HN Explorer

Ask HN: Who's starting new towns in the US?

37 points by hamburga ↗ HN
There are around 1500 towns in the US with population between 10,000 and 25,000 [1]

So it's not like this hasn't been done before. And sort of the ultimate chance to engineer the world you want to live in -- I'd think people would be really into it.

I know that YC has/had a "New Cities" initiative but I haven't seen updates in years.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241695/number-of-us-cities-towns-villages-by-population-size/

28 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 64.4 ms ] thread
willcate
It's definitely been done. Once upon a time there was a thing called Planned Communities. Reston, Virginia is one such. So is "The Villages" in central Florida. But, especially since the sub-prime mortgage crash of the 00s, I haven't heard of anybody attempting it.
natoliniak
Check out Ave Maria, also in Florida. It is a mixed-zoning town build around a College and a Catholic cathedral, but unlike the Villages, it is actually quite age diverse. So, for those who are not bothered by the the religious aspect, it is seems very livable and I think will be successful.
staticautomatic
I have often wondered if it's possible to build a successful, large-scale community/commune that is secular and run by sane people who engage in minimal financial thievery of their supporters. Think Wild Wild Country but without insane murderous narcissistic assholes at the helm. From a political perspective what they did was actually pretty amazing. The fact that the feds ultimately just asked them to leave the country rather than imprisoning them makes me suspect that the biggest impediment to building such a community may in fact be trying to do it underneath a bigger government.
TangoTrotFox
Garden of Eden is a commune of people that grow their own food, use minimal electric, use water from a well, etc and then sell their produce and products online. They've faced some lovely treatment as well [1]. They were faced with a machine gun raid and day long detainment under the auspices of a drug warrant. No drugs were found. Following that they were raided by the city's Code Compliance Department who cut down and carted off various plants and 'accidentally' broke their irrigation lines with their trucks.

[1] - https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/North...

astrodev
Good luck getting people to follow someone who is not a narcissistic asshole ;-)
0x4f3759df
The founder of Dominos pizza built the city of Ave Maria, FL -- It gets high marks in the child safety/friendly category from the local press but feels suburban to me. The most famous example is probably Seaside, FL built buy Duany Plater-Zyberk, it was the set of "The Truman Show". The story is interesting they had to fight all these dumb zoning laws (eg. The Fire Department buys the biggest truck they can find and then think that every road in the state must accommodate it) -- DPZ has other stuff worth checking out: https://www.dpz.com/Projects/All

My favorite is in Jakriborg, Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakriborg

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

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

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

0x4f3759df
Yes that's a major reason people move to the suburbs (but not actually why they were created in the first place), but on the other hand you can build a safe town where the buildings are close together.
esturk
Another related phenomenon is the relocation of an entire town which often results in building an entire infrastructure from scratch. These are either caused by natural disasters like Pattonsburg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattonsburg,_Missouri

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

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company

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

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

CloudNetworking
That's not how you guarantee there'll be no slums though. You just guarantee you move the slums somewhere else, which is not really a solution for anyone.
anovikov
Sorry for late answer, but why not? Slums are not a problem as such. They are only a problem when they are close to normal residential areas, because they decrease property values there. If slums are somewhere where normal people won't see them, i am fine with them.
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jnwatson
Celebration, Florida was created in the late 90s by Walt Disney Corporation.
chatmasta
This is only tangentially relevant to the question as asked, but you may be interested in reading about China’s “new cities” initiative.

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