Which makes it tempting to spend some money buying a few acres of land somewhere and hold it for a few decades in the hopes that a city will rebuild itself nearby.
Master-planned communities often don’t work out even with a strong government building them (ex. Chinese ghost cities). This proposal from a private investment group to create one is faintly ridiculous.
There's a 600 acre plot of relatively cheap land near me that I 2/3rds joking suggest me and friends should go in on together and start a hi tech commune. So far plenty of interest but no commitments. :(
I don't know the consequences of doing this but I think if no one wants to rent the space at any price then giving up the property seems feasible. The investment went bad. Unused land should go back to the community and be repurposed.
Eh. So basically create an an arcology somewhere that doesn't really have a current population--like in a desert somewhere--for pretty much people who can work remotely. Sounds like a big bet and doesn't sound especially attractive as a potential resident in a planned community.
Land development is not limited to "build anywhere you can". Purchases of land for later resale, when armed with knowledge about likely events, is a common strategy. In cities, you often have to deal with municipal pressures to do more. Parking lots filled empty plots in southern california 1980s and since 2015ish the number of Car Washes in Fargo, ND has grown to 80... a cash business with minimal overhead and a flimsy construction, which does not have to cover the entirety of the plot.
> Saying "just buy land bro, making money is ez" seems like a very TikTok Investor kind of take
Just like interest on large amounts of liquidity, land ownership generates a meaningful passive income, over time. There's nothing trivial about it...unless you buy wasteland in Arizona (which many people hold).
Just a train of thought because that's what I'm doing:
Why not trying to buy your own land and build a small community around it?
Might be much more fulfilling with very little money required.
I live in Germany and everything just costs money but if you are in the USA, there are plenty of very cheap areas were you can easily life self sustainable?
That would probably require demolishing or substantially remodelling existing buildings. At which point it's probably cheaper to build on an empty lot.
These emptying office parks presents an opportunity. Certainly the larger ones contain infrastructure that can be repurposed, and the asking prices is decreasing. In the next downturn, the cost of purchasing a park will go down even more.
Perhaps the larger parks can be repurposed into something akin to a village. Reformat the buildings into something more traditional, apartments on the upper floors, offices and stores in the bottom, etc. Add more buildings to create more continuity. Let people be creative, let the fabric emerge.
Now in any given area, each of these potential villages is quite isolated from another. Still, pedestrian connections can be forged and inter-village transportation arranged.
I think it could be done, but you would need to have a lot of pieces come together the right way.
For instance: having a partnership with a University and/or several employers that want to setup a new campus, a large enough number of people willing to move, adequate funding to buy several square miles of wilderness and install some initial roads and infrastructure, a favorable local government that's on-board with the plan and doesn't want to throw up administrative roadblocks, a neighboring pre-existing community that can help bootstrap the infrastructure that doesn't mind another town moving in next door, and someone willing to run the whole thing as a non-profit rather than a money-making endeavor.
The upside if it attains critical mass is that the profit on the sale of buildable lots could finance a lot of the necessary infrastructure.
So, a ghost town?
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