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Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

theguardian.com

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Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#51

Post by dimva »

xg15 wrote: post #48
dimva wrote: post #45

Reading the comments here and elsewhere about this project is so vindicating for me. In cities, NIMBYs will say "why should we build anything here, just move away and build your dream city somewhere else". I knew that there was no way that "somewhere else" would welcome construction of a new city, because there's people living out in the boonies everywhere. Those people moved to the middle of nowhere because they wan…

What I don't quite get is how government of this city is being planned. Right now, it's basically Disney world, a huge privately owned development project. Will this eventually become a municipality of its own or are they planning to build a completely privately-owned city? (Not from the US though, so I might be missing some details on how local government works in California) Also yes, social housing, walkable neigh…

Honestly, if you want a truly progressive city government in California, you probably need it to be 100% private. If it's public, the regressive California constitution comes into effect, and now you can't make property taxes be high enough to pay for city services, you can't increase the property taxes on long-term landowners, and those low tax rates get inherited by the property owners' heirs. You have to pay for city services with income/sales taxes. It's basically feudalism.

With a 100% private development, you can have a land value tax - it's legal if you just call it rent, and you can increase it however much you want (at most it's capped to 5% + inflation, a lot higher than the 2% (not inflation adjusted) cap for property tax increases).

And no, this won't be social housing. NIMBYs will say they want social housing, but they won't vote in taxes to pay for it (in CA, every tax increase must pass in a ballot referendum), nor do they actually want it built anywhere, either. Because only private money is being used for this development, it will mostly be market-rate housing, and that's fine. Or most likely, it will be nothing, since rural NIMBYs will block it.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#52

Post by xg15 »

dimva wrote: post #51
xg15 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't quite get is how government of this city is being planned. Right now, it's basically Disney world, a huge privately owned development project. Will this eventually become a municipality of its own or are they planning to build a completely privately-owned city? (Not from the US though, so I might be missing some details on how local government works in California) Also yes, social housing, walkable neigh…

Honestly, if you want a truly progressive city government in California, you probably need it to be 100% private. If it's public, the regressive California constitution comes into effect, and now you can't make property taxes be high enough to pay for city services, you can't increase the property taxes on long-term landowners, and those low tax rates get inherited by the property owners' heirs. You have to pay for c…

Ok, but wasn't the whole point of this that market-rare housing is becoming unaffordable, hence so many homeless? So how will this project then help reduce the homeless population?

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#53

Post by bluescrn »

trilbyglens wrote: post #50
bluescrn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'gated community' on a much larger scale. Not open to the public. Few entrances/exits. Big walls/fences. Private security force. Residents booted out when they lose their big tech jobs. Suddenly the utopian vision looks pretty bleak.

This is fully what I expect it to be. Peaceable by keeping out unwanted people (poor people). I don't think we have it in us as Americans to truly build a proper egalitarian society. We don't really know what that looks like. As a substitute we use whitewashing and just shuffle around the unfortunates out of sight and pretend it's been fixed. If this "city" doesn't have low income housing and community social service…

They can automate away an increasing number of low-wage jobs, but they'll still want people to clean their offices and serve overpriced coffee.

Maybe they'll have service entrances and hidden car parks where they let the low-wage workers in and out. Conceal the fact that eco-utopia still relies on a whole lot of road traffic bringing people and goods in and out. Really, it'll be an 'eco-utopia theme park'.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#54

Post by dimva »

xg15 wrote: post #52
dimva wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if you want a truly progressive city government in California, you probably need it to be 100% private. If it's public, the regressive California constitution comes into effect, and now you can't make property taxes be high enough to pay for city services, you can't increase the property taxes on long-term landowners, and those low tax rates get inherited by the property owners' heirs. You have to pay for c…

Ok, but wasn't the whole point of this that market-rare housing is becoming unaffordable, hence so many homeless? So how will this project then help reduce the homeless population?

Any increase in the number of homes reduces the homeless population. There are so many homeless people in CA mostly because there just aren't enough homes for everyone there. It won't completely solve homelessness - many people living on the streets now need social services and therapeutic help before they can afford any rent again, but there's plenty of homeless people in California with fulltime jobs paying like $30k/year (around the median salary in France). If you build enough homes, these people would be able to find housing, and social services would be less strained for the people who really do need help.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#55

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

ffhhttt wrote: post #46
WeylandYutani wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gentrification for me but not for thee.

Well supposedly after all the rich people move into this “utopian” willing there will be more housing left for everyone else?

Yeah right we're a free society in the West are we, so you're free to buy my disused Santa Barbara property or the condo with view onto Central Park that I only saw once after buying it, or sleep under a bridge or whatever. Suit yourself this is a free country.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#56

Post by poisonborz »

I see this, NEOM/Palm Islands, Eko Atlantic, Sidewalk Toronto and compare it to large urban projects from decades ago, like Brasília... is it even possible to design a city from the grounds up? To just straight up select some plot of land and build infrastructure and create a community that otherwise needed hundreds of years of organic development with existing cities?

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#57

Post by timeon »

xg15 wrote: post #49
bretpiatt wrote: post #24

The renderings did not help me visualise the real possibility. For perspective on how big 55,000 acres is, 640 per square mile, is 86 square miles, enough land to hold the city limits of Choose 2 of 3: Paris, Barcelona, and San Francisco. Paris city limits, 2.1 million residents, 41 square miles Barcelona city limits, 1.6 million residents, 39 square miles San Francisco city, 800k residents, 47 square miles

There is the old saying "for Europeans, 100 years is nothing; for Americans, 100 miles is nothing". So I'm not sure you can compare areas with radically different density. If I got all the debates about US zoning and building sensibilities right, then it's very unlikely they'll try to build high-density apartment blocks there like in Barcelona or Paris.

If they really want to create sustainable city, they need to count in density.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#58

Post by timeon »

WeylandYutani wrote: post #42
oulipo wrote: post #15

Lol, their dream is Europe, basically. Could be a good tagline: Europe, the utopia of Silicon Valley elites

No. Europe without the taxes. There aren't crackhead zombies shuffling through Dutch cities and the roads are immaculately paved. And that takes a ton of taxation. Utopia- or trying to get to it- takes money. And I question American elites willingness to pay for it or they would have voted for Sanders.

Instead of taxes there will be subscription.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#59

Post by CaptainZapp »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #9

This is a risky plan that would either fail woefully or see unprecedented success. I’m not American, so my opinion hardly matters here, but I wish to see a new successful city built from scratch…I’ve always pondered about the extreme difficulty of building and keeping cities in shape, and I’ll be amazed if someone actually pulls it off.

> but I wish to see a new successful city built from scratch…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia

There may be other examples.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#60

Post by timeon »

stareatgoats wrote: post #7
userbinator wrote: post #4

In practice, utopia usually becomes dystopia.

Agree, but why? It's an interesting theoretical question when you think about it. Is it because people who have the money and means have a skewed concept of the world making them incapable of constructing utopias/well functioning "synthetic societies", or is it more fundamentally impossible? And in the latter case, why then should we even try to improve society?

Ideas needs to adapt when meeting reality.
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