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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

Why do new homes have to be built in competition with existing homes? With remote work and the digital elite moving wherever, why not just pop up new developments wholesale, complete with shopping and services somewhere out of the way and cheap?

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I love the power of the word "just." It pairs well with armchair pundits who can simply wave a wand and solve major problems that lots of heavily motivated people who have resources and would profit nicely from solving these problems... still struggle to solve.

Can you answer your own questions in reverse? Why aren't new developments built wholesale, complete with shopping and services somewhere out of the way (and cheap)?

People do intentional communities all the time, and that's small groups of grassroots folks solving the problem. I have no doubt that a company could set up intentional communities much more efficiently, and provide more services to them so they were closer to parity with typical suburbs.

That's important to note.

Ideas are already being tried. They are also not solving the (entire) problem. But to suggest "just" doing this one thing is a solution to the (entire) problem is easy to say, but how much does it contribute to actually solving things?

(Notably, me discussing this on the internet isn't a solution. It's just entertainment, and hopefully I learn something along the way!)

People do not want to live out of the way. In fact there are quite possibly lots of homes already available out of the way and cheap; I've heard some countries like Italy and Japan give them away for nearly free.

You can get perfectly good 2000 SF, 4 BR homes in places like Fargo or Little Rock for $200,000.

There are reasons housing prices in expensive areas are what they are. Some of it is poor zoning and land usage that suppresses supply, but a lot of it is also demand. People want to live in dense, vibrant areas, even if they could live cheaper elsewhere.

People don't care so much about living in dense and vibrant areas (as the pandemic migration showed) but living near jobs and affordable housing.

I'd argue the pandemic rural flight exemplified precisely how much everyone values the vibrance and density of cities: when quarantine put a pause on the vibrance and nullified employment proximity, everyone had only affordability to select for. And when the vibrance returned, so did the residents. https://ncrc.org/the-washington-post-americans-are-returning...

Because people also care a lot about their families and the communities they live in. Being close to family and friends is a very tough point to argue against.

It is arguably a relatively new phenomenon though. We are willing to move far less than we used to, even if moving means less than ever before.

If someone could predict what shopping and services would do well in a neighborhood with any accuracy, they would go work for Target or Walmart or a hedge fund.

How are you supposed to predict what to build before anyone moves in? A grocery store is easy, but the hipster main streets that people love are hard to nail down. What stores are going to seem “eclectic” and “cute” to the people who move in, without being too far out there or too “corporate”?

How many bars? What kind of bars? Is the coffee shop fine or does it need some kind of fancy tea time place?

What price point should these places target?

All of this is very hard to know without having people living in the houses who can be polled or observed to see what they’d want.

That's how we get urban sprawl in the first place, and it is not a working strategy in the long run.

Cities benefit from high urban density, and reducing density means less benefit.

Cities are trash in my opinion. I don't want to live in a city. I'm happy to visit them once every few months, enjoy the cream of the crop of their culture, then leave and forget about them. It's not worth enduring the constant bullshit, traffic, $10 coffee and $20 cocktails so that you have instant access to culture, the mid live culture that's on offer half the time is less appealing than internet content I could consume from anywhere and taking a trip for a special occasion is fun.

Cities used to be where young folks found a job and a mate. The job part isn't such a thing anymore due to remote work but I can still see the appeal of a place like NYC if you're trying to find someone.

This is certainly as valid opinion, but just looking at the cost of housing makes it pretty clear that we have a shortage of housing in cities, and an excess of it in bumfuck where you want it to be built. Lucky for you your preference is to live where its already cheap.

There's a shortage of housing in cities because it's nearly impossible to build in most of them. That's why Dallas and Houston are cleaning up. Hence the original article.

Also, if by bumblefuck nowhere you mean places like Santa Ynez instead of San Francisco, then yes please.

Cities are what people do to make it. It is not inherently trash or unpleasant.

> the digital elite moving wherever

The digital elite are mostly staying in concentrated areas, they have the money to and concentration leads to much more amenities nearby.

The real question is whether the intersection of everyone's reasonable requests is not the null set.

California Forever is trying your thing and facing massive headwinds.

You've just invented suburbs.

suburbs aren't designed to be mostly self sufficient.

Places like that already exist. They are called towns. Problem is most people want to live in large urban centers.

Do they though? Last I checked urban centers were doing poorly and exurbs of up and coming mid sized cities were all the rage.

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