| Something I've been thinking about on and off since YC announced their "New Cities" research project [1] is whether you could create more affordable cities from scratch in undeveloped land as a sort of speculative public-interest investment. Suppose you begin with a large lump of money sufficient to buy at least several square miles of rural land and to pay for some basic infrastructure (roads, power lines, sewer, etc..). At first, you practically give plots of land away to anyone willing to build a house. (Since it's rural, there's little reason to be there unless there's some critical mass of people already there.) Then, as people start moving in, you can raise the price of the lots to recover some of your initial investment and pay for additional infrastructure. Eventually, you should be able to sell lots at far more than the original land cost and recover your investment. This might also spare residents from having to pay taxes until the city is fully grown and there are no more lots to sell. Some thoughts: The new city should ideally be near at least some neighboring town with schools, stores, a hospital, and so on to make bootstrapping easier. This would be an easier sell both to county government and prospective citizens if it were managed by a non-profit institution that is contractually obligated to re-invest profits back into the city. This could be similar to a normal city government, except that in this case the city starts off by owning all the buildable lots. Partnering with a University that wants to build a new campus on cheap land would be ideal. Figuring out the right amount of land to buy up-front would be difficult. Too much and it's too expensive and you never sell it all, too little and you'll end up having to buy more adjacent land later at steeply inflated prices or let some other developer buy it and let them absorb all the profits without re-investing it back into the city. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11987032 |