I don’t think you need to build a city from scratch. It’s sufficient to converge on a (partially?) abandoned city with cheap real estate. This is basically what gentrification is.
Version 0.01 of a new city is to simply get together a group of people who want to work on projects uninterrupted, buy or rent a cheap house in a town the public has forgotten about, and live/work there. 10 or 20 housemates is plenty to feel a sense of community. The EA Hotel is a recent experiment with this. I just spent 6 months there and had a great experience. They’re doing a fundraiser now if you want to contribute.
Experimenting with new gentrification strategies sounds like a cool idea, I’m just skeptical of building new real estate in the middle of nowhere if there’s plenty of real estate in the middle of nowhere which is already available. (Also, I think your post would benefit from a more even-handed presentation.)
I’m certainly interested in playing with reallocation systems in existing cities, but if we can go beyond that, we must.
“Gentrification”, for me includes the effect where land prices increase without any increase in value. That pricing does useful work by allocating land to its most profitable uses. It does that through costly bidding wars and ruthless extraction of rent, which have horrible side-effects of reducing the benefits regular people derive from living in cities by, I’d guess, maybe 80%? (Reminder: not only is your rent too damn high, but so is the rent of the businesses you frequent), allocating vast quantities of money to the landowning class, who often aren’t producing anything (especially often in san fransisco). If we can make a system that allocates land to its most productive use without those side-effects, then we no longer need market-pricing as a civic mechanism, and we should be trying like hell to get away from it. Everyone should be trying like hell to get away from it, but people who believe they have a viable mostly side-effect-free substitute should be trying especially hard.
A large part of the reason I’m attracted to the idea of building in a rural or undeveloped area is it will probably be easier to gain the use of eminent domain, in that situation. If we’re building amid farmland, and we ask the state for the right to buy land directly adjacent to the city at a price of say… double the inflation-adjusted price of local farmland as of the signing of the deal, it’s hard to argue that anyone loses out much in that situation. There wasn’t really much of a chance that land was going to rise to that price on its own, any rise would have been an obvious exploitation of the effects of the city. If you ask for a similar privilege on urban land, forced sale at capped price is a lot more messy (and, of course, the price cap will be like 8x higher), for one, raising land prices in response to adjacent development is just what land-owners are used to in cities and they will throw a very noisy fit if someone threatens that.
I don’t think you need to build a city from scratch. It’s sufficient to converge on a (partially?) abandoned city with cheap real estate. This is basically what gentrification is.
Version 0.01 of a new city is to simply get together a group of people who want to work on projects uninterrupted, buy or rent a cheap house in a town the public has forgotten about, and live/work there. 10 or 20 housemates is plenty to feel a sense of community. The EA Hotel is a recent experiment with this. I just spent 6 months there and had a great experience. They’re doing a fundraiser now if you want to contribute.
Experimenting with new gentrification strategies sounds like a cool idea, I’m just skeptical of building new real estate in the middle of nowhere if there’s plenty of real estate in the middle of nowhere which is already available. (Also, I think your post would benefit from a more even-handed presentation.)
I’m certainly interested in playing with reallocation systems in existing cities, but if we can go beyond that, we must.
“Gentrification”, for me includes the effect where land prices increase without any increase in value. That pricing does useful work by allocating land to its most profitable uses. It does that through costly bidding wars and ruthless extraction of rent, which have horrible side-effects of reducing the benefits regular people derive from living in cities by, I’d guess, maybe 80%? (Reminder: not only is your rent too damn high, but so is the rent of the businesses you frequent), allocating vast quantities of money to the landowning class, who often aren’t producing anything (especially often in san fransisco). If we can make a system that allocates land to its most productive use without those side-effects, then we no longer need market-pricing as a civic mechanism, and we should be trying like hell to get away from it. Everyone should be trying like hell to get away from it, but people who believe they have a viable mostly side-effect-free substitute should be trying especially hard.
A large part of the reason I’m attracted to the idea of building in a rural or undeveloped area is it will probably be easier to gain the use of eminent domain, in that situation. If we’re building amid farmland, and we ask the state for the right to buy land directly adjacent to the city at a price of say… double the inflation-adjusted price of local farmland as of the signing of the deal, it’s hard to argue that anyone loses out much in that situation. There wasn’t really much of a chance that land was going to rise to that price on its own, any rise would have been an obvious exploitation of the effects of the city. If you ask for a similar privilege on urban land, forced sale at capped price is a lot more messy (and, of course, the price cap will be like 8x higher), for one, raising land prices in response to adjacent development is just what land-owners are used to in cities and they will throw a very noisy fit if someone threatens that.