Lol, their dream is Europe, basically. Could be a good tagline: Europe, the utopia of Silicon Valley elites
And what's wrong with that? If European urban design/structure is working well why not replicate it?
Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
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Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#62Lol, their dream is Europe, basically. Could be a good tagline: Europe, the utopia of Silicon Valley elites
And yet even if successful it'll be more Disneyland than an actual real living European city. Sleeping Beauty's Castle instead of Schloss Neuschwanstein.
North American elites have always wanted the status and style of their former colonial superiors. Just with their own detached libertarian spin on it, without all the annoying social obligations and community and tiresome history and 'authenticity'.
Here you won't need a year of compulsory community service or high taxes to get access; just need a degree from Stanford and the ability to make some really compelling PowerPoint presentations.
Every time we'd go down to the Googleplex for work, my friend and I would make jokes about the movie Elyssium. But this is taking it to the next level.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#63I personally think this project is awesome. Everyone visits Europe, and asks why can’t we have beautiful walkable cities here, and the reason we can’t is because of regressive, land-use laws, poor car-centric legislation, and many shyster developers. This place is going to be so desirable that it will likely be more expensive to live there than San Francisco. What would really impress me is if they can work with public officials to create a rail line connecting this place to San Francisco. They would almost have to to keep trucks out of the city.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#64> The group only recently started interacting with local officials and residents, according to media reports, and had sued landowners who sold their land over what it deemed an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy”. > “To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a…
Building a city makes the land more valuable. If you tell people that you plan to invest a ton of money into the area they will include that information in their calculations when you are trying to buy their land. Some will then only sell their land for skyhigh prices, and some won’t sell at all in the hopes that they can sell it for even more once the city has been built around them. This can strangle the project in…
I get that part, I just don’t care about the financial details of how they are buying a community, they are just a boring little side detail. I was commenting on the fact that they are using the language of community engagement, but they are just blatantly buying a town, not engaging with it.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#65Lol, their dream is Europe, basically. Could be a good tagline: Europe, the utopia of Silicon Valley elites
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Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#66Honestly the description of this place sounds like what I’ve found Sweden to be, since moving here from Palo Alto last month. I am walking distance from everything I need, I am 10 minutes from a huge park with a large body of water, I walk to work, and if I need to detach I can take a boat to a summer house that’s off the grid.
There are also walkable town in the US, visit college towns in New England for example. (To be clear, it is definitely a small subset, but it serves to show that it is at least possible for this sort of thing to grow organically here).
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 $3…
That sounds a bit like "the reason for this traffic jam is clearly that there are no enough lanes".
Evidently, there are enough buyers/renters around who can afford the higher prices and are able to price out the $30k/year group. So what would prevent rent or prices from rising to the same unaffordable levels in the new development, if there is still demand from this higher-paying group?
I feel if the market rate becomes unaffordable for middle-class fulltime employees, then you have an inequality problem, not a supply problem.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Building a city makes the land more valuable. If you tell people that you plan to invest a ton of money into the area they will include that information in their calculations when you are trying to buy their land. Some will then only sell their land for skyhigh prices, and some won’t sell at all in the hopes that they can sell it for even more once the city has been built around them. This can strangle the project in…
Gentrification for me but not for thee.
Gentrification for thee but not for free!
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#69In 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?
I don't even know if it's true, but if it is I'd guess the Typical Mind fallacy: most of us have blind spots where we don't think about how "good" people in a hurry would react, let alone the power-hungry actively trying to break it for their own gain.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#70[flagged]