Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

Anybody have a billion dollars and want to go build some new cities from scratch? Seems like now would be a good time.

The labor and material shortages are definitely complicating factors, but historically the biggest problem is that places with a lot of jobs tend to not permit much housing to be built in the first place, thus the recent labor and material problems are merely compounding a regulatory created deficit.

Edit: to riff on this more, in most of the world you can make decent bricks by baking the dirt underneath your feet (not quite that easy, but close). A lot of places also have ample quarryable stone. So if you had sufficient capital and a bit of know how to get it started, you could set up a new city with a largely local material supply. You’d have to import some labor, but labor shortages are more a function of regional wages than of there literally being no one around willing to work. The hardest part is the location, as you’d need to find a place that was close enough to vibrant economic centers to pull in jobs, but not within the regulatory ice bath of those same places. That’s a tough one, but there are some places that could work.

It’s my understanding Marc Lore is trying to do just that: www.businessinsider.com/marc-lore-head-of-walmart-ecommerce-to-exit-2021-1

Fascinating, thanks for sharing!

I have neither the capital nor the skillset required to do this, but if I heard of something like this actually taking place in a way that looked like it had a reasonable chance of success, I'd sweep the floors just to be part of it.

Same here. I think it’s time for a new model city, oriented to pedestrians plus micro mobility, running on green power, and with some pandemic firebreaks designed in. More affordable and entrepreneurial. In the same way that Levittown set the template for the following 50+ years, I think we’re hungry for a new model for the next few generations of human habitat. Building that is my life dream, but I have yet to figure out a way to do it without quantities of capital that I don’t have access to, so instead I post on HN :)

Why go to that extreme? Just go buy 200 acres of land somewhere, subdivide it, put some houses on it and turn it into a little neighborhood. You could make a buck and reduce the housing shortage. Except I wouldn't know where to start, being neither a home builder nor real estate developer. Are there "real estate development" bootcamps?

For me the answer is because that’s not the kind of place I want to live so it’s not the kind of place I want to build. We don’t really have a shortage of conventional suburban housing. We have a critical shortage of walkable urban housing, the so-called “missing middle” which is denser than conventional suburbia but still single family.

A great example of that is the older parts of San Francisco, where I lived for years. There are lots of old Victorian homes that are comfortable single family residences with nice back yards, but at about twice the density of typical suburbia because they don’t have side yards (aka they are townhomes). Mixed in there are lots of 2-3 story buildings with shops and offices on the ground floor and apartments above.

That was a wonderful place to live! So wonderful, and also so scarce, that every place like that around the country is skyrocketing in price over the last 10-20 years.

What I would love to do is build a new town of middle density, “European style,” if you will. But that is so scarce because it’s illegal to build in the vast majority of US land area.

Hence, to do it, you need to be building somewhere outside the jurisdiction of cities and counties with conventional zoning, which really limits your options.

And finally, 200 homes isn’t enough to form the critical mass of a European small city. You probably need more like 10k homes (for a population around 25k) for it to work.

Isn't that sort of housing essentially illegal to build?

(I'm describing the current situation there, not saying it is a good thing)

One issue is that the best place to build it is where there are already enough people to justify things like usable public transit, so that people living there can access a larger job market and so on.

Many folks don’t realize everything required just to build one house on one buildable lot. There’s setbacks to consider, engineering the septic system, getting a curb cut, utilities (which have their own building constraints), not blocking easements in doing all this, and actually putting a liveable house in all that.

Putting in a street is that magnified multiple times over plus dealing with additional demands from the town, making sure lots adhere to minimal zoning acreage, drainage, street lights, sidewalks, fire hydrants, on and on. Plus political maneuvering with the planning board to make all that happen. There’s also the financial part of being on the hook for the land and the construction loans while you deal with schedules for everything.

Putting in streets is an intensely multi-discipline skill.

Based around what economy though? Towns need an industry. Many are just remnants of old mining towns. A lot where the hospital is the largest employer are surviving on elderly health care. I think that's the biggest challenge to spawning a city out in nowhere.

Well, construction and everything that goes along with that for one - electricians, carpenters, plumbers, roadwork, and painters need restaurants and grocery stores, who can appreciate theaters and parks, with require maintenance,all of whom need hospitals, fire and rescue, police, and so on.

The hard part, IMO, is getting the whole thing started.

https://prospera.hn/

> Anybody have a billion dollars and want to go build some new cities from scratch? Seems like now would be a good time.

Something I found out. In the ten years after WWII the Federal government used it's WWII command economy powers to force builders to create new housing.

I think I've come down on the side that the current fad of monetarism plus the free market doesn't provide enough house stock. And reliably creates price bubbles.

Why build a new city when you can build a new neighbourhood in an existing city? Building a new city is risky. Building a neighbourhood allows you to piggyback on the success of the host city. People already want to live there. Employers already want to open up shop there. If you have a billion dollars, use some of it to grease whatever wheels necessary to skirt the zoning ordinances.

Where can you find greenfield or brownfield land to build a new neighborhood? My county is already converting the last two large parcels into residential.

Detroit. Which is only a half joking answer.

In other places there are probably a lot of things that could be done at the planning level to make densification more likely. That's not the same as a cohesive project, but it might have a similar effect.

You don't need undeveloped land. You could increase density on land that is already developed. In the US, even urban areas have a lot of spots where land is used inefficiently: surface parking lots, wide streets, large setbacks, single-family detached homes. Consider that residential streets in American cities may be 25m wide, whereas a residential street in a traditional city is more like 3m wide.

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