The places where cities make sense are generally the places where they already are. You could hypothetically build the trappings of a new city in North Dakota or West Texas, but who is going to move to a place which is just a bunch of empty buildings surrounded by farmland? You can already buy a house in such places for less than it costs for one in a major city but there is a reason that people don't.

Whereas if you would just rezone the areas with high demand to allow new construction to actually happen there then you don't need the government to raise and spend a ton of money, all you need them to do is to stop prohibiting the thing people would otherwise be doing.

▲

Cthulhu_ 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I wonder, could you manufacture that? It seems to be happening in e.g. the middle east where they conjure up a city in the middle of the desert and just... create demand for a city there.

Take SF, which has a lot of tech jobs that aren't tied to any geographical location. Build a new city, offices, a university, loads of housing and make that the tech / internet capital of the world.

▲

AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Could you manufacture that for like a trillion dollars? Maybe, but there are better things to spend a trillion dollars on. That's the entire Medicare budget.

Could you manufacture that for like a billion dollars? No.

▲

sokoloff an hour ago | parent [-]

That’s the Medicare budget for one year. Cities have a useful life span measured in multiple centuries.

(I also think it’s impractical to pull off, with Las Vegas being perhaps the most recent long-term conjuring of a city from “not much”, but comparing a multi-century stream of value to an annual consumption budget line seems like a strange way to make your case.)

	▲	AnthonyMouse 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You'd have to spend that amount of money in one year (or thereabouts) in order to make it work. It's also not really creating much new value so much as moving it around.