5 ms·
Sounds like a great test case for public intervention to shake up a bad market equilibrium: acquire large areas of land and build new cities and neighborhoods u
by cornholio 10mo ago
Sounds like a great test case for public intervention to shake up a bad market equilibrium: acquire large areas of land and build new cities and neighborhoods unencumbered by land use and zoning bylaws.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo agoThe places where cities make sense are generally the places where they already are. You could hypothetically build the trappings of a new city in North Dakota or West Texas, but who is going to move to a place which is just a bunch of empty buildings surrounded by farmland? You can already buy a house in such places for less than it costs for one in a major city but there is a reason that people don't. Whereas if you would just rezone the areas with high demand to allow new construction to actually happen there then you don't need the government to raise and spend a ton of money, all you need them to do is to stop prohibiting the thing people would otherwise be doing.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoI wonder, could you manufacture that? It seems to be happening in e.g. the middle east where they conjure up a city in the middle of the desert and just... create demand for a city there. Take SF, which has a lot of tech jobs that aren't tied to any geographical location. Build a new city, offices, a university, loads of housing and make that the tech / internet capital of the world.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo agoCould you manufacture that for like a trillion dollars? Maybe, but there are better things to spend a trillion dollars on. That's the entire Medicare budget. Could you manufacture that for like a billion dollars? No.
- sokoloff 10mo agoThat’s the Medicare budget for one year. Cities have a useful life span measured in multiple centuries. (I also think it’s impractical to pull off, with Las Vegas being perhaps the most recent long-term conjuring of a city from “not much”, but comparing a multi-century stream of value to an annual consumption budget line seems like a strange way to make your case.)
- AnthonyMouse 10mo agoYou'd have to spend that amount of money in one year (or thereabouts) in order to make it work. It's also not really creating much new value so much as moving it around.
- fooker 10mo agoAll the 'large areas of land' that people want to live in already have dense cities. This sort of ideas have been tried again and again, and it falls apart because people just don't want to move there. Would you be enthusiastic about relocating if this was forty minutes away from Vegas in the desert?
- RealityVoid 10mo agoPeople have and will move in the middle of nowhere if it offers them a way to make a living.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo agoHow does a bunch of empty buildings in the middle of the desert offer them a way to make a living?
- RealityVoid 10mo agoIt doesn't. But it could. My point is if you offer something attractive besides just housing, people will come. Imagine company towns or things like that. They work because people get jobs there.
- fooker 10mo agoThat's exactly the point. The areas where you could easily do something that provides work for a lot of people are already occupied by large cities, near river deltas, trade routes and coastal areas good for ports. The only recent exception is SpaceX's Starbase town. And they could do this because of a very new 'requirement', frequently launch rockets where you have a south facing coastline as close as possible to the equator.
- RealityVoid 10mo agoThe "requirement" might be in this case "has cheap land and nice views". I see no reason you could not build such a thing, seems just difficult to kickstart.