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| ▲ | parpfish 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't even know what it would it even look like to "build a city" from scratch in the US. who does the building and puts together the central plan? does the government build a bunch of public housing and a publicly owned commercial district? i guess they kind of have experience doing this with military bases, but at some point you need to encourage a bunch of private development and ownership, right? or would the government just incentivize private developers to start building in the middle of nowhere and hope that a city arises as an emergent phenomenon? that approach seems like it would be rife with abuse and waste. seems like this would be a lot easier to do with an authoritarian regime that could just decree "we're building a city here. the following industries will move their headquarters" | | |
| ▲ | abdullahkhalids 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not particularly difficult to start a new city. The government simply asks large companies to open offices/factories in the new city in exchange for tax breaks/subsidies. Or give funding to a university to open a satellite campus. All you need is a promise for like 20k people to initially move. Then the government builds roads and utility networks. Private developers will also build housing if given the right financial incentive. The 20k people will automatically lead to the same number moving in due to cheap housing, or for creating every day businesses, hospitals, schools etc. Within a couple of years you can setup up a feedback loop where the population is growing at 5-10% every year. There is no need to force anyone to do anything. Financial incentives are enough. | |
| ▲ | toenail 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Starting a city is easy, growing it into a real city is the hard part. If you look at the fastest growing cities of the last decades, they had economic freedom or booming industries, nothing that requires authoritarianism. | |
| ▲ | mikepurvis 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The western approach would almost certainly be a public-private partnership; we do that with all meaningful infra projects, where multiple industry consortia put together proposals and then one is selected to move forward. For example, for the ION Light Rail in Waterloo Region (~$1B), the winning consortium was composed of engineering and construction firms/consultants, a operations company that would run the system, plus a financier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandLinq That said, for a project the scale of building a city, I can imagine it might actually be faster and more efficient for the government to just plan and build everything itself and then sell it off to private entities later. | |
| ▲ | steego 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Honestly, if you build transit, developers will build. I wouldn't call it "building a city", but if you look at Northern Virginia today, you'll find that vertical districts are popping up along the Silver Line metro that now extends past Dulles airport. At the end of the metro, there is literally a "town center" residential area on one side with buildings around 5 stories tall. On the other side of the tracks is literally fields, but the roads have been laid out like Sim City with empty plots and developers are now beginning to construct buildings starting from the outside perimeter first, working their way toward the metro station. Throughout the DC suburbs, you will find densely populated areas with relatively tall vertical buildings (15-20 stories) that simply were not there 20 years ago. Reston is a good example. I've watched 4-6 buildings (over 10 stories) get built in Reston alone. They mostly started when the the metro line was finished. | | |
| ▲ | botanrice 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | tysons is a good example as well. I always think the development of the DC metro is some of the most impressive in the sense of 'cities' popping up along the train lines. I haven't travelled the entire country but I've never seen anything quite like Silver Spring, Bethesda, or as you say, Reston. Super interesting. |
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| ▲ | Sohcahtoa82 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why spend billions building when you can just keep raising rents on existing infrastructure? | |
| ▲ | bryanlarsen 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Canada has been building housing at a much higher rate than the US in the last 2 decades. Not enough, but more. | | |
| ▲ | daedrdev 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They have been underbuilding compared to their population trends as we see their prices continue to skyrocket | | | |
| ▲ | jeffbee 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hrmm. What data source can I see to demonstrate this? I looked at a chart I have referenced before that shows nationwide USA housing starts over the last 20 years ranging from 2 to 8 per 1000 people. Then I searched for one for Canada and found one suggesting 1-2 per 1000 since 2005. And, evidently, the situation in Canada as developed/deteriorated to the extent there's a whole subreddit for the canadian housing crisis? | | |
| ▲ | bryanlarsen 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Looks to be averaging around 250,000 per year over the last decade. That'd be over 12 per 1000. https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/housing-starts | | |
| ▲ | jeffbee 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes so it looks like the Reddit people are committing major chart-crimes, showing quarterly data as such, rather than annualized rates, and not mentioning it. It looks like this is a source of truth: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=341001... | | |
| ▲ | mh- 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I have watched reddit become useless for any kind of nuanced debate over the last 5 years. It's rather sad to me, because once upon a time I learned a lot about others views - especially ones I disagree with. Even HN is much less welcoming of the "I think I agree with you, but walk me through your thinking" replies than it used to be. I presume this is reflective of a few broader societal trends, and it's.. not good. |
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| ▲ | bbarnett 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations. It's also easy to have cities grow fast, if you're primarily a rural/agrarian nation, and suddenly have a transition to become urban. This was (for example) Canada in the 1900s. Mostly rural, yet now it's mostly urban. Canada saw fast growth of cities back then. It's maintaining large cities once the fast growth is over, that is a different story. How will, for example, China look in 50+ years? 100+ years? When all its newly built mega-city projects are crumbling. | | |
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