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That’s what bugs me so much about this kind of thing, too. Well, first that they’re always in such a rush (50,000 people living there by late 2030? Please.) but then also, if they used a fraction of that time and money to address the housing crisis in San Fran, as one example, it seems a much better use of resources.
And they wouldn’t even necessarily need to build that much. Get the laws changed so there aren’t a bunch of homes sitting vacant while people live on the street. Or buy up a bunch of existing homes that sit vacant and use them for actually housing people.
They pretend that they’re trying to solve a problem, but they aren’t.
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I think, like @jorny so eloquently expressed, these people want to run away from the other inhabitants of a city. People they despise. It’s a problem in their eyes because they essentially think they shouldn’t have to ever see any houseless or poor people.
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For all their love of sci-fi they don’t seem to realize there were no billionaires on the USS Enterprise.
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I think they prefer New Vegas and want to be like it’s autocrat, Mr House.
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Sounds like Cypress Creek.
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They’re more fans of films like Downsizing and shows like Upload, where class divisions continue in different forms.
ETA links/fix typo.
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Ultimately, Libertarianism and its variants are a childish approach to life: selfish, prone to over-simplifying, petulant, self-aggrandising, impulsive. Most children eventually outgrow these characteristics as they mature into adults, but a subset of them never do. If the exceptions stumble into big money in America, this is the result: billionaires who still believe that the sun sinks into the ground at night.
There is no way on Earth this project was intended to or indeed could benefit society.
Say what you will about his megalomania and love of flamethrowers, at least Hank Scorpio treated his workers well. I’m pretty sure this latest attempt to create Galt’s Gulch would be a “no hammocks for you, peons” kind of “community”.
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Yeah, he was one of the first supervillains I’ve seen onscreen where the loyalty of his minions actually made sense! His theme song pretty much covered it:
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It’s already on my kindle, but well down on my to be read list
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It just struck me that there’s already a version of this, only on a larger scale: China. They’ve been furiously building entire cities for years now. Like, they literally picked an area of land and built an entire city on it, shopping districts, high rise apartment buildings, business district, the whole thing. They sold apartments on spec and off the plan. Then they tried to get people to move in.
Largely, those people didn’t. Which means those cities (not buildings, cities, I can’t say this enough) are empty and already falling down because the buildings were built in a hurry by crews who didn’t have time to not cut all the corners, even if they cared, which they didn’t.
Which is to say: this experiment has already been run, on a far greater scale, and has already been proved to not work, by a government which has the power to straight up force people by the million to move where they’re told to, and still hasn’t been able to make it work.
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Plus China actually does the infrastructure part --probably badly, but still better than whatever cut-rate Howard Roark the California Dreamers hired to plan out their city.
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There are some who are trying to bring back the old “company town” model, too. If workers are dependent on the business and the company goes under, it’s a financial disaster. For workers no longer employed by the company, it’s a challenge to remain in place. I’ve also noticed some of these proposed villages leaning into the idea that most people would be remote workers, but they’re probably setting themselves up for other tax-related issues for the entire community down the line. If a town has few businesses and the municipality depends on taxes to fund schools, libraries, police/fire departments, etc., the residents have to make up the difference.
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I know a handful of people who moved to NH specifically because they don’t have income tax, who then complained without end about the high property taxes. The schadenfreude is sweet.
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Everyone should read City Of quartz by Mike Davis if you haven’t
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Late Victorian Holocausts is a good one, too…
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No, very few planners would call the principles behind it as good practice. First, for all the reasons in your thread and in the article, it could easily be argued to fall afoul of the basic AICP code of ethics. On a more theory and practical level, it also isn’t even slightly proposed as a walkable community. A detached suburban development, even if built at Hong Kong density with gorgeous architecture isn’t walkable, because a community of that size can’t support the array of social, commercial, and recreational opportunities that people want. When they can’t get what they want and need in that bubble, they will have to drive outside it. Once you build a community with that car dependence as a structural feature, the cars will force their way in over time. It is walkable enough for a press release and ribbon cutting, but not life.
Poorly thought out large scale exurban development does a lot of damage, both the obvious ecological damage, but also to the finances of everyone in the region. Leapfrog development creates a cycle of expanding infrastructure needs that slowly bleed cities and over time regions dry. If you want a golden example, look at northeast Ohio and southwest Michigan. We often talk about these places as poor, but they have pretty hugh GDPs and somewhat stable regional populations. The problem is, capital flex to the edges, leaving a well of poverty with rapidly increasing maintenance costs.
I get that you are talking scale, but I will always push back on the idea that they built cities. A city is it’s people. They built enough buildings to house some cities.
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