
Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US? - hamburga
There are around 1500 towns in the US with population between 10,000 and 25,000 [1]<p>So it&#x27;s not like this hasn&#x27;t been done before. And sort of the ultimate chance to engineer the world you want to live in -- I&#x27;d think people would be really into it.<p>I know that YC has&#x2F;had a &quot;New Cities&quot; initiative but I haven&#x27;t seen updates in years.<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;241695&#x2F;number-of-us-cities-towns-villages-by-population-size&#x2F;
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0x4f3759df
The founder of Dominos pizza built the city of Ave Maria, FL -- It gets high
marks in the child safety/friendly category from the local press but feels
suburban to me. The most famous example is probably Seaside, FL built buy
Duany Plater-Zyberk, it was the set of "The Truman Show". The story is
interesting they had to fight all these dumb zoning laws (eg. The Fire
Department buys the biggest truck they can find and then think that every road
in the state must accommodate it) -- DPZ has other stuff worth checking out:
[https://www.dpz.com/Projects/All](https://www.dpz.com/Projects/All)

My favorite is in Jakriborg, Sweden
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakriborg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakriborg)

You learn about this sort of stuff if you are plugged into the urbanist blogs
/ podcast scene

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> The founder of Dominos pizza built the city of Ave Maria, FL -- It gets high
> marks in the child safety/friendly category from the local press but feels
> suburban to me.

That's kind of the _point_ of suburbs - to be more child safe/friendly than
the city. It's not a bug, it's a feature. (It may not be a feature that you
personally want, though...)

~~~
0x4f3759df
Yes that's a major reason people move to the suburbs (but not actually why
they were created in the first place), but on the other hand you can build a
safe town where the buildings are close together.

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captain_perl
Irvine, California is a subdivision of The Irvine Company, owned by one man,
Donald Bren.

To ensure alimony couldn't touch his $15 billion wealth, he had a family out
of wedlock.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company)

~~~
anovikov
Cool! Why didn't i hear about this before?

Why there are no other such examples? At least, this approach guarantees that
there will be no slums: if slums start to form, the guy who owns the town will
start losing billions, quickly, so he will do everything to evict those
people.

~~~
CloudNetworking
That's not how you guarantee there'll be no slums though. You just guarantee
you move the slums somewhere else, which is not really a solution for anyone.

~~~
anovikov
Sorry for late answer, but why not? Slums are not a problem as such. They are
only a problem when they are close to normal residential areas, because they
decrease property values there. If slums are somewhere where normal people
won't see them, i am fine with them.

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staticautomatic
I have often wondered if it's possible to build a successful, large-scale
community/commune that is secular and run by sane people who engage in minimal
financial thievery of their supporters. Think Wild Wild Country but without
insane murderous narcissistic assholes at the helm. From a political
perspective what they did was actually pretty amazing. The fact that the feds
ultimately just asked them to leave the country rather than imprisoning them
makes me suspect that the biggest impediment to building such a community may
in fact be trying to do it underneath a bigger government.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Garden of Eden is a commune of people that grow their own food, use minimal
electric, use water from a well, etc and then sell their produce and products
online. They've faced some lovely treatment as well [1]. They were faced with
a machine gun raid and day long detainment under the auspices of a drug
warrant. No drugs were found. Following that they were raided by the city's
Code Compliance Department who cut down and carted off various plants and
'accidentally' broke their irrigation lines with their trucks.

[1] - [https://www.chron.com/news/houston-
texas/texas/article/North...](https://www.chron.com/news/houston-
texas/texas/article/North-Texas-hippie-commune-sues-over-failed-
SWAT-6431853.php)

------
willcate
It's definitely been done. Once upon a time there was a thing called Planned
Communities. Reston, Virginia is one such. So is "The Villages" in central
Florida. But, especially since the sub-prime mortgage crash of the 00s, I
haven't heard of anybody attempting it.

~~~
natoliniak
Check out Ave Maria, also in Florida. It is a mixed-zoning town build around a
College and a Catholic cathedral, but unlike the Villages, it is actually
quite age diverse. So, for those who are not bothered by the the religious
aspect, it is seems very livable and I think will be successful.

------
danni
Not sure about the state of the project, but I remember reading this article
last year about Bill Gates starting a new city:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-buys-arizona-
land-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-buys-arizona-land-to-
build-smart-city-2017-11)

------
esturk
Another related phenomenon is the relocation of an entire town which often
results in building an entire infrastructure from scratch. These are either
caused by natural disasters like Pattonsburg.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattonsburg,_Missouri](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattonsburg,_Missouri)

Or it can be caused by planned hollowing of the ground from mining like
Kiruna.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna)

Either scenarios are fascinating to think about the engineering effort that
goes into starting a town from scratch. Like literally sim city.

------
gusmd
Check out Rajneeshpuram [0], built by the Rajneeshees in Oregon. There's a
Netflix documentary about it now, called "Wild, Wild Country". Definitely
worth checking out.

Besides all the controversy surrounding it, it was actually a pretty
interesting example of "buying land and building a city from scratch".

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Country)

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jnwatson
Celebration, Florida was created in the late 90s by Walt Disney Corporation.

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mc32
This guy bought up lots of land with the purpose of building some kind of city
in with his vision.

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/23/mormon-mogul-
ey...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/23/mormon-mogul-eyes-small-
town-vermont-for-vast-futuristic-
development/VevYULqFPKGSnd8zHj2twL/story.html)

~~~
hamburga
This is very interesting and exactly what I was looking to find. Thanks!

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chatmasta
This is only tangentially relevant to the question as asked, but you may be
interested in reading about China’s “new cities” initiative.

There are lots of articles on DuckDuckGo but here is one:
[https://outline.com/ZAZvTt](https://outline.com/ZAZvTt) (Forbes, yuck!)

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hamburga
Has anybody heard from YC's New Cities project, by the way? Should we assume
it's disbanded? [https://cities.ycr.org/](https://cities.ycr.org/)

------
tiredwired
[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-arizona-smart-
city-t...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-arizona-smart-city-
tonopah/)

~~~
hamburga
Didn't realize this! Interesting take here about how this actually just a run-
of-the-mill sprawling Phoenix development that Gates invested in just for
profit: [https://slate.com/business/2017/11/bill-gates-smart-city-
in-...](https://slate.com/business/2017/11/bill-gates-smart-city-in-arizona-
is-not-smart-not-a-city-and-has-almost-nothing-to-do-with-bill-gates.html)

------
singularity2001
There was a great TED talk about new VC funded enclave cities with modern
laws. Idea soon got corrupted and dismissed as tax evasion schemes.

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hamburga
This one?
[https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer](https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer)

~~~
singularity2001
ja, danke

