the Bay area; surprised they never heard of a drop off rate. ;P Speaking of the people behind this, who are they? There's absolutely no information on this site explaining why you should ever bother placing some level of trust in the efforts spearheaded by these people. Then again, maybe this entire thing is a joke. I almost felt certain of it when I read this line: This step is all about social networking. We need 10,000 enrollees to complete this step. Tell your friends, neighbors, cousins, distant acquaintances, cats, dogs, and anyone who will listen. If everyone does this, we will finish this step in about twenty five minutes.

tomelders 15y ago
Yeah, it's probably going to be really difficult. May as well not even bother trying. Best to just pick holes in it and offer up no constructive criticism. Well done you (slow clap) I'm so tired of people shooting stuff down for the sake of it.

IAnsari 15y ago

Man, I'd freaking love to do this.. If only my wife felt the same way.. FML..

kolinko 15y ago

0% unemployment? Communists tried that a couple of times, never worked. I wonder how they're planning to be different..

PakG1 15y ago
To say nothing of those who want to take a break deliberately... :)
- sologoub 15y ago
  If you deliberately take yourself out of the labor force, you are not unemployed according to the rules used to gather official statistics ;)
steve-howard 15y ago
True that. If we pretend they're not talking about frictional (between jobs) or structural (tech makes people redundant) unemployment, they seem to be claiming that they can eliminate the kind of cyclical unemployment that happens when the world economy goes down the drain. I'd be fascinated if the Power of Social Marketing can fix that.

wickedchicken 15y ago

I legitimately can't tell if this is a troll site or not. "In step four the town chartered bank sells $2.5 Billion in prime mortgage backed securities and construction begins." Groupon jokes aside, who trusts random guys on the internet with 2.5 billion?

noahth 15y ago

exactly one forum post, and it appears to be spam. kudos for the raw ambition though.

hammerbrostime 15y ago
Nope, not spam. I'm just a long time lurker.
- Samuel_Michon 15y ago
  I think Noah was talking about the Omega forum (http://omegaproject.us/index.php/forum http://omegaproject.us/index.php/forum), not HN.

rorrr 15y ago

To build the world's most extraordinary town you first must be outside of US jurisdiction. I suggest you build a modular island out of plastic bottles instead.

ctdonath 15y ago
Plastic bottles aside, that was the goal of the libertarian-oriented http://oceania.org/ http://oceania.org/ project.

0ffw0rlder 15y ago

This looks like a leftist version of the free state project, but with slightly more cool-aid.

becomevocal 15y ago

I'm thinking a campaign where they get 'the internet' to all pitch in and buy $25 sponsored bricks would work better. I would do it, knowing my brick might never materialize. Now if a lot of people did that, then you could start offsetting costs to the point where people might actually buy a house.

kokey 15y ago

This is brilliant, they should do this in many regions around the world. Now that we are running out of communist states because they are failing, we need new working examples of why it's a bad idea.

gotrythis 15y ago

I know of a group of people doing something similar near where I live. They have successful serial eco entrepreneurs, experts in land acquisition, builders, teachers, and several doctors, involved at the higher levels. Not exactly a bunch of hippies. (Edit: If they were doing it somewhere more sensible, as in warmer, I'd be on their board as well. I think people should be encouraged to create intentional eco communities.) They want to have full control and not all of the usual infrastructure required for a town like sewers, roads, etc. One of the major problems of course, is zoning laws, which can be circumvented by setting it up as a university... or a religion. I skimmed through the omegaproject site and didn't see where it was planned or who was behind it, two things that would help. Without knowing more about the people involved, it does come across as suspect.

brudgers 15y ago

>"pre-sell the homes, and use the profits to create the most extraordinary town ever built." Profits are what is left over after you build everything. When pre-sales create profits, you have a scam.

Aviwein77 15y ago

Oh man, where is that 250 grand I had lying around... :) Seems like this site is coming under a lot of harsh comments. I am not sure about the sustainability, or even the ability of something like this being created. But (to use their term) with the power of the internet you can reach those who do know how to do it. Someone who knows all the legality of something like this might never have an idea like this. I think the point was 'Hey if realtors can do it, we can too and turn the profit into something useful'. If a realtor knew how to do something like this than it wouldn't take too much to assume that other people would know how to accomplish something like this. From the posts you prove this, you have more insight into this than the creators, but the idea has to start somewhere. One would assume that if they are hoping to build a grand community then they would be willing to take suggestions from their community as to how to build this community. Just because it is idealistic, and secretly maybe you want to be a part of it, doesn't mean it is going to fail.

GoGlobal 15y ago

The most important question is not about the technical etc. of the project per se, but rather about: How can a project like this gain enough traction to really get the first 20-30% funding. At this time (and by showing prominent investors etc.) it could take-off. In it's core the marketing of visions are not different to webpages... They should: 1. Reduce the core msg to 1-2 Sentences ON TOP 2. Give it a better layout and support it with pictures 3. Give examples of interested people etc. and how this project could benefit them ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS 4. Overall a better structure... it's too confusing atm

Sukotto 15y ago

I remember a similar initiative on Slashdot about 10 years ago. The goal there was to get a whole bunch of tech people to all move to the same state and work together as a (mostly) unified voting block to make that state a great place for tech people to live. It seemed a lot better thought out than the OP's plan. iirc, they picked New Hampshire. I don't have a bookmark and my googlefu is failing me. Can anyone else confirm that memory for me? [EDIT] thanks waqf . Yes, those were the guys. Browsing their site, they seem a lot more nutjob than I remember them being. I wonder if that's just me getting old (get off my lawn!), me adding a rosy sheen to my memory, or them shifting focus over the years. [EDIT 2] Looking at their original manifesto it's a combination of me getting old, and a rosy memory. If anything, they've gotten less nutjoby over the years.

waqf 15y ago
You're thinking of http://freestateproject.org/ http://freestateproject.org/. It's moving pretty slowly, but they claim it's not dead.

CurtHagenlocher 15y ago

You can't build an extraordinary community. You have to grow it.

SudarshanP 15y ago

http://seasteading.org/ http://seasteading.org/ is an idea on similar lines by the free market libertarians and http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ for the more communist minded libertarians led by Jaques Fresco.