I lived near Reno when this project was announced. Lots of out of state news organizations had a field day talking about how this brothel owner was such a big shot in local politics, and meanwhile the locals just kind of shrugged and went about their day.
somewhat related, some blockchain idiot's idea for an "innovation zone" near the same area, the 2021 article [1] says they own 67,000 acres out there. They had some vague vision for doing all this stuff with coins, but they wanted a waiver to not follow any business rules or pay taxes. There were funny stories from the reno reddit about people who interviewed out there, saying the guy behind it was a tool.
There was some person years ago on reddit attempting to get redditors to build a commune in Detroit by buying up distrought neighborhoods/land where lots were cheap and such.
She mentioned some model on how it would work, and had it such where she had it all figured out, so she would be the central manager of the scheme.
I don't recall exact numbers, but I took her scheme and built a simple model and did all the inputs and looked up the land values she was talking about and it was some horrid pyramid where she wound up with a large amount of the money (as if the plan wasnt to just outright steal all the money in the first place)
-
Its really fun too look into the finances of organizations/schemers/whatever.
I dove into the finances of the Salvation Army of California after they did a filing - and HOLY SMOKES that is an outright grift of epic proportions on the down low...
The other, not criminal - just eye-opening, was I went through the budget for San Francisco Public Health, specifically what services they were providing to the homeless population. What was eye-opening, was that basically the budget worked out to $25,000 per year all-in per homeless person.
I would really like to do some of these discoveries again using gpt to ask the questions I was manually extracting previously...
Thats a shame about salvation army. It always bugged me that the top execs rake in enormous comp packages. I know the counter to that: that it supposedly takes talented people to manage large organizations, blah blah blah. I just can't get behind it, I really wish real business people from the private sector could take 0.5 - 1 year off to manage charities for free, same way big law firms do pro bono.
Regarding Detroit, thats also unfortunate that they didn't go for an established REIT or something, where everyone has legal stake. There's tons of legal precedent for setting up shares (similar to co-ops), just the fact that she wasn't going that route is a huge red flag and indicator it's a scam.
It's a shame that we encourage some forms of economic activity (creating jobs) but discourage another (building homes so that those jobholders have a place to live). Supply-side housing constraint drives rent growth, and places that build have lower inflation: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/what-1-percent-i...
Article 3 spells out the process and requirements. And then there are the zone descriptions. It's pretty typical stuff - setbacks, FAR, heights, etc. Most residential zones are single-family. It's all the usual zoning things which drag down the pace of construction. Have you applied for your pre-application meeting? Are the planners satisfied that your application is complete? Scheduled and noticed your public hearing? Did the commission like your project and grant it conditional approval?
