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US has plenty of space. And unlike Europe, you can easily find a large "mostly empty" patch of land.

But for some reason new cities are not built anymore.

And when someone proposes building a new city inevitably the press fills up with dystopia/rent-seeking/we-should-make-existing-housing-cheaper/... articles.

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Cities grow around something. In the past, that "something" has generally been a point-specific natural resource that can be exploited. Natural harbors, confluences of rivers, mines, etc. Sometimes cities grow around point-specific artificial resources like crossroads.

Sometimes there are resources that are exploited but everyone knows that the resource is very temporary so a city doesn't really grow. Instead, a town forms but never plants roots. For example, the small cities across the Bakken Formation which grew huge transitory populations but no one stays because everyone there knows when the price of oil shifts the Bakken will become unprofitable.

The important thing is attempting to plant a city in the middle of nowhere almost always fails absent very strong government incentives. Washington DC is sort of like that, where it was put where it is because of very strong political incentives (Virginia and Maryland didn't want that land). Brasilia is the other example that jumps to mind, where they wanted the seat of government away from Rio and forced the issue.

>Cities grow around something. In the past, that "something" has generally been a point-specific natural resource that can be exploited. Natural harbors, confluences of rivers, mines, etc. Sometimes cities grow around point-specific artificial resources like crossroads.

They can also grow around political and religious motivations like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, the utopian experiment of New Harmony, Indiana, etc.

Massachusetts Bay Colony formed around a natural harbor that was already in use by native americans. The others I'll grant you.

We should build a major new city at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. It seems like an ideal location.

Starbase, TX, seems to have a good reason to grow.

my dad lives in a "master planned" community in the middle of nowhere in the desert centered around a man made lake that needs to get refilled periodically. the weird thing is that 20 years later its actually much more populated and thriving

Would you be willing to share what brings people there? Is it a retirement community?

just a development for families, with some amenities like community center, pools etc. you can get a very large house for not so much money. it honestly is fairly nice, visiting used to seem depressing when I was younger but now when I visit with my kids it seems like not a bad place for a family to grow up in.

> in the middle of nowhere in the desert centered around a man made lake that needs to get refilled periodically.

How is that refilling paid for? What source of water does it draw from?

There’s generally home owner dues in those types of communities.

no idea, there's also a fish truck that dumps fish in it every week or so

Are there jobs nearby? Do most people have far to commute?

I imagine that things may have changed a bit over the years, depending how big the development was perhaps it was the catalyst for more development?

> Cities grow around something.

Today that resource could just be "cheap land". We don't need coal or iron today, we need housing.

> very strong government incentives

Could "cheap housing" be such an incentive?

Last I checked, those resources are water and roads (or promises of roads). But people can't live without water and don't keep building where they can't get it.

> We don't need coal or iron today

Yes, who uses steel anymore? /s

All of us, but the Swedish are doing it without using coal or other fossile fuels. [0] Iron's going to be a bit harder to remove from the process though ;)

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2021/08/19/how-swe...

You can have all the empty space you want to build on, but if it doesn't have water or electricity, it will continue to be empty. Modern societies rely on modern infrastructure.

Do you think someone building a new city will not connect it to the grid and think about the water?

That's exactly the point. Where do you think water comes from? You can't just build a city in the middle of the desert. In order for it to be sustainable you need it located next to a lake or river or other large source of freshwater that's easily exploited. Water is a natural resource just like any other.

They will certainly try, but if they pick the wrong spot it will be prohibitively expensive compared to other locations and so they will be more inclined to pick another location, and the market price of the land will price this all in

The reason that major cities are where they are is because either there's a ton of traffic that flows through the area OR because they were the highest, easiest point to build on near a major source of fresh water. So no, they're not going to just appear because you build a city there. That's not how cities or infrastructure work.

Not all space is the same, nobody wants to live in Gerlach, Nevada because there's nobody there and also because it's the middle of the desert, which in turn is why there's nobody there:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210809032137/https://landequit...

Land in Gerlach goes for $0.0054/sqft

Land in the heart of San Fran can go for $865.21/sqft

That's 159,000 times more expensive.

The increase comes from the fact that some land is more naturally productive than others, and also because of agglomeration effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration#:~:....

Oh, a fellow Burner.

Nearby Gerlach is Reno, the biggest little city in the world. It's 100 miles or 1 hr:45 mins away by car, 51 weeks of the year. With no income tax and a Tesla plant, Reno is thriving. Northern Nevada may have a lot of desolation, but the same rules of real estate apply - the three most important things are location, location, location. Land in Reno is expensive compared to Gerlach but cheap compared to downtown SF, at $270/sq ft (of course, SF being one of the most expensive cities in the US means everywhere is cheaper).

Yup! I actually forgot about Gerlach being associated with Burning Man (never been, myself). It just comes up when you search for "cheapest land in America."

And yeah, my point is the same as yours -- it's always the location that matters. If you can somehow bootstrap yourself a desert-mega city in the world's worst location, then agglomeration effects take over and the land becomes valuable because people want to be next to other people. But typically desert cities get off the ground because there's something about the initial conditions of that particular piece of desert that's more interesting than everything around it (that's what happened with Phoenix with regards to the canals/water).

Of course, once a critical mass of settlers shows up and sticks around long enough, wherever they happened to congregate is the most valuable location in the local area from then on.

Pheonix is also in the middle of the desert:

> Phoenix is officially America’s fastest-growing major city.

https://news.yahoo.com/phoenix-nation-fastest-growing-big-17...

Phoenix was not just some random place in the desert that was as good as any other, it was founded because of a pre-existing canal system that the founders expanded upon that gave it much better access to water

http://www.azheritagewaters.nau.edu/loc_hohokam.html

Phoenix has some location advantages (large rivers flow into the valley, warmer climate, better soil for agriculture) than northern Nevada that makes it more desirable and spurred growth.

I don't understand "new cities are not built anymore". Villages become towns and towns become cities all over the place. There isn't likely to be new planned cities in the middle of nowhere. Cities need infrastructure like power, roads, water, airports, etc. These things happen organically except in state created cities like in China or Saudi Arabia.

Is “building a new city” meaningfully different from just expanding or growing the current city or introducing medium density?

I’m supportive of new cities as experimentation projects - think that’s great actually. If it’s take a sprawling suburb and build another one it’s like why would you bother doing that versus just doing the same thing you’re doing now in current cities?

I agree with you, expanding cities should be preferred.

But that doesn't happen either, maybe because existing cities are surrounded by private lands, or other stuff that is hard to displace, in a litigious place like US.

Or don't expand them, make them denser. Hopefully means less travel needed as well.

Yeah, building a city from scratch opens up new possibilities for governance, institution building, city zoning and layout. I'm for a lot of small cities, each experimenting.

Adding to an existing city plugs you into all these incumbent systems, including existing hierarchies and notables.

The vast majority of that empty land is either in less ideal climates out in the west or on federal land.

See: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Fig1...

It's not that surprising.

It's not 'profitable' and it requires actual competence.

It's the same reason you have meetings where nobody will commit to anything, hoping that some other fool will commit to take on extra responsibility for no extra pay. Politics is exactly like that.

Why don't we build new cities? Because we don't have pioneers anymore. This is actually a really intriguing idea. We should crowdfund the creation of new cities, pioneered by a new generation of dissatisfied priced-out hyper-techified metrosexual young people.

Why build new cities, when there are plenty of smaller towns (<500,000 population) that can grow?

I think there is a billionaire trying to make a utopian city called Telosa.

Cities are built from less intense settlements. We don't build cities anymore because we systematically declare them "done" when they're just getting started.

How about we build a perfect grid of cities across the US - perfectly spaced 50 miles apart. Mountain in the way? We'll use explosives. /s

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