It's not that building a new city is hard. Real estate developers do it routinely. The problem is jobs. There are, at present, quite a few places in the US with more houses than jobs. Only in a few places, such as SF and some areas of Oklahoma where there's heavy drilling activity, is the reverse the case.<p>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.
I live in one of their houses. It has beautiful shared spaces and nice kitchens — but it is very expensive. Great place to live when you first arrive in a new city, but most people move on after ~6 months.<p>A nice thing is that the effective land lords (campus employees) are my age — which helps.<p>Previous versions of this vision statement described colonies on Mars ... so they've scaled it back a bit lol
OK, now let's figure out how to do something like this that might actually work for families and then you will have something useful to society as a whole. The current "managed roommate" setup they have going is probably not going to work very well if families are involved. I'm not sure my two year old running through the halls of one of the five bedroom houses after a shower screaming "I'm naked I'm naked" would go over real well but maybe I'm wrong.<p>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.
didn't expect the post to hit frontpage so quickly! Just thought some other HNers might be interested.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And did I mention the month to month lease? I wish this company existed years ago when I was moving cities more often.
I'm curious as to why they are choosing to start their pilot program in the Bay Area - they're not a software startup, so why choose one of the most expensive areas in the world to rent/purchase land? There's a lot of land out there with easier avenues to self-sufficiency that are just a plane ride away at the most, I cant imagine them needing to be close to an urban area at all actually.
This is obviously an ambitious big goal, and so naturally seems like a low likelihood shot.<p>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.<p>If these guys have a chance of succeeding, they probably have interesting ideas.<p>It's actually a cool question: "How do we build new cities as a startup?"<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Here's my idea to solve the same problem (aimed at tech people):<p>- Buy a decent expensive plot of land in SV<p>- Buy several tiny homes (let's say 10)[0] and put them on said plot<p>- 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<p>- 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<p>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.<p>[0] - <a href="http://www.wishbonetinyhomes.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wishbonetinyhomes.com/</a>
Looking at the website beyond the landing page, their current business is yuppie boardinghouses. Which isn't really building cities and doesn't scale in that direction because what makes cities hard is economic diversity...Greyhound Stations and methadone clinics have to go somewhere or it's just prettier gated suburbia.
Ah, the arrogance of completely ignoring history and human nature.<p>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.<p>What they are basically describing is trying to start a cult.
Looks at some of their properties in SF. 3 level house in Haight-Ashbury, ~18 units.<p>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.
Is this "not invented here" syndrome again?<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town</a><p>-or in the extreme case-<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_republic" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_republic</a><p>I can't quite tell if Silicon Valley has already jumped the shark, or if they are still seeking funding to build the ramp.
I wonder if they'll choose to make a whole diverse city or just a "monoculture" of 20 somethign roommates. ? I dont imagine seniors are usually attracted to Campus' main market (see the communities on their website). But cities usually have all sorts of demographics.
As a mid-career professional, this strikes me as the kind of thing that might have appealed to me when I was 19-23, but even then I hung out with 40 somethings. Perhaps I'm just not the target audience. Cool idea, nonetheless.
This reminds me of the Downtown Las Vegas Project spearheaded by Tony Hsieh's. Definitely interesting to see the "hacker" mentality applied to city development.