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Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?

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Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?

#11

The founder of Dominos pizza built the city of Ave Maria, FL -- It gets high marks in the child safety/friendly category from the local press but feels suburban to me. The most famous example is probably Seaside, FL built buy Duany Plater-Zyberk, it was the set of "The Truman Show". The story is interesting they had to fight all these dumb zoning laws (eg. The Fire Department buys the biggest truck they can find and…

Could you share some of these blogs and podcasts?

Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?

#12

I have often wondered if it's possible to build a successful, large-scale community/commune that is secular and run by sane people who engage in minimal financial thievery of their supporters. Think Wild Wild Country but without insane murderous narcissistic assholes at the helm. From a political perspective what they did was actually pretty amazing. The fact that the feds ultimately just asked them to leave the coun…

Garden of Eden is a commune of people that grow their own food, use minimal electric, use water from a well, etc and then sell their produce and products online. They've faced some lovely treatment as well [1]. They were faced with a machine gun raid and day long detainment under the auspices of a drug warrant. No drugs were found. Following that they were raided by the city's Code Compliance Department who cut down and carted off various plants and 'accidentally' broke their irrigation lines with their trucks.

[1] - https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/North...

Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?

#13

Irvine, California is a subdivision of The Irvine Company, owned by one man, Donald Bren. To ensure alimony couldn't touch his $15 billion wealth, he had a family out of wedlock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company

Cool! Why didn't i hear about this before?

Why there are no other such examples? At least, this approach guarantees that there will be no slums: if slums start to form, the guy who owns the town will start losing billions, quickly, so he will do everything to evict those people.

Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?

#16

The founder of Dominos pizza built the city of Ave Maria, FL -- It gets high marks in the child safety/friendly category from the local press but feels suburban to me. The most famous example is probably Seaside, FL built buy Duany Plater-Zyberk, it was the set of "The Truman Show". The story is interesting they had to fight all these dumb zoning laws (eg. The Fire Department buys the biggest truck they can find and…

Could you share some of these blogs and podcasts?

Jim Kunstler's podcast is good when he doesn't veer off into peak oil civilizational collapse speculation http://kunstler.com/writings/podcast/

Granola Shotgun https://granolashotgun.com/

http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/

I really enjoyed the books 'The Great Good Place' by Oldenberg , 'Streets are for People' by Rudufsky and the Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler

Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?

#19

The founder of Dominos pizza built the city of Ave Maria, FL -- It gets high marks in the child safety/friendly category from the local press but feels suburban to me. The most famous example is probably Seaside, FL built buy Duany Plater-Zyberk, it was the set of "The Truman Show". The story is interesting they had to fight all these dumb zoning laws (eg. The Fire Department buys the biggest truck they can find and…

> The founder of Dominos pizza built the city of Ave Maria, FL -- It gets high marks in the child safety/friendly category from the local press but feels suburban to me.

That's kind of the point of suburbs - to be more child safe/friendly than the city. It's not a bug, it's a feature. (It may not be a feature that you personally want, though...)

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