Hackertopia: Creating a City as a Startup
intellectual-detox.com
intellectual-detox.com
EDIT: If we're going to make new and arbitrary rules for this place, wouldn't it be cool if there was a cap on business that only allowed for them to employ 30 people or less? Small businesses that are highly specialized working together instead of large corporations who have huge amounts of divided workforces.
Imagine you're running the corporation that governs the city. Your aim is to maximize profits. You do this by under-serving and over-taxing your residents, but not so much that they're pushed to move away. Because moving, buying property, and changing jobs or schools is time-consuming, expensive, and stressful, once you've got residents, the amount of tax-hikes or service cuts people are willing to tolerate before leaving your city might actually be quite high. This sounds like a terrible place to live.
When buying property in Hackertopia, the tax rate would be fixed at the time of purchase. The property valuation (and thus the total amount of taxes) could fluctuate of course. The valuation would be set by a variation of the old two people dividing the pie trick. One party (perhaps the homeowner) would set a valuation for the house. The other party (the city) would have the option of buying back the property at that price.
The property ownership contract would also guarantee that the provision of vital services (electricity, gas, water, etc) be provided at non-extortionate prices (perhaps the contract would specify that the price could be no greater than cost plus 30%). Thus city government would be contractually banned from charging $1k a month for water as back door property tax.
Since the city is making money off of property values, it has an incentive to provide common services such as roads and parks that increase property prices.
A company that screws over its customers or makes promises it then revokes will not be a highly profitable company for long. For a city to be profitable, and to maintain high property, it must continually attract new residents. If the city gains a reputation for screwing its residents, demand for property will plummet, property prices will drop, tax revenues will fall, and profits will fall.
The more the city government thinks about long term profits rather than short term profits the better life will be for the residents. Ideally, the corporate charter would have some tweaks to make the corporation even more future oriented than most corporations. For instance, all stock in the company could be restricted stock that is nontransferable until the owner has owned it for ten years. Executives would also receive dividend paying, non-transferable stock instead of stock options or a pension.
The reason kids over 5 are not running around town is not fear of cars, it is the fear of abduction. The abduction does not require a car either.
In the US, abductions are also very rare. I think the last average I saw was 800,000 a year. Of those, about half were family abductions. After factoring in runaways, accidents, etc., the number of abductions was down to a quarter, or something like 200,000. In a population of over 300,000,000, that's pretty rare indeed (though I admit, high enough to be concerned with in a metropolitan area).
58,000 is indeed a much lower number than I was even putting forth, though again, as irrational a fear as I know it to be, it's still a consideration for how far my daughter is allowed to go, and the time of her curfew.
(1-.03%) = 99.97% chance of not being abducted in a given year
.9997^14 = 99.6% chance of not being abducted in 14 straight years (from age 4 through 17, assuming kids under 4 are virtually never left alone).
Thus there is a 0.4% chance of being abducted by a stranger by age 18. Of those <1% suffer injury or death. But about half suffer some form of sexual abuse. The other half are unharmed. So the chance of having a traumatic abduction by the time a child reaches 18 is ~0.2% or 1 out of 500.
Further, if everybody that founds the city brings their own jobs, then who's going to set up the local economy? What funds the initial city development? Where does the power come from? How much are the utility bills? Who do I buy my high speed internet from?
Clearly a lot of thought has gone into this, but I highly doubt that enough thought has. It effectively claims to be the answer to everything, but nothing ever is.
The cities revenues come from real estate taxes. I do think that most cities spend their money in a wildly inefficient manner, and if they were run as for-profit businesses they could provide all the essential services and turn a profit.
But the major upside for the investors in the city corporation would be if the city owns far more land than the initial development. If you buy ten square miles of undeveloped land for $10k an acre, then a city of 25k grows up in one square mile of it, that remaining nine square miles is far, far more valuable than the original purchase price.