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Comment by throw8383833jj | Hacker News Reader

and we could solve this problem by creating new cities/towns. Why on earth, can't we do that anymore? for most of human history we were able to do that, now all the sudden everyone needs to be in the same exact geographical area.

People follow the jobs. Give companies a subsidy for starting in a new town/city/village and the people will certainly follow it. And you'll get all the benefits of starting with a clean slate: you could make it walkable, bikable, keep land costs low by not limiting it(enough supply to keep costs low)

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People want to live near other people, not in empty towns. Other people start businesses they want to work at, cook at restaurants they want to eat at, and play basic at bars they want to frequent.

Starting an empty town doesn’t do that. Why doesn’t everyone just stay at home with their parents and just commute into a meta verse version of the Bay Area where everyone can have a fake home?

We've been creating new "towns" in the form of subdivisions and planned communities for the better part of a century. They are fine for a generation or two, but the astronomical costs of maintaining their government subsidized services (utilities, sewer, roads, schools, fire, police) stretched thin into a low density area inevitably leads to their decline.

The costs of suburbs aren’t astronomical in the Bay Area. There is a reason Strong Towns and the like always talk about suburbs in Missouri. The suburbs that are unaffordable are the $150K home owned by the household making $40k/year. You can’t charge that person the $8k in property tax you need to upkeep a suburb. Charging $8k on a $2 million home in the Bay Area is a lot more doable. It’s a 0.4% property tax rate which should be achievable. The only barrier to Bay Area suburbs paying for things is California’s neo-feudal property tax laws.

There are rent seeking local “mafias” in every pocket of the globe you would try this. Companies would rather negotiate with the devils they know ( large cities ) than end up dealing with e.g. unknown, possibly corrupt and rent seeking commissioners,protection agencies,judges,sheriffs,mayors,councils,unions,etc.

People want to live in this area because it's closer to work, which requires them to be in the office. Take out that variable and our population would start to be more evenly distributed over time.

I personally don't like living in a city, too much traffic, too many assholes and I don't trust modern police, of which cities have an abundance of.

Hopefully, if this remote working sticks and we don't go back to driving to an office everyday, it will be a net positive for a lot of problems we are facing: overcrowding of cities, skyrocketing rents, pollution, unnecessary carbon emissions, etc.

I'm not sure how common pure remote is going to be. I see a lot more hybrid, which gives greater flexibility, but still involves being within an hour or two drive of an office.

Furthermore, for people already living in, say, the Bay Area, they probably have friends and/or family there and it's not like the Bay Area is a hellhole so the default for a lot of people is to stay there, in spite of the high housing prices, rather than move to a cornfield in Iowa.

new cities? where? why? there's plenty of space right there in the bay area, no, not the parks, look up.

negative density tax is the way.

unfortunately new suburbs are an unsustainable addiction in this regard. it incentivizes everyone for optimizing for cars and backyard-driven life-development.

You seem to be asking companies to create company towns--probably with company housing and stores.

There's already tons of cheap housing around the US. It's just that a lot of it isn't where many people most want to live.

You know the VC question that they ask founders, "why now?"? For any particular location you might want to create a city, ask "why here?".

Successful towns have historically been built near some natural resource (rivers, deltas, lakes, mines, forests, etc). Jobs / corporate mini-HQs are not a natural resource.

Give companies a subsidy

So we give existing house owners a subsidy by creating artificial housing scarcity, and then we give companies a subsidy to fix the house owner subsidy by starting new towns?

Who pays for this? Productive young people earning income? Again?

> Give companies a subsidy

Who's paying for that? And why?

It's actually common practice in many parts of the country. The practice is called Economic Development. Rarely used for residential purposes, but does finance commercial development and promote hiring. The funding typically comes from the calculated/expected incremental tax revenue to the area (State, Local, etc). Newark, CA in the Bay Area did this for a while (may still?).

I'd be curious the inner workings surrounding the development of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starbase in Boca Chica, TX and what the backstory was around that.

Kind of a different use case with needing distance and dangerous stuff being deployed but still probably a worthy bit of development history and municipal dynamics to be shared there.

Ok but why spend that money at all? Companies are happy to create jobs and hire people in existing cities. And we can build housing at the cost of 0 tax dollars, for all those people, by easing zoning. It'll also cost a lot less to upgrade infrastructure for higher density that to build it wholecloth for new communities.

I was contemplating something in this direction once. That this concentration in the bay area could very well be driven by the tastes and desires of the CEOs and other execs who are pleased to live in the comfy parts of the bay area regardless of the outcomes of their employees and how much blood is squeezed out of them by the high cost of living and time sunk on commutes.

I think it was Elon Musk who made me ponder this. Somewhere he blasted the notion that most of the Silicon Valley venture capital gets blown on housing costs. That made me ponder what other alternatives could be found and what other productive uses that money could have been spent on. It's a fascinating train of thought with big directions it could go. That's an interesting idea about encouraging the subsidization of a town, I'd like to see that experiment tried if it hasn't yet.

We stopped building real cities when people decided it was more important to be able to park everywhere forever for free than to have nice places.

We have run out of flat land along the coasts, and housing everywhere else is already dirt cheap.

> Why on earth, can't we do that anymore?

We used up all the good places.

> Give companies a subsidy

Probably very difficult to get this right.

Fordlandia was already tried

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