I'm very invested in urbanist discourse (which is to say, all things that lend themselves to less cars and more people doing more walking/biking/transit). That said, the fantasy of building a human-scale town from scratch is, unfortunately, a fantasy.
The author is half correct in saying that we've forgotten how to build towns. It's better to say, the creation of new towns have become economically obsolete. Their niche is gone. Historically, towns formed organically around sources of value, such as farmland or rivers or mines or whatever, where many people making a living in the same region benefited from being in walking proximity, which enabled commerce. That concern just doesn't exist today, due to cars.
You don't need a town with an inn when the truckers stay at motels and rest stops. You don't need a town square when people shop at the big box store on the highway and local producers are part of a complex global supply chain.
I would argue that, for better or worse, Marfa, TX in West Texas is a real manifestation of this essay. It's only a town of about 5000, completely walkable, and homes that were selling for $20k before news got out that it was a secret artist enclave just 10 years ago are now going for north of $1 million (even more eye popping when the median single family home price in the most expensive metro areas of the state, Austin and Dallas, are around $500k). Outside the town is farmland and oil fields. Inside the town is a collection of bars, restaurants, hotels, museums, and high art, all from a once-dying/repurposed small town on a defunct train line.
"A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine. See (also mentioned in that article) Seaside, Florida.
Marfa is in the middle of nowhere, the jobs seem to be of the landscaper/service industry type unless you are arriving with money from somewhere else.
Sounds more like a touristy set of rich estates at this point, I expect the laborers live in the surrounding area and drive into town just like a large city. I did some labor during HS and in the summer it was driving 20-40 miles from our small town in nowhere Texas for the jobs we did.
During the early 80's oil boom there were several small towns in Texas that kinda looked like OP's model, but once the boom went to bust they started dying and never recovered. Probably around the Austin area in the 60's a lot of places looked more idyllic (there were no stoplights between downtown Austin and I think Lampasas at that point), but it's all sprawled out and become a Metropolis at this point.
Not clear that any sufficiently attractive area would not end up being encompassed in suburbia or a high-end enclave (Westlake by Austin comes to mind).
Eh, I don't know about that re: Marfa demographics. There's certainly been tension about property values forcing some out of town -- but the town is still majority Hispanic (67%) and the median household income is $39k. It's got attractiveness to tourists driving up property values, but it is very much still a real town with real people.
I mean the people paying $150,000 for a lot in Marfa (looking at listing on Zillow) are probably not locals from those $39k income households. Perversely, the way property taxes in Texas work, this likely means that anyone under 65 is watching the property taxes climb faster than their income, increasing pressure to sell and move to a cheaper property.
It's a real town, but the service folks are largely priced out at this point (although I'd expect this real estate bubble might not last as there might not be that many people willing to buy at Austin prices in Marfa).
> Perversely, the way property taxes in Texas work, this likely means that anyone under 65 is watching the property taxes climb faster than their income, increasing pressure to sell and move to a cheaper property.
What's perverse about that? When there's suddenly high demand for a limited housing supply, we should encourage those who happened to randomly live in a particular place to consider selling to those who especially want to live in that place.
If you look a the overhead map of Marfa, you'll see it isn't particularly land constrained. However, people living in trailer houses on small lots in town are seeing their taxes go up, so they eventually have to move. Also perversely, the land around there you see with cows or crops on it is almost assuredly in an agricultural tax exemption status, so the excess land has little pressure to be sold for new housing.
It's perverse because it effectively forces poorer people to sell to rich people.
I will also note Texas has a homestead exemption, originating in 1876, so this is a well-known issue. It does not appear to be inflation or value indexed, and does not provide relief to low-income people when their house suddenly appreciates. There is a limit on how much the appraisal goes up every year, but it's certainly more than wage growth.
Regardless, the point is OP's ideal town this is not, the people moving there are not moving for the local jobs and economy in a nice little town. The incomes certainly don't support the high house prices.
If you own a house that's become so valuable, you're already above the median. Exempting rich people from taxes so that they don't have to sell to even richer people doesn't seem like a good policy to me. Any kind of tax makes it easier to be richer than poorer, that's just life.
I'd agree that the agricultural exemption is perverse (as is the whole notion of taxing property value rather than unimproved land value - but ad-hoc exemptions aren't the way to fix that).
You should never be taxed out of a paid off house. I’m in Texas and our property tax system was built for 2-3% annual appreciation. It’s been running 3x that or more in many places, for many years now.
Also, people living in their home for years, being a part of the community, raising families, etc is not random at all. What’s random is the guy who just shows up one day from another state and decides houses are cheaper here so he can pay $100K over ask.
I'm finding it remarkable that people getting chased out of houses they've lived for years - maybe all their lives - by property taxes is "non perverse".
Bonus points for using the phrase "happened to randomly live". I mean, the whole sentimentalism about people's hometowns can be taken a bit far, but seriously?
HN comments like this put me in mind of that great quote:
"All of us have sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others." -Francois de La Rochefoucauld
I've been forced out of homes I loved multiple times, because I can't afford to buy even though I'm working my ass off[1] at a job that pays far above average, and a big part of that is people who bought when it was cheap but won't sell at any price. So yeah, when the idle rich complain that they need a tax break so that they don't have to go through the same thing that I do and can keep piling it all on me instead, cry me a river.
[1] I'm quite conscious that I'm lucky to have the skills I do, and I'm sure I have better working conditions than many people, but I do work hard
There's a certain irony that the urbanists who advocate high density big city living are also the kind of people who escape at the first sign of trouble or rising cost, which they themselves contributed to, and run off to suburbs, small towns, and country sides and drive up property costs and price the much poorer locals out. Living in a suburb in NJ I can't help but notice increased traffic in the direction of NYC, even compared to prelockdown, coinciding with the rapid rise in housing costs
This is a generalized assertion about a large number of people, made without any evidence. Even if it is true for some subset of "urbanists" (which could be true, but it isn't incredibly obvious that it is), it isn't likely to be true for the entire set of people who advocate for high density big city living.
I doubt most people making 38k would be that annoyed if their house gained 700+k in value and property taxes forced them to move somewhere else. The elderly can even do a reverse mortgage and stay in their homes while receiving extra income.
Judd made Marfa and died before it ever became what it was today. Secretive group of artists and the like came later and in the end, all good towns need an industry and Marfa’s real industry is tourism of people coming to see the art and related art that has sprung up.
Even terralingua has a restaurant with a two hour wait now. Tourism is the only real driver of a small town booming imo.
Marfa also does not have a lot of services that are needed for anyone older than 50, like a hospital.
a friend from the area insists that judd was involved in drug trafficking and that the (frankly mundane) art was a pretense or money laundering mechanism. i've spent time in the region and it is not difficult to spot people who are obviously involved.
the same friend's relative was recently interviewed for a soon-to-be-released podcast about the former sheriff of presidio, who was recently released from a multi-decade bid for bringing heroin over the border in his official trailer and putting it on trains hauling cattle feed to houston: https://www.presidiosheriff.com/
So... a secretive group of artists could build a town, live there 'til the word gets out, sell at 10x the price, and move on to the next secret location? This sounds like a fun way to live.
Marfa isn't valuable because of a secretive bunch of artists, it is valuable because it has been exporting real estate appreciation from Manhattan for over fifty years. Judd, the artist who brought all the wealth to Marfa, bought the building at 101 Spring Street for nothing and throughout his life borrowed against its value to acquire property in Texas. Today the building is worth at least $100 million.
Marfa is hilarious to me. I'm from west Texas and I've driven highway 90 dozens of times, there is literally nothing out there. A complete wasteland. It's painfully boring. I don't believe anyone buying these properties are living there year round.
Alpine is a much more scenic town and it's just up the road. I'd probably buy a house there instead.
Yeah, just the idea of getting to Marfa hurts me to think about. Made the drive from El Paso to Austin a few times, can't imagine regularly visiting that area for pleasure or wanting to live there.
> ...just the idea of getting to Marfa hurts me to think about.
I suspect there are quite a few owners of that Marfa property are flying and not driving in. Marfa Municipal airport as about 20+ airplanes per day [1].
There are plenty of small towns that can be managed and organized according to the principles of the article, and personally I think it's a great idea. I'm referring more to the idea of building a small town, presumably starting from scratch, as if you were playing Sim City or Cities: Skylines.
I've never heard of Marfa but wikipedia suggests it was originally built around the 1880s as a Railroad Water Stop. The analogue today would be a "town" around a highway rest stop, which is generally not going to be built at human scale or with pre-war zoning and architecture.
> "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine
Absolutely. The major issue here is that if you're building a small town from scratch, it's not a desirable place to live / visit until it is built. And it's not "built" until you have several hundred people, at least, living there. But those people aren't going to want to build houses and live there if it's not a desirable place to live. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.
The whole point of deliberately starting a new town with human-scale architecture etc. is to get around that chicken-and-egg problem, precisely because moving to a highway rest stop town would have all the problems you mention.
Marfa is a really weird and unique place. It was originally famous for UFO sightings and then somehow became that artists enclave and achieved some sort of cult status to the point that it was a prevalent pre-tinder dating app meme for women to have pictures in front of the fake Prada storefront art installation there. That made it a really hip place for anyone who knew it, and yeah, eventually word got out and now it's super expensive.
But I don't see how that is repeatable. Trying to build a new town from scratch can't realistically have the plan of UFO sightings and cult-status house-size art installations to get people to want to live there.
Marfa is the same population as advised in this article but it's ten times larger.
There are plenty of recent examples of development on the scale that this article suggests. The area just to the west of Warm Springs BART station in Fremont, California is 90 acres. The New Urbanist polestar of Hercules, California is about 150 acres.
It's true that it's legal geographic size is ~1.5 square miles. However if you look at Google Maps a good 30% of it is just empty/undeveloped land previously (still?) owned by the military.
So yes, it's still bigger geographically, but it still only takes 15-20 minutes to walk from one end to the other; I've visited a few times. I'm not very familiar with either location you mentioned, but I would say for Marfa to be 3 hours away from the next-largest town (El Paso), have no commercial airport or passenger train line, and still be a self-sustaining walkable town is impressive.
I'm possibly mistaken, but the first example you pointed out looks to be an apartment complex next to a train station within a larger city and Hercules, CA is a 20 square mile (maybe I'm looking at the wrong city?) suburb of SF; I don't think those are examples of what this article is saying?
The New Urbanist part of Hercules is very small and easy to overlook. It does not hit every point that the article mentions, but it is an example of some of them.
Marfa started as railroad infrastructure and grew around the Army airfield (and chemical mortar firing range per Wikipedia) south of town.
There’s room in West Texas for one of them. Nobody’s gonna build a second Dairy Queen on US 90 in Marathon or Valentine. But even with a DQ, living there is only practical because there’s a Walmart in Van Horne. Dallas and El Paso are too far for underwear.
And of course Marfa is full of air conditioners. As is all of Texas…a place I suspect the article’s author has not spent much time…football ain’t played on pitches in Texas.
The only reason the houses could possibly cost that much is if the town is restricting new construction. I.e. the old guard is making real estate there expensive.
I got married in Marathon and my wife and I spend a lot of time in and around Marta. That part of West Texas is pretty unique/strange for a number of reasons. I would hesitate before drawing any parallel between the area and anything else. Terelinqua is even worse/better, the population consists of corporate burnouts and bandits pretty much.
Laughed at the bandit part. I grew up mule deer hunting in Terlingua and I recall nearly every person I met gave off that "fugitive from the law hiding out in the desert" vibe.
I'd have to argue against the notion that towns/ European style cities are "economically obsolete". Yes, they are virtually impossible to build from scratch at the moment (zoning, building codes, developers, etc), but the economic value of walkable cities has never been higher. If you cross reference walkscore against our metropolitan areas in the US walkable cities (that are in warm climates) are our most valuable real estate... not to mention that they are the location for most of our companies participating in the "information economy" (military-industrial complex aside).
Basically most Americans want to live in a walkable city with charm and community, but the way we built America post 1950 makes it very difficult.
Just to be clear: existing towns are not economically obsolete. The economic conditions that led to the founding of small towns no longer exist, and in this sense the idea of "building a new small town" is obsolete (with some exceptions: eccentric millionaire building a planned community, an ideological sect with hundreds of people willing to uproot their lives to build somewhere that is not yet livable, "theme park" style for-profit destination towns like your disneylands or The Villages in Florida).
This isn't a matter of zoning, building codes and developers (thats mostly a problem for existing towns/cities), this is a matter of economics. It takes impetus to create a new town/city, and in the modern economy that impetus almost always involves automobiles.
Edit: updated my wording in the above post to make clear that existing towns aren't obsolete, just the creation of new ones
This was basically Walt Disney's idea of E.P.C.O.T. before his passing, and specifically focused on commuting via 'peoplemovers' and walking instead of cars.
https://youtu.be/tKYEXjMlKKQ
The Villages is interesting as an example because they mostly drive golf carts everywhere. There are gas stations / charging stations specially made for the carts, tunnels and bridges to allow the carts to pass under/over highways, and small parking spaces everywhere for them. Carts are honestly a lot more practical, in my opinion, for a modern city design. You can still easily run errands and carry kids with them, you can drive on slower roads comfortably, they remove a lot of traffic off the roads, and they're cheaper to build special lanes / paths for.
Golf carts are sort of a scourge. I've spent time in Avalon where residents use a lot of golf carts. The gas ones are insanely loud and leave the street smelling like a lawn mower well after they've gone. Gas or electric, due to the nature of their transmission they are jerky at crawling speed and somewhat dangerous around pedestrians compared to a car or moped that can more smoothly crawl at low speed. They also seem to foster a culture of DUIs since they feel like a toy rather than a serious vehicle capable of harming other people, and there isn't enough enforcement to catch them all even though the police are constantly pulling people over in golf carts. They banned golf carts from some streets and made them pedestrian only, and it was far more pleasant.
A lot of established cities today were planned shortly after founding. They were just planned with a grid pattern conducive to the flow of traffic from carriages, streetcars, or railroads rather than pedestrians.
It's completely reasonable to plan a new city today with the goal of being walkable. Given the fact that so many of our most valuable cities are navigable without a car, it seems that there may be a strong economic incentive for such cities, just no one has really tried to capitalize on it.
We are seeing a lot of walkable microtowns popping up around the USA, but these are more centered around renters than owners. Which might be due to zoning issues than market forces.
> If you cross reference walkscore against our metropolitan areas in the US walkable cities (that are in warm climates) are our most valuable real estate... not to mention that they are the location for most of our companies participating in the "information economy" (military-industrial complex aside).
> Basically most Americans want to live in a walkable city with charm and community, but the way we built America post 1950 makes it very difficult.
How do you know that this means Americans want to live in that style, versus that high concentration fosters today's thriving companies and job markets, and so the people follow the jobs at the expense of cheaper and more desirable housing? Single family homes reduce walkability for everyone else, but are more valuable than a condo next door in those thriving American cities. The ultimate desire is to have your cake and eat it too.
And that economic value and company presence aspect argues against forming new small towns - the $$$ shows that all the desire and demand is in bigger metro areas, right now.
I live in a UK town a hundred times that size, and still have reasonable access to proper green space. This does require:
-modern multi-storey buildings;
-public transit. Which requires similar infra to cars.
Economically, a town this size supports a train station to other towns, which is... huge. I've gone to after-work drinks in a different, similar-sized town. So has my partner.
And environmentally, there's no real objection to building up a bit (it might be a net positive, by shoring up aforementioned train station). Adding a whole new town anywhere in the region would be a nightmare. And frankly, for all the current (deserved) bad press on flats and the romanticism of single-family homes, an awful lot of the latter are terrible. Leaking, creaking, cold, subsiding, dangerous wiring and something else rhyming.
The other example is towns on lakes/oceans by some tourist attraction. You need a variety of people to work all the hotels/rentals/building etc. Like college towns - you also have a good percent of people who can pay a lot in taxes + consume a lot of services to benefit the whole towns.
I think as income has become more concentrated in certain industries it hurts. Even if your agricultural town had very little poor people - if is has virtually no one making about 70k then it is going to be tricky to build and maintain.
Federal loans probably prop up demand and tuition but I disagree that colleges or college towns would be unsustainable without them. The ROI of at least a large subset of college degrees is high enough that they’d be worth financing with private capital if federal grants and loans didn’t exist.
I really miss Ruston LA for this. Small town, but a lot on campus and enough within walking distance. Pretty safe. Pretty campus for Louisiana and it's actually walkable unlike LSU, which is an absolute nightmare.
That's probably part of it, but I think the root is that a college campus is designed for people to use it without cars. Food, stores, classrooms, places to sit and meet are all built in and connected via walkways. Cars become unnecessary once you get to campus
A college campus is its own sustainable self-perpetuating institution. Or at least has been for much of the past century in the US (and elsewhere) as 1) an increasingly technological world has increased the need for an educated populace and 2) funding for college education has been readily available.
You've also got a town structure which is based on a single identifiable economic centre, which doesn't generally rely on heavy industry or ag within that centre (information, knowledge, and people, as well as the support strucutures for them), and so your principle transportation problem is how to move a fair-to-middlin' mostly younger and healthier population around. Bikes and walking fit this mode well, the small population of elderly and disabled can be accomodated as edge cases.
Keep in mind that in many small college towns, there's still a sizable commuter population. Some of that are students priced out of local housing, though the workforce is a much larger component, and may have commute patterns comparable to that of a large city (driving in from an hour or more away). The centralised nature of employment makes even rural mass transit or commuter shuttles viable.
There are still plenty of cars around college campuses and parking is a perpetual issue. Certainly faculty and staff (and some students) drive in and park daily. And even a town built around a relatively small college like Hanover NH still has a population of over 10K people.
ADDED: But, as others have noted, once you drive somewhere at least relatively close to where you're going, at least small to mid-sized campuses and associated towns are generally designed to let you walk to stores/restaurants/etc. fairly easily.
That's likely a consideration, as are the concentrated sources of value that are classrooms and labs with face-to-face instruction, as well as interaction (both social and educational) among students. Online education is reducing the edge of the former, though the latter is still hard to replicate outside of a college town.
I live in an artificial town that was constructed 10 or so years ago near a light rail station to the larger city to the north (and other similar "towns") so it's totally doable, it's just not for everyone.
I'd love to read more about it. My impression is that this sort of "greenfield" doesn't exist because most established cities have surrounded themselves with low density suburbs. What's the name of the town/region?
Vienna's Seestadt Aspern fits that description and seems to me like a very good attempt at building a "new town" with its own centre and infrastructure.
It's only a short train ride away from Vienna's center, but so are many other small towns and those are decidedly separate.
I take this more as a thought experiment on how building a town without the primary nuisances of 'modern' places. Cars have enabled many things but they are not unequivocally good. I understand the positives, but they produce a LOT of negative externalities and there is significant cost to spacing things further apart.
> Cars have enabled many things but they are not unequivocally good. I understand the positives, but they produce a LOT of negative externalities and there is significant cost to spacing things further apart.
Believe me, you're preaching to the choir here. My comment is really just to offer a counterpoint to the justifiable desire to create a "new world" without the troubles of the old one - most people aren't shopping for new lives, so these sorts of plans don't emerge organically in the way that towns did originally. And when "start over" towns built around some ideological principle do arise, they often fail comically[0].
> What they needed was a town that was small enough that they could come up and elbow the existing citizenry, someplace where land was cheap, where they could come in and buy up a bunch of land and kind of host their incoming colonists. And they wanted a place that had no zoning, because they wanted to be able to live in nontraditional housing situations and not have to go through the rigamarole of building or buying expensive homes or preexisting homes.
Is this the kind of bad scenario that NIMBY activists organize to prevent (despite the issues created by their zoning policies not letting people move in)?
> To be fair that sounds more anarchist/hippy commune than what the article today was about
To be more precise, Grafton was an attempt to "create" a new town governed by the ideas of Libertarianism, while the OP article is describing how to create a new town governed by the ideas of New Urbanism (roughly). The shared problem is that if you're founding a town on the basis of an ideology, you have a town full of ideologues, which isn't a very organic state and hence is prone to many unexpected issues
But obviously a mountain resort town has to be somewhere that outsiders want to vacation in and everyone who lives there is either in or supporting in some way the tourist industry.
Disney built a human-scale "town" from scratch as Celebration, Florida. Some people seem to like it. The basic formula could probably be repeated elsewhere.
Seaside is an unincorporated master-planned community on the Florida Panhandle in Walton County, between Panama City Beach and Destin.[2] One of the first communities in America designed on the principles of New Urbanism, the town has become the topic of slide lectures in architectural schools and in housing-industry magazines, and is visited by design professionals from all over the United States. The town rose to global fame as being the main filming location of the movie The Truman Show. On April 18, 2012, the American Institute of Architects's Florida Chapter placed the community on its list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places as the Seaside – New Urbanism Township.
Strangest bit of trivia is that the Truman Show was filmed there, and the house that the titular character lived in is owned by Matt Gaetz, the extreme right wing congressperson under investigation for sex trafficking.
They keep saying things like "arid, parched" which leads me to believe they are looking at land in West Texas (it is very cheap land). These things do not apply to South East Texas, which is mostly subtropical. However, even in the South East we've had issues with subsidence due to over pumping (which we've mostly weaned off from), so the point of being self sustaining on surface water still applies.
East Texas has a huge logging and tree farming industry, so if you're building in East Texas, you'll probably want to leverage the natural resources; rammed earth doesn't quite make sense there.
Also, and this is my personal opinion, I do not believe it is possible to create a successful, large town without vehicles or air conditioning here, it isn't practical, and it isn't in the culture. If you look at the history of success of Texas towns, many further West and South/South East did not become successful until the advent of the vehicle and the air conditioner. The idea of lugging groceries for even a 150m walk in this weather sounds miserable. I recommend the author looks more local to find out what makes Texas towns tick rather than global, because while there's great ideas from around the world that could be imported, you shouldn't discount the local maxima.
Villages in Spain and elsewhere use light wall colors, roof overhangs and narrow streets/walkways to keep paths shaded and cool. Also can orient for wind. Can make it a bit more manageable. For really oppressive days, you put low flow misters along paths.
In a village, you don’t go to HEB once every two weeks and get $400 in groceries. You walk to the market every day or two and shop. One tote bag. You send the kid to the butcher, fishmonger or for something you forgot. Completely different from sub/exurb lifestyle.
Smaller hand trucks/carts would also be a norm, very common to see those in Europe with the elderly, delivery or tradesfolks.
One aspect of the covid era was that many stopped walking to urban stores every day and made it a weekly thing or got delivieries. Kind of eye opening to see a city like SF return to crowded markets.
You can absolutely have a city without air conditioning. Humans have done it for thousands of years. The well-known tradeoff is that you are going to lose some elderly people during the summer.
Yes, it's definitely better, but like all of these zero-energy "alternatives" to air conditioning, it feels like a 20% substitute being sold as an 80% substitute.
How is this an alternative to air conditioning? It's an idea to make being outside in the heat mor bearable, not inside. Good shade provides more like an alternative to depending on a car to get around on hot days.
Properly livable landscaping isn't being sold as an alternative for air conditioning in the first place, which makes your comment seem like a complete non sequitur.
It's true that the right-leaning government will override local control when it comes to most controversial issues in the blue cities, but when it comes to land use, Texas leaves cities alone. I grew up in Dallas, now own a home in Los Angeles. Aside from the local zoning ordinances (Dallas is "zoned", but compared to Los Angeles, no it's not; and Houston doesn't have any formal zoning at all), California has _way_ more state-level codes than Texas when it comes to land development.
Also, I would argue that, for better or worse, Marfa, TX in West Texas is a real manifestation of this essay. It's only a town of about 5000, completely walkable, and homes that were selling for $20k when news got out it was a secret artist enclave just 10 years ago are now going for north of $1 million. And, to assuage your concern: yes, it's blue (not enough to turn the rest of the rural county blue, but close enough to make the vote of the county 48% Biden - 52% Trump, almost exactly mirroring the overall result in the state). Marfa even disbanded its entire police department in 2009, and the red state government still left it alone.
As you noted, thar was procedural rather than reactive — Dallas passed a similar “form-based” code almost a decade earlier that Austin is using as inspiration, I believe, and it’s only been expanded since [1].
Austin also just passed a historic public transit capital program via referendum that the GOP was openly against, and though the state government could have used some shady but technically legal tactics to prevent Austin from building a subway under a state-owned park (simply by refusing to bring a bill up for a vote rather than actively taking the right away, too!), they didn’t and gave Austin a 99 year lease on the ground rights for $1. [2]
Dallas and Austin are currently in a competition to ban parking minimums, which funnily enough has found much bipartisan agreement [3]
I mean, Texas is home to the largest unzoned city in the country. It’s also the most successful red state in the country, so it’s favorable amongst some groups, especially those with business leanings. I don’t think they’d enforce parking minimums, but we do have municipal broadband restrictions.
As a resident, I also found it an odd choice. I’d build an experiment city (especially one that wants to be walkable with less reliance on a/c) somewhere with more amenable weather. Water is also more of an issue. West Texas land isn’t just cheap because it’s flat and brown, it also is a crapshoot if your wells pull up brine vs fresh water, or if you have to dig absurdly deep wells that you have to replace every 5 years.
West Texas has some kind of fatal attraction for a certain type of person, like the Ron Paul followers who tried to establish Paulville in Hudspeth County. Wrath of Gnon, much as I enjoy certain of their tweets, has that "reject modernity, embrace tradition" vibe that is also very closely aligned in several dimensions with libertarians and separatists. Compound that with the fact that land in most parts of far west Texas is incredibly cheap (because it is useless) and you can see how people fall into that trap.
I think people should just remember that if they see some incredibly cheap Texas land advertised for sale online, it was probably used at some point to spread New Jersey sewage imported by rail.
I consider it the “western frontier” type person, and it goes thru Texas, Utah, Nevada and up to Idaho the Dakotas and Montana, with smatterings of eastern Washington, Oregon and California. Which makes some sense just from a hereditary standpoint since much of it’s only been started to get settled (by non natives) for a hundred years. Nomadland as a movie does a good job of getting the mood right.
As a Texan, who has spent a good chuck of their life in the Panhandle and west Texas:
So far I have only made it through half of this, but it is clear this person has not ever spent any amount of time on a farm or a ranch or in any part of Texas (west or not).
Food production is smelly and dirty. You don't want to live upwind of a gin or feed lot. In west Texas you don't build high because of wind. For such an arid place they sure are banking on having access to a shit ton of water.
There is a huge aquifer that most of the places out on the High Plains of Texas pump from. It's use is contentious, but your not going to be surviving off of a 3 acre playa lake.
Upon reaching the following line, I laughed out loud. This is utopian social planning at its least realistic:
“There will be an urge to build each home optimized for air conditioning. Don’t. All buildings must be useful and livable even with the power cut. Hence, natural ventilation, strategically designed windows that open, etc. is necessary. Obviously you can add AC (Air conditioner) on top of that, but in no way should the town be dependent on AC.”
Anyone who has never been to West Texas should check the weather today in some subset of {Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, Pecos, San Angelo, El Paso, Alpine}. (Some are nice and some are not!) If you can work inside all day with your house that temperature... good for you, but I cannot. And nearly every house in all of those places is air conditioned.
Better yet! Visit the Great State of Texas and take a walk of three blocks or more outside in a city during the heat of the day in June, July or August and report back on how much you liked it...
I don't think we should be surprised that buildings not designed for deserts perform poorly in extreme desert climates. The solution is to build structures that take the climate into account. Indigenous and Spanish colonial architects didn't have the luxury of designing around AC, so they built houses that reflected that limitation. Those houses remained quite livable without AC even during severe heat waves. A little active cooling on top makes them perfect.
Some historic cities (e.g. Marrakech and Ures) have designed the entire urban landscape to improve the outdoor situation as well. Dense corridors of high thermal mass buildings create shade, fountains and other water sources provide active cooling, and so on.
It's not that past generations had some special knowledge on building structures that we have forgotten, but they were doing the best they could with the materials they had at the time.
Lot's of adobe buildings were made by the indigenous people as that's about all they had, mud and clay. Mud and clay are terrible insulators, they retain heat extremely well, which is why they are great for pizza ovens.
In the arid parts of Texas evaporative cooling works really really well but requires a decent supply of water. I've never seen people use solar chimneys in these parts but those older generations could have done it with their technology, as long as they had a source of cool air to pull from.
The low R-value is why the Southwest Thermal Mass Study was done, because adobe was anomalously effective considering how badly it insulates. It's well-suited to the environment and relatively cheap. It also wasn't limited to the Americas.
November? Not about design. It's about execution. To build those types of hand built buildings today, without the workforce to do so, and pass modern inspections? Good luck.
Houses like that are still being built and passing inspections today, mostly in NM. I realize that technologies requiring actual builder expertise (because they're uncommon) and a minimal level of competent, individualized design are out of reach for the majority of the market, but it's not some inaccessible future tech.
I'm in Austin and I one of the reasons public transportation struggles is that for several months every year, it's too hot to even sit at a bus stop, let alone walk to or from one unless you have a shower available at your destination.
"All homes will be equipped with fireplaces, wood stoves and chimneys."
In West Texas? Which has no trees? "Sustainable", right.
What this guy is missing is that small towns were originally service centers for surrounding farms. When 60% of the population worked in agriculture, towns were needed as distribution points for goods and services. With under 2% of the US population working in agriculture, that function is gone. Plus, between WalMart and Amazon, distribution no longer requires a town.
I think there's an underlying assumption that maybe, some people would like to work on a farm, and to buy things which don't come from Walmart or Amazon. The economics of all that, plus the realities of farm work which are not immediately apparent to your average computer programmer, are a separate issue.
Yes, modern wood fireplaces are pretty decent emission-wise when properly operated and maintained (the catalytic converters need replacing after a few seasons). But even at their best, they produce more pollution and particulates than natural gas [1][2].
Gas is cleaner, safer, and easier, so why use wood for a built-from-scratch model town?
This is a nice overview of historic urbanism, but it nearly completely misses the real question:
How will you legally be allowed to build this car-free town?
Even in Texas you can't just build whatever you want wherever you want. Every city and most counties have minimum lot sizes, road, sewer, power, and fire code requirements that would completely defeat any effort to build a medieval european village in the US.
In terms of location, you need to be 5-7 miles away from any existing city to be outside of it's ETJ. Any closer and you're probably going to be subject to the zoning laws of that city.
In theory you could pull this off if you could get a critical mass in an unincorporated area and then incorporate a town so that the new town sets the development laws to allow this pattern of development, but you normally need anywhere from 200 to 2000 people to get that started, and until that time the county rules dictate.
One potential hack is to build the town as a condominium complex, so the entire thing is considered one apartment/condo building, even though the design is nothing like a normal apartment/condo. Another is to treat it as a trailer park, but you probably have to do a phase of development where the buildings are small pier-and-beam structures that can pass as "not permanently attached" to the land.
In short: At this point the design principles of historic and modern urbanism are generally well understood and not that interesting. The primary obstacle to these practices being brought back is that they're utterly illegal in North America, and the plausible routes around that illegality make the economics - which would already be challenging - substantially more difficult.
Texas has no building code of their own, but 70.100 adopts International Building Code 2015, International Residential Code 2015, and NFPA as the standards by which all things must be built. Most other states do the same.
Things like ADA and OSHA are federal laws that Texas builders can't just ignore.
You can probably avoid building permits if you own enough property to be your own county government, but good luck getting a construction loan.
>all homes will be equipped with fireplaces, wood stoves and chimneys.
Great: the burning of solid fuels (coal in the past, but nowadays mostly wood at least in the US) is the source of one of the most damaging forms of pollution (particulate) these years, which is the reason that for example fireplaces and wood stoves have been banned in new construction in the Bay Area since 2005.
I did find it weird to assert that you can't use wood for construction materials because it wouldn't fit, but then require it for fuel. If you can't find enough wood to build out of, then it seems even harder to find enough to cook & heat with, even in a relatively warm climate like Texas.
Probably not a problem with only a few thousand people. You could also require catalytic stoves or some other kind of stove with lower particulate emissions.
I regularly find a single household burning wood to be obnoxious to me in certain atmospheric conditions (which are present about .6 of the time in my part of the Bay Area).
Vehicles in countries with good air quality simply avoid producing carbon-rich particles (the kind of pollution produced by burning wood or coal) in the first place: their catalytic converters are for other types of pollution (gases).
This reads the second-system effect applied to urban planning, which is a field that does not lack for ego-driven projects of planning-over-natural-growth. (e.g. Seeing Like A State, and the career of Robert Moses.)
I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that we'll never learn all the fun, new problems that his grand plan would introduce.
> The newest building on the block should look like the oldest. In the case of Texas, this means the town will be built to a Mission, Spanish-colonial, or German-colonial style
Pretty amusing to leave whatever the correct word for "Anglo-American-colonial" is out of this list.
> It should look like it was founded and laid down in 1667 or 1746, not 2022.
Large parts of West Texas were not settled until after the Civil War (with gridded streets of course), making "historical authenticity" a bit of a challenge. But building a "new" horse-compatible late 19th century Texas town with wide streets and big lots would be hard enough already, so I definitely respect the gusto here.
Is there an Anglo-American colonial style in Texas outside maybe Galveston? Genuinely interested and would love to visit any remnants we still have.
Empresarios and land grants seem to have led to different settlement patterns at the start for the Anglos than the rigid early Spanish or hilariously insular hill country Germans.
“Spanish colonists came organized once the missions and presidios were already built, Anglos posted up stick houses by themselves on land they ostensibly owned and tried not to get slaughtered by comanche” is the vibe I usually get.
A couple years ago during a period of existential levity, I thought to myself: what's the most ambitious thing I could do with my life? The idea of creating a city for some reason popped into my head. Perhaps it was born out of my frustrations with finding affordable housing and the obsolete nature of the work commute (prescient pre-covid), that I started a blog and started reading about urban economics and sharing some thoughts and notes etc.
Of course going through the process of trying to get a permit for a small home remodel will destroy any enthusiasm one would have to work with any bureaucracy made me quickly forget of the ambition. During that brief period though, I did learn about different efforts out there (some now defunct, ex Google's) of re-imaging the modern city. I do hope some desolate plots of land now become economically viable post-covid and become experimental zones for new ideas and small communities.
This was an interesting thought experiment, but required some mental gymnastics to go along with the premise that the town should be entirely self-sufficient. (Especially trying to grow all of your community's food in West Texas!) But to the extent I'm interested in how you would build a community more than how you'd build a town, there are some interesting thoughts here about how you'd go about an intentional community if you didn't mind some reliance on modern industrial society (which is also true of the Amish farmers the author touts throughout)
I sometimes wonder why there's not more people and growth in Northern Australia. It seems like there's a lot of space and resources up there but not many people...
It's hot, arid, and just terrible place to live generally.
Except in the Lake Eyre Basin and more eastern areas, generally, the soil is utterly infertile. The land has had no mountain building since the Precambrian, and no Glaciation for similarly long periods. That means that this particular piece of land has been undergoing nearly 250mil years of constant weathering, without any renewal. That does make it fairly unique in the world honestly from a geological point of view, but terrible from ensuring people live there point of view.
Ellenbrook is more of a planned exburb, not a new planned town per se. It's about as far from Perth as Parramatta is from Sydney. Odd that you mention Australia, as I think we're completely lousy at building new cities (leaving towns aside) - the projections of future Australian population would be a lot easier to take if the bulk of people didn't just keep cramming into Sydney and Melbourne.
AFAIK The number of new planned towns in the US post 1950 is approximately 0. The closest equivalent is a "Master Planned Community," which is a large-scale suburban development that might include a mix of land uses. Those are relatively common, but they're build as attachments to a larger city, not as new cities.
How to make cheap West Texas land worth even less: Build homes on it, but don't include garages or driveways; instead tell prospective buyers that they need to keep their pickup trucks outside of town.
EDIT (as I feel I was overly snarky): I don't think there's anything wrong with thought experiments like this, and I've wondered to myself what a brand-new city or town might look like. I do think the no-car thing would be an incredibly hard sell in rural Texas though. The reality is that most modern towns aren't self-sufficient. Maybe there's a dentist, or maybe you have to drive to the next town over for one. Maybe there's a used sporting goods store, or maybe you have to drive an hour to one when the kids grow out of their cleats, etc. I think something like this would stand a better chance if it were right outside of a city. Maybe an old farm in what is now the suburbs - you could build a dense, walkable town that also connects to the big city via mass transit.
A 600 person town isn't remotely self-sufficient in the modern developed world. You could in principle build something walkable that, given sufficiently pleasant surroundings, some people would be willing to trade against walking to do most of their errands or hopping in a car to go anywhere.
But you'd need the public transit links and I'm guessing many would still want to own a car on the outskirts (as in a college/corporate campus) and provide access of some sort for the disabled, etc.
> Maybe there's a dentist, or maybe you have to drive to the next town over for one.
As part of the plan he specifically says "save an excellent spot in the town center to offer at low cost to whomever decides to practice dentistry there"
Yep, that's why I included the dentist example. So maybe, if the town actually succeeds in attracting and retaining a dentist, people don't need to leave town for that service. But there are many other services people want or need, some of which won't be available locally. It's a big world out there, but cars have made it so much smaller. I'd imagine people in this town would still be constantly hopping in their cars to run to Costco, go on dates, take grandma to chemo, etc.
There's a reason most car-less Americans live in NYC, DC, SF, etc. You can get everything you need there without a car. Small-town America does not offer the same and I doubt this idea would change that.
This sort of exercise, both in thought and realization, is important for this generation of young people. Some of the ideas are silly and/or naive. But there have been too few of these experiments proposed by the young, and even fewer attempted in real life, over the last couple decades.
Utopian communities were part and parcel of 19th C America, and there was a flutter of activity around communes and intentional communities in the 1960s and 1970s. We have the infrastructure and technology nowadays to do better.
The long term success rate today would probably still be low, but the value in the exercise is in the personal growth experience for the young themselves and the prototyping of new ideas, some of which migrate to the general culture. Lots of lessons learned are available from books written about these past communities to prevent making the same mistakes.
Perhaps the risks are just too high these days for the young…
A refreshing read. Most 'modern' towns are loud mainly because of vehicles and lawn care. It is interesting to think about a town built around not needing those things.
What is especially exciting about the idea, is the opportunity to incorporate modern internet into the town from the start.
The article mentions solar panels and wifi technicians. Naturally, the town would be equipped with a kind of mesh net for local communication in cases of outages, etc.
But also, the town librarian could maintain something like community resources hosted on the mesh network. Design documents, etc.
Of course, the town would provide a Pleroma or Matrix server to all residents too :)
Mesh networks don’t actually scale well compared to traditional fiber topologies. If you have the opportunity to bury fiber from the get-go, that’s a much better option for most optimization criteria (latency & bandwidth, for starters).
I like these town vibes and the US lacks these types of towns mostly because economics. Self sufficient farming is cool but there is a reason the vast majority of places don't do it. And one might say it creates that family or towny vibe but most towns in the US don't do it. Why economics. People are somewhat resistant to big town store but a few sellouts lead to more and eventually the price differential can destroy that model. Now the author point out they want to prevent this from happening but making towns no cars which is a tough sell if your not a tourist town (getting to this is the problem). I can think of many towns in Europe that have this property and maintain the local feel much better but still it feels much harder. Jobs are really important and if you town is just making farm stuff you run a risk of a huge poor spot developing leading to issues spiraling out of control because there's not jobs to fix it. Now this might be the exact reason to try it because there is risk and it has potential but it seems very difficult to pull this off
Aren’t new towns and villages built all the time? Definitely not with all the aesthetics this author is looking for, but not fair to say we as a society have forgotten how to do this.
I can think of several examples in Texas, the mueller neighborhood in austin. Steiner ranch outside of austin ( built on an old ranch ) . The woodlands outside of Houston built up in the 80s and 90s by an oil baron
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culdesac_Tempe
Which seems to be making headway in getting built according to twitter. Ironically may drive out there this summer & check it out.
Does anyone have insights on the legal part of creating a town? The articles doesn’t seem to address that. Would one just start with un-incorperated land? Buy land from an existing city and try to split it off?
Are there any legal requirements from the State of Texas which need to be followed?
Texas: You need at least 200 residents, and if you have less than 2,000 residents your town must be smaller than 2 square miles. With less than 600 residents you cannot have a mayor (except as a honorific title) and must use a commission (elected city council) government. After you draft a town charter you need a minimum of 10% of residents to sign a petition. You can take that petition to a county judge who can then set a special election date. A simple majority must approve.
The hardest state is Hawaii, which only recognizes Federal and County governments. Next up is Delaware, which has no process by which to form a new city, but also has almost no unincorporated land left. Most other states require an act of the legislature.
Easiest is probably Nevada, where you need only 5 "qualified electors" (18+ and having lived in the state 6 months), a professional land survey/mapping, and a written plan on how you'll provide police/fire and bring in revenue. Assuming only your five electors live in the town and will vote for incorporation, there is really nobody who can stop you.
Oddest is by far Wyoming, which requires you to find a source of water not claimed by another town and a minimum population density of 70 people per square mile.
I was pleasantly surprised by the focus on esthetics in the article. So many places in the US look so artificial or industrial.
One thing that was missing though was creating density and the need for mixed use mid rise buildings with shops and restaurants in the ground floor and apartments above it. This is ubiquitous in virtually all cities we regard as great places to be, but in the US it is often illegal to build like this nowadays due to zoning regulations. So you often get shopping malls with huge parking lots that are completely abandoned after 7pm and residential areas that consist purely of houses and are devoid of any interesting shops.
Has this person ever been to Texas? Texas is not a monoclimate, but if he's proposing that all the land is parched then he's thinking west Texas. Where is all his fireplace wood coming from - there are very few trees there. How does he expect people to live there without A/C? How will these rooftop gardens survive the near constant and drying winds? As someone who has been to Amarillo more times than I wanted to, I don't think this is in any way realistic. If instead we assume this town is say within an hour of Houston - there are different concerns, but being perpetually parched is not on of them.
He doesn't say "live there without A/C". He advocates for designs not being dependent upon it--a big difference.
"All buildings must be useful and livable even with the power cut. Hence, natural ventilation, strategically designed windows that open, etc. is necessary. Obviously you can add AC (Air conditioner) on top of that, but in no way should the town be dependent on AC."
When it's 105 degrees out with the power cut, nobody is going to be indoors for an extended period of time because stagnant hot air is more miserable than moving hot air.
No amount of natural airflow is gonna do that. There's a reason that people used to cook and eat their evening meals outdoors in the South. The only thing that drove them inside was mosquitos when the sun went down.
Keep in mind this is a hypothetical scenario in response to a real question from real people, so when the author talks about the arid climate of Texas, they may know exactly where the real estate in question is while not wanting to reveal it.
It's kind of a mix of general ideas floating around urbanist circles and specific suggestions for this question asked of them with specific proposed parameters. In some cases, I can kind of see the logic and see that it was just not really explained. In other cases, I think it's basically fantasy, as a lot of such proposals tend to be.
Some of the talking points are rooted in the reality that water is a big issue in the world and getting worse, climate change is a big issue, there was a really major power outage in Texas not hugely long ago, some of our global problems are rooted in being too car dependent and too dependent on food imports, etc.
The actual situation: Four guys have purchased real estate somewhere in Texas and want to build a town. This piece likely will fail to serve them well as a recipe for developing a town.
"Build it and they will come" has a long history of failing. Planned towns have a long history of failing. See Fordlandia and California City as historic examples of planned cities that failed.
A notable exception to this general rule is the unincorporated community of Hershey, Pennsylvania which was built as a company town to provide homes and amenities for workers at the Hershey factory that was built there, iirc. It currently has about 14k residents.
This is Texas and the author seems to not know much about the state. It has a lot of quirks that set it apart from other states.
You don't need a public school system for your planned community. Texas has the most liberal homeschooling laws of any state. If I were a paid consultant working on this town, I would put together some information on online education, homeschooling, where the nearest physical college is, etc. I would target childless couples, retirees, etc and make it clear that "if you have children, you should plan to homeschool and here are some resources to help support that."
I would target remote workers and make sure the town had excellent internet. This would be a hack to get around the fact that the real estate these four guys bought was probably not bought with an economic purpose in mind -- eg the development of a local mine. Towns tends to spring up where geography fosters economic development and the modern world can get around some of the historic constraints that forced towns into specific locales, but no one can get around the need for the town to be economically sustainable. If you want a real town to happen here, you need to answer the question of "How will people support themselves?" and you have three basic options: It's a retirement community or enclave of independently wealthy jet setters bored with jet setting for some reason; you can develop a local business there that somehow is related to that physical place because of the resources that exist there; you can plan for remote workers as your hack for not defaulting to trying to attract people so rich they can live anywhere (so why would they live there?) or developing a significant business on the ground to attract workers to live in the town.
Even in dry West Texas, average rainfall is plenty adequate to support off-grid, self-sustaining homes if that's your thing, eg Earth Ships, which can work with as little as 10 inches of rainfall annually.
This piece is correct that reducing the energy load for some of the big things, like heating and cooling, is an essential first step in designing a community that has energy independence and energy security. Passive Solar design can go a long way, even in West Texas weather, towards reducing energy needs while keeping people comfortable. You could readily borrow ideas from Middle Eastern desert cultures as well, a source of wisdom largely overlooked these days.
Local character is not something you need to inject. It's something you need to allow. Historically, it was rooted in vernacular architecture and that is generally speaking local building styles made with local materials and designed to accommodate local weather.
Articles like this typically focus on the built environment. This article tries to tell you how to build a town and there are cities across China and in other places that are modern ghost towns because someone with money and power built the buildings and the people never showed up, or at least not in large enough numbers. It may not be completely empty, but there are multiple cities today where they built it and the people did not come.
A real town is a place where people live and articles of this sort almost never address the question of "Why would anyone move there? Who do you want to attract and how will you get them there?"
And you would, really, need to sit down with the four men who bought this real estate and have a serious heart-to-heart with them about what kind of people they are, what activities they like, what kind of people do they like to hang with, how do they live their lives and what kind of social connections they currently have. This is not being addressed in this piece and the author seems unlikely to address it.
Placemaking is not just about the physical place. It's about the people who live there as well and the biggest challenge a planned town has is "How do you get people to move there? Why would they want to?" It's a question that tends to be given short shrift while people imagine some perfect built environment that lacks all the things they find aggravating in the world today and then don't think about the actual purpose of built environments, which is to serve the needs of the local population.
It was an interesting read with a lot of familiar ideas, but it's not very grounded. This is not a recipe for these four people to start a town. It's a thought experiment for the entertainment of the author, basically, which is fine but don't get confused. This is not a real recipe for how to develop a real town.
Edit: The footnote says part 2 will address the question of People. (crosses fingers)
Edit 2: I will add if the place gets big enough, sure, public school is a good thing to have and may be a necessity. But this piece is essentially aimed at attracting the first 100 residents and I think for that purpose, you don't need a school system nor any real plans to create one.
If the author wants to see the outcome of this kind of development they should read the history of the Llano Estacado[1].
Lubbock and it's surrounding communities built up during the latter half of the 19th Century, with the small communities forming as the farmers and ranchers needed them.
Other comments have pointed out lack of cars (the whole point) or AC being an issue when you want to carry your groceries 300m home in 40+ degree C temperatures. And this is true.
But for me it was the "soundscape" comments.
- caption quote: "imagine the fresh air, the invigorating call of roosters in the morning"
Rooster calls are not so much invigorating as annoying.
- "The loudest noise you will hear on a typical day will be children playing or a conversation between neighbors in the street. And so it should be."
Did stereos, consoles, movies just cease to exist too? Are we going to be crammed in next to our neighbours hearing everything they do through their "airflow enhanced" houses?
- "Keep the lots small, and all buildings aligned right to the edge of the lot facing the street, leaving backyards and courtyards, common or private, and walled gardens on unused space"
Apparently so. This town is for someone else, not me.
I can't help but imagine that Tournai and other towns during the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance years smelled of human waste, but I appreciate the lofty goal of filling modern communities with fresh air.
I think the author is an urban professional dreaming about people doing what he never has in a place he's never lived.
There's nothing wrong with doing that, although if you really wanted to design a realistically successful small town, you'd start by asking "where will we put the chemical plant/oil refinery/paper mill?"
And 600 people. (Supposedly growing to 3000.) I doubt you support a school system with 600 people unless it's some communal everyone pitches in sort of thing. You're not going to support much in the way of stores--which I suppose can be built along the outside of the town. And you're not going to supply the town, get people to doctors, have emergency services, etc. without some degree of car access. The fire department isn't going to arrive by train. And I assume most people will be working remotely?
With 600 people paying $1,000 in taxes per month, the city would only net $7 million/year. This is less a plan and more a pipe dream.
Cities are built where there are demands for cities to be built. They grow around nexus points of travel, gold rushes, or other places that invite entrepreneurs to build them.
Entrepreneurs might create the need for the city, but there has to be some means of sustenance for the city not to become what is called a "Ghost Town".
I think if you were to create a city budget of infrastructure, emergency services, courts, and so forth you would run out of money before your list of unfunded services got completed.
Of course, people who stick-with-it can get anything done. The village I live in has a budget of $48 million, so it is possible $7 million would be enough (after taxing everyone 1k/month). Let's look back on this in a year.
I cringe thinking about the dating pool in an isolated community of 600 people. Just one more reason this sort of experiment might accidentally push people to their cars instead of away from them.
600 people is a larger social group than most humans have had for our species’ entire existence. No, app-based hookups won’t work well in this environment. So what?
That may be true, I don't really know. I tend to make my choices based on what's available to me currently, rather than the standards of the past. Even if a nice tent is better shelter than most humans have had for our species' entire existence, I'm still going to choose to live in a house.
I don't intend to. I'm simply highlighting the point that dating in a smaller pool is a lot harder for some people in ways that may not be immediately apparent.
I didn't read this as 'completely isolated community'--the author writes about a rail station. Also if it is as idyllic as described it would be swamped by tourists.
Creating a K-12 for like 100-600 kids seems pretty feasible to me. If for some reason that didn’t work, I’m not going to mourn the loss of modern industrial schools.
My town has something like K-8 with a 7K population and has a regional system with 2 other towns for high school. And that's about 60-70% of our property tax spend.
The target is 3k people. 20% in k-12 is what I roughly expect for this sort of community.
I went to a few K-12s with fewer than 400 people. They were great.
American public schools are notoriously inefficient. Spending tons of property tax revenue is not necessary, just politically challenging to undo. You might be able to pull it off in a project like this. Or just say there are no public schools and outsource education to parochial schools or something. It doesn’t really matter - education has minimal impact on life outcomes until high school/college. It would not be my first concern with this kind of experiment.
Maybe it was edited after it was posted, but it doesn’t say no AC—it said the town should be designed to function without AC in case of power outages and use as much passive cooling as possible, but that AC can be added in as needed.
So, constantly. It's Texas. 40C summers are normal. The state was sparsely populated, even by 19th century standards, until air conditioning became a common fixture. It's a necessity.
In west Texas, assuming you have access to water (by no means a guarantee), the option for water-based cooling (evaporative or indirect cooling) is present. "Swamp coolers" have a deservedly bad rap in humid climates, they're far more tolerable in dry ones.
Forms of evaporative + stored thermal mass cooling (rooftop sprinkler systems, perhaps combined with a rooftop garden and an underground irrigation + cooling mass water system) could provide the basis for an indirect cooling system that isn't reliant on electrical power, though it would still have fairly high evaporative losses.
> There will be an urge to build each home optimized for air conditioning. Don’t.
In Texas. Everything sounded somewhat reasonable up to this’d topography non withstanding. Why not make sure to build near caves to store ice from the winter.
And then it gets into batkeeping and eating pidgeons. When does a modern sustainable town end and a medieval fantasy begin.
While Virginia is not Texas, it gets really hot and muggy in the summer. I lived there with no AC. On hot nights we’d sleep in the basement. It’s definitely possible to make it in the south without AC.
Cities and towns exist largely as economic, occasionally cultural or educational totems. Lacking a fundamental economic basis will doom any planned city.
There's a history of "intentional communities". Many are thought of as utopian communities, and as largely (though not entirely) failed, though this misses some notable successes lurcking in plain view. There are a number of successful intentional community models.
The first is religious communities which have sustained themselves. In the US, notably Menonite, Amish, and Mormon communities, though there are numerous others. In the case of the Mormons, the community is the size of a state (and strongly influences most of its neighbours).
The second is the college town. For the past century colleges and universities, even comparably small ones, have proved robust self-perpetuating instutions, as both demand for an educated population and funding for education (and research, and sport) have been generous. That tide may be shifting, along with a potential trend to decentralised or remote education, though I suspect it's got life in it yet.
Several commercial motivations have proved workable at least in instances, notably tourist, retirement, vacation, and (as noted, viz Marfa, TX), art colonies. Odds may be longer here, though opportunities also more numerous. The key problem is that fads and fashions are fickle. Retirement populations, as with college students, tend to move on after a few years, if to different prospects. Many of the advantages of a student population: youth, health, vitality, openness to experience, credulity, are lacking in the older set.
Government projects are another option, with some outposts (Los Alamos National Laboratory and its impact on Santa Fe, NM, Macdonald Observatory and Ft. Davis, TX, Cape Canaveral and the Florida coast) having a profound local impact.
Otherwise, a town is generally reliant on what's at hand for economic initiative. In what I presume is West Texas, that's some highway travel, a current boomlette of oil and gas activity, cattle ranching, a few notable cultural outposts, and some degree of border activity. There's also wind and solar development in the area (there's a notable solar technician training centre across the stateline near Clovis, NM), as well as possible other activity I'm unaware.
But lacking that, "build it and they will come" seems rather unlikely. The remaining possibility is that the vision Wrath Of Gnon espouses will appeal to the specific niche they hope to attract, in which case there is limited likelihood of success.
That said: expressing the plan in terms of goal, economic basis, architecture, and design principles would help. The economic base element is conspicuously missing.
Regulatory, governance, and conflict-resolution elements should also be explored.
Very interesting article! The biggest problem I foresee is that all of this requires cooperation, community spirit, and a dialing-down of libertarian-fundamentalism. I don't think a heterogeneous group of Americans can cooperate like this anymore, though I'd like to be proved wrong.
While this is an interesting exercise, it feels amateurish. Urban development is not a new field. Starting from a blank slate is a phenomenal opportunity but don't try to reinvent the wheel.
Also, Texas is a big place. It spans multiple climate zones. The author seems to be describing West Texas but other parts of the state are completely different.
My advice
* It's hot! (And often very very humid depending on local. ) You need AC.
* The worst part of Texas towns are 4 lane highways bisecting most of them. Avoid that...
* But you still have to plan to allow people to use cars. That has to be incorporated into the design. As does pedestrian and cycling life. All need to be facilitated to some degree.
* Sidewalks, please. I've lived in FL, OR and now TX in the past 5 years. Far to many residential streets in all these places completely lack sidewalks. It makes taking an evening stroll with the family stressful when you are sharing the space with cars.
* Parks. Can't have enough of them.
"You need AC", "You need cars" ... I lived for 4+ years in Phoenix, Arizona and I tell you that humans can live without those two things with the right design. We're way too far into the modern way of thinking that we almost take these things for a given ... It's a huge blindspot. I grew plants here in the desert, I lived without AC, I never had a car and all of this when everything around me has been designed in what I think is the worst way possible ... People think in linear terms but forget that managing heat for example should be approached holistically as different element will augment each other ... etc. It can be done with low tech and there is research to back this up (look up "urban heat ASU").
>managing heat for example should be approached holistically
Agreed. Also behaviorally. So many people would tell me I was crazy for living without A/C while they were standing in their house with the blinds open, windows closed, dishwasher and stove on in the middle of the day. If you make your home into a greenhouse with a heater in the middle, yeah it's gonna be hot - maybe don't do that.
But I think my last phrase is the issue. People really hate having to not do what they want, when they want. Like not cooking or whatever until the cool part of the day, when the heat can be managed by ventilation.
My house is well insulated, I keep the blinds on sun-facing windows closed during the day; I have 12' ceiling in my living room and I'm smart enough to not run the dishwasher or clothes dryer during the day. The refrigerator I can't do anything about. However, I'm not crazy enough to think I can live without A/C in a Minnesota summer.
I live on a dirt road. The ambient temperature above the surface is noticeably less than on asphalt: the instant you turn off a main road onto the gravel, you can feel the temperature drop.
I also neglected to add that I have shade trees :-)
He is not re-inventing the wheel, he doesn't have in mind what you are describing. The author is describing a typical european town, that you see in germany, italy, or england, (most were build during medieval times).
You just described a typical suburban 'smart development', which is not dense at all by european standards, and really it is just like a typical strip mall area eveloved a bit, but still way behind.
He is, there's plenty of small towns in Texas inspired by what you see in Germany, the author just hasn't visited them. Texas has a massive Irish, Czech and German populations and culture. Dublin, TX is one of many examples (pop. 3,654). Like pretty much all Texas small towns it has a downtown you can walk end to end within 15 minutes. One main street going through it. Local coop and most things you need. What did I miss?
Fredericksburg & New Braunfels have major German culture and German buildings from the 1800s, but they are larger cities now as they have expanded, but the downtown areas reflect what you guys want, but ya' know, connected to the world via roads.
Most of Texas small towns have co-ops, communities of 3000 give or take, and it's all walkable and drivable (usually one road going through them linking towns via backroads)
Usually they are pretty self sufficient because they are isolated, but you still need roads to connect the outer farms and other towns for supplies to reach downtown, and when you want to travel to bigger cities for larger hospitals, cinemas, family, clubs, etc. In West Texas you need it especially because good luck growing anything there.
This author is just ignoring existing culture and trying to apply direct European culture ignoring the fact that immigrants from those cultures have already merged and influenced small towns across Texas.
My advice, take a road trip through the backroads that connect Texas, you'll get a large dose of many cultures, nice people, great food, and massive highschool football games for entertainment on Friday nights.
This is quite a bit of misinformation. From the article:
> The account has also shown a preference for cultural conservatives in its “likes”, which these include ... Roger Scruton, a man known for making a career out of his prejudice; and Leon Krier, a disciple of Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer.
Roger Scruton was knighted for his contributions to public education [0] and helped establish an underground academic network in Soviet-occupied Europe. He was also one of the best contributors to the New Statesman which I suppose is now cancelling him?
Leon Krier was in no way a disciple of Albert Speer. Speer's only mentioned in the footnotes of Krier's Wikipedia article [1] because Krier wrote a book about Speer where he asked, “Can a war criminal be a great artist?” [2]
It seems that the problem to this writer is conservatism as a whole, and of course these accounts are conservative! The whole point of the Twitter accounts is pro-conservation!
The author is half correct in saying that we've forgotten how to build towns. It's better to say, the creation of new towns have become economically obsolete. Their niche is gone. Historically, towns formed organically around sources of value, such as farmland or rivers or mines or whatever, where many people making a living in the same region benefited from being in walking proximity, which enabled commerce. That concern just doesn't exist today, due to cars.
You don't need a town with an inn when the truckers stay at motels and rest stops. You don't need a town square when people shop at the big box store on the highway and local producers are part of a complex global supply chain.