Silicon Valley elites revealed as investors behind $800M Bay Area land grab | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley elites revealed as investors behind $800M Bay Area land grab

sfchronicle.com

99 pointsjonah118 comments

I wrote this in a recent article [1]:

Today, if a wealthy benefactor wanted to emulate a Renaissance patron and fund an architect or artist to create a new town square or city park, it’s unclear how he or she would even go about doing so. There don’t appear to be any financial instruments specifically designed for rewarding investors that fund integrated artworks. The design of the public space would almost certainly be watered down and subject to various governmental councils and community groups. Hostile attitudes toward the wealthy would probably result in the park being vandalized, if it were actually built.

The hostility toward ideas like this new city is a major reason why we don’t have Renaissance-quality architecture anymore. Some of the most beautiful cities in the world were funded by the past equivalent of billionaires.

Today, there is too much resentment and tall poppy syndrome and any attempts to use private funds toward architectural projects is immediately criticized as being a bad thing.

1. https://onthearts.com/p/modern-culture-is-too-escapist-part

Eh? My city has many beautiful parks that were private estates. They were simply given to the city by their wealthy owners. Rich people can do this now if they want to.

https://faculty.mercer.edu/davis_da/fys102/baconsfield.html

Many properties are not "given", but managed in trust. As in the above example, while Baconsfield Park lasted for over half a century, control was reverted (wrongly) to the heirs, and the land was sold off.

That's the point. Rich people are free to make generous benefactions but they'd rather retain control and when that's impossible they whinge that society is limiting their generosity.

That is just charity, not investment. Renaissance artworks weren't funded as a charity.

Nor as an investment.

Such an outmoded idea — when will the effort to build utopia stop?

https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-the-luster-is-fading-on-o...

Health care. Living wage. Alternative transport. Small affordable homes.

Please stop trying to build Disneyland and just focus on reducing regulation and corruption happen and letting innovation happen in existing cities.

Refactoring vs rewrite ;)

But this time, we'll get it right!

That just sums up the hubris of it all perfectly. Someone who didn't even write the first version and couldn't possibly, doesn't understand it and couldn't possibly, is going to go for the "rewrite".

Because that would not be Their Vision™.

I agree with you in principle, but these things cost way, way more than their Disneyland...

US is the richest nation in the world. Also, one of the last major nations in the world to NOT have any of those things.

There isn’t much evidence that existing cities want innovation.

This, there are literally thousands of comments on HN saying so and so, similar to the parent, but I've never got the impression on the ground in real city suburbs that even half the voting population would desire such 'innovations'.

And that's across quite a lot of cities in the US and Canada.

Most families who can afford to are willing to pay a huge premium in order to not share walls with a neighbour, even if it's only a few feet of grass and adds a longer commute.

Whereas most of the opposing sentiments I can only find as talk by random accounts online... and not in actual behaviour.

Democracies are great for preventing tyranny, but they are terrible at reform. Reform often comes from a smaller group of people pioneering a solution among a smaller more willing population, thus demonstrating to the majority that such solutions work.

Democracies are, by definition, ruling by the median intelligence of the group, thus cherry picking a smaller set of the population, you can advance more complex ideas and solutions - hence efforts such as in OP's article.

That’s quite a salient point and raises interesting questions.

I’ll toss out that I’d say the main reason people don’t like to share walls is poor construction makes it so you can hear everything through the walls. This can be easily mitigated but isn’t because money.

There's also the legal aspect along with the loss of some degree of freedom and flexibility. These are pretty huge downsides even if perfectly built walls became common.

The thing is they probably don't realize the benefits. Have a read of strong towns. I was surprised.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

That’s quite a lovely movement. Very good link!

Utopia in Dutch culture is a mixed city were people of different income levels and cultural backgrounds live together.

This ofcourse goes against the natural inclination of rich people. But it keeps society from splintering into the haves and have nots.

I am not sure about the "different cultural backgrounds" part, at least when it comes to non Dutch traditional backgrounds (e.g. Middle Eastern immigrants)

Nobody does city and infrastructure planning better than the Dutch.

> This of course goes against the natural inclination of rich people.

I don't think that's true at all. If there are no poor people nearby, you can't have any servants.

The servants simply commute from several miles away; they are NOT next door neighbors. [and live-in servants have declined massively.]

> and live-in servants have declined massively

This is not true everywhere.

Where it is true, it is because supply has dried up as the general run of the population decides it has better options, not because demand is down.

How much technological progress does a utopian Dutch city have?

The dream of making society better. Such an outmoded idea. I mean a dense, transit connected, walkable urban setting is such a fever dream.

Everyone who tries to improve things should be shut down.

Whoosh.

Other than generic finger wagging that happens anytime rich people do anything, can anyone cite an actual problem with this?

Seems like it’s not harming anyone and more experiments and innovation in cities seems like a good thing.

Quote the "generic finger wagging" from the article.

For example, use of “land grab” to describe a normal real estate transaction.

Common and normal are two very different things.

Attitudes like these ones are why Billionaires always ask for a "equal level playing field" every time they go into a new business domain.

Maybe they can call this one Elysium: Scan residents eyes for safety, commute an remaining human workers needed in the morning and evening via driverless taxis, and be done with it?

The billionaires arguably got ripped off here. The farmers colluded to sell at artificially high prices.

There’s not a shred of evidence to support that except for the lawsuit brought by the investors. I would wager this was the fair market in action and these billionaires paid the price that was given by people who needed a large incentive to sell. Anything past that is the old rich person game of “free market rules for me but for thee” Nice try though

That phrase only occurs in the headline. Here's something that occurs in the body:

> “Flannery Associates used strong-arm mobster tactics to purchase the land, including suing farmers — generational farm families — promising that they can continue to operate, and then throwing them off the land,” Garamendi said.

The poster essentially asked for the article to be rephrased because it's nothing but generic finger wagging, as they claim. So before doing the work of paraphrasing the article for them, I'd prefer them to elaborate, and name the phrases they meant with "generic finger wagging". Because, truth be told, that sounded like awfully generic criticism uttered without reading the article.

1/ Billionaires are the last people I would ever trust to properly run a city, let alone build it.

2/ Cities built by a small group of "elites" inevitably fail or become the worst hellscapes you could imagine

3/ These people are dogshit to have as bosses. Now imagine them as unelected mayors having the ability to control your livelihood

4/ The land they bought is fucking stupid, unaccessible, has no water, no train stations, will be generic car centric hellscape n°1275

5/ None of them have any knowledge in city building (the time they spend on Cities Skylines while they pretend they're working doesn't count), and they will be working with sycophants saying yes to every one of their whims, even if it goes contrary to everything we learned.

6/ The land doesn't have water, sewage systems, power lines, internet, etc. Guess who they're going to go cry to and lobby? The state. Guess who's going to pay for their playground? You.

7/ We've already tried company towns. They were hell on earth.

VCs, and billionaires in general are the most uninnovative people I could ever think of. They have nothing but their "vision", willfully ignoring important things. Even picking up a hobo in the middle of Skid Row would lead to better results, because the hobo knows which parts of architecture are hostile, lead to horribly hot summers, etc.

But please let's let them try. It's their money, however they extracted it, and you never know. Trying new things is one of the singular positives in this country of ours. We don't know how to maintain things, we don't really know how to refactor and fix the laws we have, either because of entrenched interests, inherent racism, or a lack of willpower. But we can still create new things, prototype and try out new ideas. So let's keep doing that, and let the rest of the world take our best experiments and make their little socialist utopias while we continue to live in this extremely heterogeneous, unfair, and idealistic but somehow pragmatic place.

>It's their money, however they extracted it

Except, it's really not. Taking aside the fact that being a billionaire is fundamentally immoral and that it necessarily caused the misery of hundreds if not thousands, it's not _just_ their money. It's your money when it's going to come to plugging in the electrical grid, because you know they're going to ask for assistance. After all, it's built, and the state wouldn't want the bad publicity of being the ones that refuse to kickstart a brand new future city, right ? It's going to be your money for sewage systems, for pipes, for road maintenance. It's your society they're damaging by abusing the justice system to bully and sue farmers out of the land. It's going to be your environment when they have to pump water and dry out your rivers, your lakes, leaving fewer for everyone else. It's going to be your environment when chronically irresponsible VCs dump chemicals because they know the EPA will need ten years to come at them. It's going to be your national security when the Travis Air Force base receives complaints and pressures to close down because they're being too noisy next to the city. It's going to be your environment when they have to water a whole city in the middle of an almost desert.

>We don't know how to maintain things, we don't really know how to refactor and fix the laws we have, either because of entrenched interests, inherent racism, or a lack of willpower.

So the solution, instead of trying out small scale experiments that will help you build a proper city of the future is to just build a whole city in one go and hope it works out ? The people that are blocking you from maintaining things _are_ the ones building this. Andreeseen is in those investors, the same piece of shit that blocked construction of thousands of houses because it would "devalue his investment". He's not doing this to improve _your_ life.

> let the rest of the world take our best experiments and make their little socialist utopias

The rest of the world is not socialist, and you know it.

>somehow pragmatic place.

There is nothing pragmatic about the US. There's a very small subset of extremely powerful and wealthy ramming their decisions through everything, destroying lives in the process and counting on the state to be too slow to react, or slow enough that when they do, they're already entrenched anyways.

Yes my term socialist was a bit sarcastic, they are all capitalist mixed economies. But I don't think these kinds of experiments are an issue, it is rarely a zero sum. Externalities like water supply, chemicals, and road maintenance need to be carefully managed for sure. I don't blame capitalists for corrupt or captured regulators. I do think that it needs to be better understood that a capitalist never gave away money, only their widows and children ever did. What we seem to lack now is the backbone to truly regulate. Break up their trusts and monopolies, tax their profits, and create more and better infrastructure for the common good.

> 2/ Cities built by a small group of "elites" inevitably fail or become the worst hellscapes you could imagine

Irvine doesn't seem like a hellscape to me.

Relevant: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/They_Saved_Lisa%27s_Brain

The US already had to deal with the corporate cities problem, btw. Its nothing new. First, as a tragedy, now as a farce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Obviously this idea is dumb, but I'm concerned that it's the only realistic way to expand housing in the bay. The bay is currently short a solid million housing units, as far as I can tell there currently is no solution to this problem. All the areas that have already been developed are politically captured by NIMBYs that refuse to allow housing to densify. A giant conglomerate coming in and just throwing up a ton of housing on currently uninhabited land is imo the only solution other than the state or feds just unilaterally ending SFH zoning which I don't see happening.

Would not SB9 (or some recent law whose name I forget) allow lot more housing to be built? Not tomorrow but surely over the next 10 years. And then there are so many condos coming up near BART etc. We may be a million short, but I think dynamics start changing with every 100K, so as long as enough people start moving towards ADUs, and 4 houses in place of 1, it will start moving the needle.

A lot of time it is a question of cost, and a lot of times it is a question of cheap property taxes. Remove those blockers and it may make things move faster.

In India, a lot of "builders", come in and offer to rebuild your house for free as long as they can get 1 floor for themselves. Same can happen here - rebuild a house to break it in 4 units, and the builder keeps one for themselves (to sell). Maybe with the higher cost, they keep half to see - I do not know, but you just need a few dozen people to show this initiative before it becomes a bandwagon.

On the property tax, we already have some incentives for people to move elsewhere and keep the low tax rate. I wish we could also apply a floor to the property taxes - yes you have had 2% max raise this past 30 years, but if you are in the bottom 10% (decile?), sorry but we will raise 5% going forward until you are not in the bottom 10%. Slow and steady, but see the incentives change over a decade or 2.

SillyCon Valley is a National Security Threat. It's destabilising. It has tons of cash but it has no clue how to spend it. The greatest misallocation of capital in the history of mankind.

They are not going to build a city on this land. Only a fool would believe that.

Unfortunately you're correct, but in general we can say that about most big companies and wealthy people. Everyone can solve their own problems with money, but they don't want to provide for us, they would rather own us and that's situation similar to the Great Depression in 1929.

What's even worst, all these wealthy people in US can pay 20% or even less tax on their income and how much workers have to pay from their income? There's no way to compete, they have capital that can give them huge gains and they share almost none of it.

The 20% thing is misleading because that's just the final ding via dividend taxes on a dollar that was earned and taxed in a corporation already. When you look at total taxes paid on that earned dollar it is very similar to total taxes paid on dollars earned and taxed at the individual level. This butt hurt about taxes thing needs to die in most cases because in most cases it is not true.

People on low incomes often pay very little tax, maybe 10-12%? There are good reasons for saying that the poor have an unreasonably hard time, but I don’t think income taxes are specifically where they get hit.

The people who I think pay the highest percentage are salaried professionals.

You get those low kinds of numbers for low income looking only at income taxes. You need to add Social Security/Medicare taxes (both employee and employer), sales taxes, property taxes, gasoline taxes, car registration fees, alcohol and cigarette taxes, etc.

Earlier discussion, 150+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37266398

"Local land revealed to be owned by local rich people."

“By land grab” they mean. Offering 4x market rate for land nobody else is much interested in. To build a dense urban environment because none of the other cities in the area seem to be able to get out of their own way. No idea if it will work out or be a net positive or not. History is littered with failed attempts.

But that’s a pretty negative framing right out of the gate.

What makes it a “land grab”? They bought the land in the usual way.

The author does not like the people buying, and thus call it a land grab. All journalists have an agenda.

They had better build some pretty fantastic water catchment systems.

Residential water usage makes up ~10% of water use in California. The vast majority of water waste is commercial, e.g. flood irrigation. While I'd love to see efficient water usage residentially (e.g. fewer water-wasteful lawns), they're just not the bulk of the problem.

OP was mentioning water catchment, it's about preserving water from rainfall so it doesn't go straight into roads, gullies, rivers and oceans. It's not only about preserving water but also preventing problems downstream like flooding.

SF already offers rebates on installing rainwater barrels and cisterns https://sfpuc.org/learning/how-you-can-help/rain-barrel-and-... and there's a manual if you want to learn more https://sfpuc.org/sites/default/files/learning/RWH_Manual_Fi...

Those things can be scaled up https://franciscopark.org/francisco-parks-rainwater-catchmen... But nothing beats Tokio's Underground Discharge Channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Area_Outer_Underg...

It’s been so hard to get rid of lawns in California because of HOAs. It’s often literally illegal to do anything else — even veggies.

woud this be like HN but a city? Can't say or do fun things that aren't "adding value" or engage in discourse with an unpopular view unless you get shadow-banned (they throttle so much, I can't have a discourse if more than 2-3 people reply to anything I post here lol). The goal is to add value, to protect value which means maintain appearances and orderliness and conformity so that the sensibilities of the elite are guarded and the majority of the desirables come and stay.

Ugh, at least there will be a lot smart and kind people there? And a lot of niche cities like austin, portland, seattle and such are already very tribal like this? But too much like living in a billionaire's mansion for my taste.

There could be a far worse group to start a city. I think this is a net benefit for CA, more housing and infra is always good and I am glad more people will find a place they belong at.

My only problem with this would be if they plan on building a lot of short or single family housing. More tall multi family housing will improve the overlall situation.

It will be like that episode of the Simpsons "They Saved Lisa's Brain" - where the super-intelligent take over Springfield and its a disaster

Isn't this the plot to a few dystopian novels?

I feel for the families that were forced out.

Finally, someone looking to challenge Neom.

it's funny how the media immediately pointed fingers toward china when they didn't know who was the buyer

most people see “anonymous buyer” and think of their worst nightmare

and they should seek therapy for why that is

Scientology has done the same in Clearwater, FL.

Show the same behaviour at the stock exchange and you will get fined by the SEC like Musk did.

What behavior are you talking about?

Buying up stocks through proxies without notifying the SEC soon enough.

ah okay, yeah there are reporting requirements at certain % thresholds of ownership and $ values. in that industry to that regulator.

‘act according to the law’ and you’ll frequently find laws that benefit you, such as a lack of transparency in many other industries

I don’t live in the US, but it seems to me that a group of billionaires trying to make their own city is actually worse than the China scenario. It’s somehow even more dystopian.

Americans in aggregate only dislike when the government has authoritarian powers, if the exact same thing is done by billionaires and corporations controlling all facets of life it will be rationalized

“but hey at least we can talk about it, right guys?” <entire life on Google account deleted with no explanation>

Obviously we need more cities. Yes please!

Not obvious to me. There are thousands of underpopulated cities (Detroit, etc.)

Thousands?

Why build an entire city instead of improving an existing one?

I imagine it’s because of pesky governments run by elected citizens who share common interests with their constituents.

What unholy shenanigans will these billionaires force on their residents who will undoubtedly have no role in the government?

I like how you take the reason why every city exists ever and reappropriate that as controversial

I meant to be facetious. A government that a team of billionaires considers "pesky" is probably mostly doing its job to protect people from harm, even if it is inefficient.

I can see both sides a lot here.

It's maybe uncommon knowledge but maintaining a road (or rebuilding a road) costs more than building a new road. (which is part of why the US has so many roads in the first place incidentally). The same holds true of buildings, Europe (as an example) has a lot of legacy and replacing buildings takes a long time and is enormously expensive than if you just had some land.

SF itself is extremely NIMBY, if you build a new city (which, incidentally is why most cities became a thing in the first place) for a specific purpose then people at least get to see your vision instead of fighting the establishment because you want high rises but the people who live there preferring the charm do not.

That said: I don't know many purpose made cities that actually succeeded.

I'm not even aware of any "Company Towns" surviving the decline of the company that founded it; Eindhoven suffered greatly with the decline of Phillips but it had existed for 500 years prior. I can't think of other examples of cities that so heavily depend on companies surviving their inevitable decline.

Yeah I dont believe you. Theres no way fixing potholes every few years, which is 99% of road maintenance, is more expensive than building a whole new road.

Eh, you massively underestimate road maintenance if you think its just a few potholes every now and again.

https://www.governing.com/now/the-u-s-needs-to-fix-existing-...

Some information from Aukland specifically because details are hard to find on my phone for the US;

https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2013/05/26/roads-arent-ch...

https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2017/08/01/escalating-cos...

Those links dont support your claim that building a road is cheaper than maintaining it.

Yes they do. Roads last longer than 1 year.

Heck the annual budget for maintenance matches the current spend of building new roads on a yearly basis now: https://archive.curbed.com/2019/5/14/18622511/construction-h...

The main issue here is that even if you take current spending into consideration, it's not really equivalent because roads are not being repaired at a required rate currently; they're being underinvested in and permitted to fall into worse conditions.

Nobody said it's cheap, they said it's cheaper to maintain them than to build them.

> The average cost to operate, maintain and periodically renew 1km of urban road in Auckland is approximately $60,000 per year.

https://blog.midwestind.com/cost-of-building-road/

> constructing a two-lane, undivided road in a rural locale will set you back somewhere between $2 and $3 million per mile — in urban areas, that number jumps to between $3 and $5 million

And then you still have to maintain it.

While a dystopian horror is entirely in the cards we do have this problem build into the capitalist system where we lack interesting products to buy for people with nonsensical wealth. Ideally these would be products that require employing a lot of people, do something new and experimental that contributes to society as a whole.

If we cant make things interesting enough for these insane people all they have is their greed. Insane as in: they suffer from an addiction and that they will need ever larger shots of financially induced adrenaline until it kills the entire planet.

As stupid as it might sound this kind of projects could be the only solution to the puzzle. We might want to limit wealth by law or in general have a government by the people for the people but I wouldn't know where to begin doing that.

Everyone will get brain implants powered by chat GPT

> Why build an entire city instead of improving an existing one

NIMBYs (including people on the list of investors, like Horowitz who lobbied against the tiniest shred of densification in his city because "property values" "traffic" etc.) would dislike that very much. Getting a clean(-ish) slate gives the project better chances.

Better chances for what? Wealthy individuals won't create "dense" city because they don't have need and understanding for it, they have their personal jets, helicopters, chauffeurs to move around, moreover people and things come to them instead of other way around. In other words the are living in a completely different world than regular people.

What this is is more like interesting endeavor, hobby project out of boredom and self entitlement to make something grandeur - regular folks would go hike around, paint plastic figurines, play sim-city on the computer - this bunch instead wants to play simcity in real life.

They could be building a dense city because it's a good investment opportunity to provide housing in an area that needs it and density can increase the return on investment, not because they themselves want to live there.

"Thy new city shall be called, Utopia!"

This the right path: entire city that is wholly owned by one company, with nothing for sale, only rentals. Gated. City council is same thing as company's board of directors. Police are private guards. You fail to pay the rent of violate rules, you are escorted off the premises: no homelessness, no unemployment, and minimum crime. Near-equality and almost flat social structure, no hate or envy. It will be expensive, but personally i'd love to pay twice to live in a place like that.

How do you expect it will be equal and have a flat social structure, instead of it likely mirroring the companies hierarchy?

I wouldn't expect a valid answer from this person since they already contradicted themselves. "City council is same thing as company's board of directors" is incompatible with a "flat social structure" being that the former is a hierarchy and the latter is the absence of hierarchy.

Simply, because poor/unemployed will be kicked out, and owners/idle rich not living there at all because why would them. The place will be only as differentiated as salaries of employed persons are differentiated, which is, not much.

You cannot kick out the poor, because you need them to clean for you and make your food. At best you can price them out of living next to you.

That’s why you make them live next door (or far away) and commute. That’s the plan with this community right, since the folks there must work for the company?

If the company doesn’t keep them employed, voila they must leave. And presumably the company is not going to hire (or allow to live there) ‘undesirables’.

That’s the plan with this community right, since the folks there must work for the company?

It's not that sort of company town. The Company is the town and the town is the The Company. They will own all the buildings and infrastructure, be responsible for providing all the services and as such get to decide who gets to live there and how, but they'll be doing so with a goal of running a profitable company/town. The people living there won't (necessarily) be working for the company. As long as you can pay, agree to live by their rules and aren't 'undesirable' in any other way you can potentially live there.

Disney has a similar setup - and you have to be working there or a ‘guest’ (aka customer) usually via a paid pass to get in.

It’s the same thing, just with no customers being able to show up on site no?

Or do you think the company will allow randomly renting to non-employees in the housing? Or subletting or something?

do you think the company will allow randomly renting to non-employees in the housing? Or subletting or something?

The housing won't be (primarily) for company employees, but for anybody who can pay and gets approved. Most company employees will in fact probably be people doing maintenance and providing services to the residents, and they almost certainly won't be able to afford to live in the the town.

London's Canary Wharf/ Banking Sector is a very good description of what you're describing up there, private police force and everything.

It is nice to look at for a day, but it is a dead and soulless place, and the lack of activity at night paired with the high/clean/bland architecture is somehow more frightening than walking down a narrow alleyway anywhere else in the city. It is a distinctly anti people feeling, knowing that a place was not built for you, but it is permitting you to stay there for now.

Parts of CW are ok at night. It's improving. I went there for dinner with an old friend the other week and it was buzzing.

Come on, I lived on the Isle of Dogs (2 manilla st) for 2 years. That's right next to Canary Wharf (a literal 2 minute walk). While it's true the actual Canary Wharf area has its own private guards its not a typical gated community. Yes, there are clever underground car barriers(I don't think I ever saw them closed though), but there are no surrounding fences etc. I don't think it's a good example of a "private owned gated community" at all. Anyone can just walk in.

Also, Isle of Dogs is a great example of how private/public partnerships can lift an area out of poverty. The Tower Hamlets area which Isle of Dogs is a part of has been a very poor area with lots of drug/theft/poor housing problems etc. Then lots of high rises were built (including the one I lived in) and some petty crime remained, but the quality of life was pretty good there. The best things being really good access to public transport, access to the river, shops/restaurants an NHS health centre that isn't overwhelmed with patients etc.

Canary Wharf is absolutely soulless but it's neither dead or frightening. It will almost certainly be the safest place to live in central London due to the fact that it's private land and you can be expelled from it permanently and the cameras everywhere will help security find you.

I've heard stories of a person who worked at a certain bank getting into a fight for the second time in a bar and then getting banned from CW - they could not go to work anymore.

It is absolutely a place that sets narrow parameters for your behaviour and if you can operate within those parameters there are companies who pay well operating there, clean streets, no visible crime etc.

This is a proved-wrong path throughout history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Company towns are one form of what former slaves called "wage slavery" in that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_Slavery

Capitalism is many things but certainly not flat or equalitarian.

Company towns existed because people worked for the company and company made money by exploiting them which worked the best when they were effectively locked up in one place. Here, the company will make money by people staying there and paying it, thus they will compete by providing best conditions to everyone.

Who will they compete with? Wouldn't they have a monopoly in housing in this scenario?

Who will they compete with?

The next town over. The theory is that if the town is good enough, rich people will pay a premium to live in this town rather than then one a few miles down the road. Then businesses will pay a premium to rent commercial space there since it will give them access to a 'better' class of customers etc. etc.

That implies a complete freedom from all attachment. What if your job is in the worse town? What if your aging parents are?

What if your job is in the worse town? What if your aging parents are?

You commute, like people do today. Living in one town, working in another and having your parents in a third sounds completely normal

Oh I see, you're really serious about this.

I choose to believe it’s commitment to the bit.

Disney thought so, it was the original plan for Epcot prior to his death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)

It looks like "private residential club communities" are still a thing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-66536...

I really hope that I just missed the sarcasm in this comment

> no homelessness, no unemployment, and minimum crime

... where you are. Its just exported to elsewhere. South africa had a similar system, it was great for about 10% of people, less so for the rest.

Strong Irvine vibes.

And then there’s the 12 districts outside of the Capitol.

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