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What's preventing people from making dense, mixed-zoning walkable cities with good public transit like NYC elsewhere? Why it a requirement that cities have their commercial areas mostly separate from the residential areas?

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I remember a few years ago I saw a 7000 acre piece of land in eastern CA for sale. The price tag was $7M. How hard do you guys think it would be to convince a good group of people with diverse skills to go out there and start a small city? All initial people get a piece of land for very cheap or free. Later movers get smaller pieces, etc. Like a startup with equity.

I'm not really sure, I'm guessing you could get at least a small group of people to come. I'd consider it if it had a high proportion of geeks, seemed well managed, had good infrastructure (things like water rights, proximity to an airport, Amazon service, fiber to the home, good schools, etc), and wasn't too expensive.

I don't think you'd have to make it free - you could probably make a tidy profit off of getting services hooked up and then subdividing the land, and still providing people a better place to go.

John Galt, is that you?

Labour is too expensive to build the NYC subway again, and the dynamite would make OHSA throw a fit. Look how much a single new line costs these days.

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