[octaveguin]

A solution to the housing a problem never mentioned is intentional communities. They seem to solve a good portion of the problems.

Here's why they make sense:

1. They can be cheap because they can be built in places with low land prices and low regulations. These are the chief factors in why housing is so expensive.

2. They can solve desirability by building together that stuff that makes a city desirable - other people, businesses, walkability, modern design.

3. They're more feasible than ever because remote work is so practical that you don't have to live in the middle of a city for a job.

4. A model for bringing people who have this goal together has been recently validated on a large scale (kickstarter type systems).

So I'm left wondering - am I just not seeing the projects or why have I not heard of them?

[fragsworth]

> remote work is so practical

Remote work isn't actually feasible for most people. It's feasible for software engineers, and some other high-paid jobs, that don't have much of a problem paying high rent prices.

[dragonwriter]

> They can solve desirability by building together that stuff that makes a city desirable - other people, businesses, walkability, modern design.

The things that make a city desirable (and supportable) are largely natural features of its location, which you either can't currently practically engineer (pleasant weather) or which are very expensive to engineer (like access to fresh water supply). Places that are currently unpopulated and have low land prices are usually lacking these things.

[mch82]

How come people continue to live in flood planes, hurricane zones, or the Northeast?

Massive Winter Storm Hits Northeast - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/04/575643483...

[dragonwriter]

> How come people continue to live in flood planes, hurricane zones, or the Northeast?

Because those places have desirable geographical features, like access to fresh water (flood plains tend to have this in spades), access to arable land (doesn't always support high density, but supports at least people to farm and support farming, because people living elsewhere need to eat), access to natural features that are convenient in trade (like navigable waterways and natural harbors), access to valuable natural resources, etc.

[Clubber]

Hyperloop at 750MPH would drastically solve this problem using the solution you described. Build feeder cities in a 750 mile radius.

I mean that's Miami to NYC in less than 2 hours.

[mch82]

This is a very interesting way to look at the issue.

Income source strikes me as the most significant challenge. How will the citizens of these communities earn money? In addition to remote work, local manufacturing, education, healthcare, public safety, tourism, and service industry can help fill the gap. Quite a master planning challenge though!

Access to natural resources is a challenge, but that challenge might spark solutions we’ll need other places on Earth and as we colonize the Moon and Mars. People already choose to live in many inhospitable regions, depending on purchased water or routinely damaged by predictably destructive weather patterns (I’ve often wondered why wealthy New York financial firms don’t relocate somewhere sunny).

Sustainability is another question I have. Is it more sustainable for us to build up in cities than to set up distributed towns? Do we need to pivot how we aspire to live and what we aspire to own from standalone houses to dense high rise units?

[taurath]

Because connecting them between other communities is expensive and requires more investment then we value on both a state and national level. I would love a state to decide to go all out for fast transit and build communities that way, but we don’t do it well here.

[qball]

>They seem to solve a good portion of the problems.

The problem is that human beings generally hate them.

For a good example of this (and why), check out (http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...).