If you want to buy an empty town of new houses, there are plenty in San Bernardino. Vacant lots run about $7500. San Bernardino even has a new airport, fully completed and ready to go. But no airlines fly there. Because there are no jobs.
There is more than work and housing to make a vibrant city.
That seems like an exception being used to disprove someone else's rule.
Unless they already have the money to exist and live there, no one is going to move to a place they can't afford.
So the question is again - why would they move there, except this time you are asking only people that are not part of the typical job market / economy (because the number of available gainful jobs there is too low; and at the same time no one is looking to start businesses there).
It seems like these types of places are for only the upper class, especially considering that low scale gives high prices.
Or goes the other way, and makes lots and lots of suicide inducing standard units, small in size, with uniform paint jobs, and all placed together. A place where the government pays your rent.
Even then, it would only have potential if it filled a bunch of other checkboxes of desirable qualities people wanting for those companies might want which are not filled by established cities, like great outdoor activities nearby, proximity to large cities, extremely low property costs ...
What I'm reading / glancing over is that they want to create campusses, modeled after some SF software company headquarters. That would only work in SF, because said software companies aren't going to move out of SF anytime soon. Even then they'd stick to bigger cities where the jobs are.
See my reply to commenter below. I for one don't believe ideas are worth nothing, and am willing to pay for ideas/information useful to me.
Ideas may be worth something, but how would the market for them work?
So that they can charge the highest rent / purchase costs and look good on paper for the inevitable takeover / IPO / payout?
So, potential residents have the benefits of like-minded roommates, tech-driven area, and no-contract housing.
Other cities could have better profit for the landowner to rent out, but it would only really share the no-contract perk.
The problem with building a community of like-minded people is that after a few generations it won't be a community of like-minded people that have chosen to be there anymore. And I'm not even talking about any other form of social and economic reality. All else remaining the same (it won't), just bringing in new generations will change the entire dynamic.
What they are basically describing is trying to start a cult.
not sure how it resembles a cult? their goal is not for all the communities to be the same, but rather for there to be many diff types of communities, each of which evolves over time as roommates come and go.
Cult is exactly what I thought when viewing the website. All the talk of like minded people, the photograph of people sitting around in a circle... hugely creepy.
after a few generations it won't be that company's problem anymore - buildings built, money earned, and founders dead or retired.
- Buy a decent expensive plot of land in SV
- Buy several tiny homes (let's say 10)[0] and put them on said plot
- Buy a large cheap plot of land way out in the middle of California (or potentially Nevada for tax reasons) that can accommodate 100 tiny homes
- Move the tiny homes (they're portable), effectively swapping them, from the SV plot to the cheap plot every time someone wants to get funding
Now, I know this is SV echo chamber speak, but hear me out for a second. I think there is a sizable market of people who realize that living in the SF Bay Area is stupidly expensive, and are willing to go ramen style because they're close to VCs. This brings the best of both worlds - cheap comfortable living + proximity to VCs during the time they need it most (rounds), with a community of founders to keep them from going bored.
* Build giant highrise apartment buildings * Rent them out at affordable rates
Alternatively:
* Build a suburb inland * Build a high-speed train connection to said suburb
There are plenty of solutions for housing problems, and only political reasons preventing them. In SF, money is definitely not the problem.
In the rest of the country, this is called a "trailer park" or "RV campground". There is no second, remote property in Nevada, because all the homes adhere to a common standard for utility hookups and foundation pads. Even so, despite the theoretical possibility, most mobile homes do not actually move more than once. This is because it is several orders of magnitude easier to move people and their personal possessions than the buildings they live in, even when such buildings are designed to be moved.
I don't want to be mean about this, because you did put your idea out there and stand behind it, but it is not an ideal business plan. There is already a solution to the problem wherein a businessperson needs to be in a certain city for 10% of the year, while still enjoying most of the amenities of home--several, actually: hotels, time-share condominiums, furnished apartments rented weekly, couch-surfing, pieds-a-terre. There are also existing solutions for portable homes: touring buses, RVs, camper trailers.
> There is no second, remote property in Nevada, because all the homes adhere to a common standard for utility hookups and foundation pads.
Solution: Solar (electricity) and gas propane (for heat).
> hotels, time-share condominiums, furnished apartments rented weekly, couch-surfing, pieds-a-terre.
None of these are economical because their high price is driven by regularly unused capacity. Also, there are benefits to being "swappable" in that entrepreneurs are always close to other entrepreneurs. YCombinator alone could benefit from such a system where they have 100+ entrepreneurs temporarily relocated to the Mountain View area every 3 months.
Each unit is around $1500/month and they estimate clean/utilities at $200-260 per month. Is that insane to anyone else? Where the heck is all the money going for utilities?!?! I have a two bedroom in the richmond, one roommate and we use maybe $30-40 a month in electric and gas, including the washer/dryer.
I'm betting they could do something better and more interesting for families and lower income folks once they start building their own properties. Certainly it's worth a try because housing is badly broken in the US and a lot of other countries.
http://www.npr.org/2015/01/18/378162264/welcome-to-whittier-...
Phase 1 is "communities." These are the yuppie boarding houses. 4, 20, 200, then 5000. Looks like they on about 30 now.
Phase 2 is cities.
I like it, personally. It's got that too-ambitious element but they set themselves a proving ground. If they hit 200 "communities," are profitable and are managing scale exponentially, I would definitely be listening to them talk about creating cities.
A nice thing is that the effective land lords (campus employees) are my age — which helps.
Previous versions of this vision statement described colonies on Mars ... so they've scaled it back a bit lol
regardless of the lofty plans, what they have actually built already is pretty great. The communities indeed evolve overtime, but the team is careful about how they transition communities and how quickly they add new people.
The services are useful too. Literally showed up at my place and Internet, common room furniture, cleaning, basic kitchen utensils all already provided and working. Sure there are some kinks in the processes, but remarkably smooth considering all the logistics.
And did I mention the month to month lease? I wish this company existed years ago when I was moving cities more often.
It's one of those cases where I would like to hear the founders talk. Long, earnest interviews. Podcasting would be great. WTF are they talking about exactly? Step 1 sounds like a house-share idea, maybe purpose built. The likely market is students and recent grads. Beyond that they are talking about building cities.
If these guys have a chance of succeeding, they probably have interesting ideas.
It's actually a cool question: "How do we build new cities as a startup?"
One interesting idea that (I think) seems like a potential bridge between phase 1 and phase 2, is "student villages" where alumni and staff are encouraged to settle permanently. Residents would already be more intimately involved and invested in the community than they would be anywhere else, have things in common.
If 5-10% of a graduating class stayed long term it would give you a fairly rapid growth rate. The eventual size would be reached at whatever size that 5-10% equals the natural rate of attrition. Say 200 graduates settle per year and 1/10 of residents leave in any given year, they would reach 1,000 residents in 7 years and top out at 2,000 residents within a few decades.
You really can't know in advance, but I suspect that a decent number of graduates (especially of post graduate programs) from top universities could be tempted to buy in to alumni communities if the price was right.
But.. you really need to be a badass team to pull off something at this scale and in this space. The list of Big problems is daunting. Financing, governance and ownership structures would be tricky.
There are plenty of little towns and cities out there already. They were all programmed in non-portable assembly for obscure processors. Some even have a rudimentary OS written in C. And the startup in the article wants to scrap the entire code base, and rewrite the whole thing from scratch in Python, or Scala, or Clojure, or Brainfuck, or whatever closes the first round of funding this year.
Never mind that this has been done before, countless times. They're called "company towns". If the company did it well, they diversified their economies and still exist. If not, they failed, and were absorbed by natural communities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
-or in the extreme case-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_republic
I can't quite tell if Silicon Valley has already jumped the shark, or if they are still seeking funding to build the ramp.
