There was a great TED talk about new VC funded enclave cities with modern laws. Idea soon got corrupted and dismissed as tax evasion schemes.
This one? https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?
#22https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-arizona-smart-city-t...
Didn't realize this! Interesting take here about how this actually just a run-of-the-mill sprawling Phoenix development that Gates invested in just for profit: https://slate.com/business/2017/11/bill-gates-smart-city-in-...
Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?
#23The 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...)
Yes that's a major reason people move to the suburbs (but not actually why they were created in the first place), but on the other hand you can build a safe town where the buildings are close together.
Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?
#24Check out Rajneeshpuram [0], built by the Rajneeshees in Oregon. There's a Netflix documentary about it now, called "Wild, Wild Country". Definitely worth checking out.
Besides all the controversy surrounding it, it was actually a pretty interesting example of "buying land and building a city from scratch".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Country
Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?
#25Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?
#26Irvine, 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.
That's not how you guarantee there'll be no slums though. You just guarantee you move the slums somewhere else, which is not really a solution for anyone.
Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?
#27Has anybody heard from YC's New Cities project, by the way? Should we assume it's disbanded? https://cities.ycr.org/
Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?
#28I 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…
Good luck getting people to follow someone who is not a narcissistic asshole ;-)
Re: Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not how you guarantee there'll be no slums though. You just guarantee you move the slums somewhere else, which is not really a solution for anyone.
Sorry for late answer, but why not? Slums are not a problem as such. They are only a problem when they are close to normal residential areas, because they decrease property values there. If slums are somewhere where normal people won't see them, i am fine with them.