Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US? | Hacker News Reader

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

37 pointshamburga27 comments

There are around 1500 towns in the US with population between 10,000 and 25,000 [1]

So it's not like this hasn't been done before. And sort of the ultimate chance to engineer the world you want to live in -- I'd think people would be really into it.

I know that YC has/had a "New Cities" initiative but I haven't seen updates in years.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241695/number-of-us-cities-towns-villages-by-population-size/

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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 then think that every road in the state must accommodate it) -- DPZ has other stuff worth checking out: https://www.dpz.com/Projects/All

My favorite is in Jakriborg, Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakriborg

You learn about this sort of stuff if you are plugged into the urbanist blogs / podcast scene

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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 country rather than imprisoning them makes me suspect that the biggest impediment to building such a community may in fact be trying to do it underneath a bigger government.

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...

Good luck getting people to follow someone who is not a narcissistic asshole ;-)

It's definitely been done. Once upon a time there was a thing called Planned Communities. Reston, Virginia is one such. So is "The Villages" in central Florida. But, especially since the sub-prime mortgage crash of the 00s, I haven't heard of anybody attempting it.

Check out Ave Maria, also in Florida. It is a mixed-zoning town build around a College and a Catholic cathedral, but unlike the Villages, it is actually quite age diverse. So, for those who are not bothered by the the religious aspect, it is seems very livable and I think will be successful.

Not sure about the state of the project, but I remember reading this article last year about Bill Gates starting a new city: http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-buys-arizona-land-...

Another related phenomenon is the relocation of an entire town which often results in building an entire infrastructure from scratch. These are either caused by natural disasters like Pattonsburg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattonsburg,_Missouri

Or it can be caused by planned hollowing of the ground from mining like Kiruna. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna

Either scenarios are fascinating to think about the engineering effort that goes into starting a town from scratch. Like literally sim city.

Check 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

Celebration, Florida was created in the late 90s by Walt Disney Corporation.

This guy bought up lots of land with the purpose of building some kind of city in with his vision.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/23/mormon-mogul-ey...

This is very interesting and exactly what I was looking to find. Thanks!

This is only tangentially relevant to the question as asked, but you may be interested in reading about China’s “new cities” initiative.

There are lots of articles on DuckDuckGo but here is one: https://outline.com/ZAZvTt (Forbes, yuck!)

Has anybody heard from YC's New Cities project, by the way? Should we assume it's disbanded? https://cities.ycr.org/

https://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-...

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

ja, danke

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