The error was in the Guardian piece. now corrected
This sounds like the backstory for a dystopian movie where the founders appoint a Judge Dredd type sheriff to keep homeless addicts away by killing them.
The car commute from Montezuma Hills in roughly the geographic weighted center of the land purchases to San Francisco looks like roughly 3 hours and ten minutes round trip on the average working day.
So about an hour and a quarter in and then the same back? That's not *terrible* (there's people in my town do that to the city where they have their pharma, etc., job) but of course the longest part of the trip will be getting into the city. Unless they set up some kind of rail service/commuter bus service, and I doubt that is going to happen. So the "dense, walkable city" idea is knocked on the head from the get-go, as you are going to need a car to get to your tech job.
A couple would definitely need two cars. And over three hours of commuting per day to San Francisco would mean it's not that much more desirable of a location than existing downscale exurbs like Stockton, which could depress the quality of residents who'd be attracted by it.
It would nice to have a rail commute: commuting by passenger rail, like in "Mad Men," is the most pleasant way to get to work during rush hour. In the Chicago suburbs, for example, the most desirable suburban locations are within a reasonable walks of train stations: 15 minute suburbs.
There's a train track between Sacramento and San Francisco that's about 10 or 20 miles away, but most railroads in the U.S., other than specifically commuter railways in places like NYC and Chicago, prioritize freight over passengers, so schedules for passenger trains are often fictional, with passenger trains being sidetracked to let freight roar by. (America, by the way, has very efficient freight trains in return for having terrible inter-city passenger rail.)
An alternative would be to extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail line from Antioch under or over the river/estuary to this new city. But that would cost many, many billions and would probably require the new city to have a population of, say, a half million. Also, BART raises fears of Oaklanders or some of the exurban slum dwellers (e.g., Pittsburg) riding mass transit out to the new city to raise havoc. If you can only get to this new city by a long car trip, it will have low crime rates.
In sum, there are good reasons of geography why this piece of land is so empty. On the other hand, this coalition of billionaires is not unimpressive. I wish them well.
It seems to me like the early targets would be people who mostly WFH, maybe only going to the office a few times a month. (Or you're entirely remote but don't want to stray too far from the Bay Area for other reasons)
Having local jobs is clearly part of the plan. These investors are historically more interested in industrial projects than residences.
Speculative: I doubt the wind farm is coincidental. There is even a windmill in the californiaforever.com logo, at the bottom of the page. Note that in the PNW datacenters get built next to hydroelectric facilities.
Wildly speculative: if you expect fusion reactors in ten years or so, where do you expect them to get built?
>The specific utopian city is going to look like this:
Their images are AI generated. Wrong number of stripes on the American flag, leaves floating in mid-air, bricks/vinyl siding that doesn't match, nearly a perfectly square aspect ratio, etc, etc, etc.
Kind of funny to see The Guardian analyse the details of the images ("a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods") like they're not Midjourney sludge that means absolutely nothing.
Doesn't seem wrong to me - if the company prompted Midjourney with "a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods", that communicates information about their plans. The pipeline is always going to be "a leader who knows the strategy says a few sentences to an artist, the artist draws their impression of those few sentences, the leader either takes their work or asks them to try again". AI might slightly degrade the communication step, but not enough that you can't think of it the same way.
Ideally a project like this, at this stage of development, should already have some actual architects involved, and those architects should have some plans at least some thought-through concept art showing what they actually intend to build.
It's a lie though, a deception not even by omission - they're portraying an image of 'the final result' that is not going to happen. I know advertising is brazen, but this is pretty egregious even for that. It's not going to be a Tuscan village, it's going to be stacks of apartment blocks in a scrubland.
The Prospera stuff is poor, but at least they are going to (try and) build the housing/offices as portrayed in their 'artist's impression'. Solano (whatever they end up calling the thing) is not going to be remotely like what they're showing here.
Ah, the wonders of AI - only fledgling as yet, and we're already using it to lie to our fellows!
So the AI was using reference photos of (what looks to me like) New York housing, but mashed together with the "walkable suburban street" prompt. I have to admit, I like the flag flying in the background - are they trying to appear patriotic and evoke American values of The Frontier, or is this just an artefact from whatever reference materials the art used? 😀
This billionaire's coalition is pretty ideologically diverse, but they seem like people who might unironically approve of flying the American flag.
They are probably influenced by Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso's highly popular Americana outdoor shopping mall in Glendale, CA, which looks like a prosperous small city in Ohio in 1910. Caruso's immensely popular Grove mall looks like an Italian hill city. People in L.A. will drive long distances and pay to park to walk around a walkable simulacrum of city from before cars.
I think Kerguelen Island would be an ideal spot for resurrected Ice Age megafauna like Woolly Mammoths to be hunted by billionaires using only spears assisted by atlatls.
Does Kerguelen have residents? It seems to me that uninhabited land would operate differently than what you suggest, because a referendum would be irrelevant if there are no residents.
Article 1 of the French Constitution of 1958 states that "France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic." The term "indivisible" in this context implies that the territorial integrity of the French Republic is sacrosanct and cannot be divided by selling off a part of its territory. This would apply to overseas territories like the Kerguelen Islands as well.
Article 11 allows the president to submit to referendum "any Government Bill dealing with the organisation of the public authorities." Algeria's independence was approved after such a referendum, that's the constitutional mechanism, the government had no legal authority to let Algeria go without it.
It's implied, but the meaning is open to interpretation. Also, if it did mean that, would probably only apply to the Republic proper; the various "departments', both in and outside Europe that are represented in the National Assembly.
My wife and I were sailing from the Galapagos Islands to Hawaii on a small sailboat.
Normally you would go west then north to avoid the "doldrums", i.e. the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, where the weather is unpredictable and even dangerous. But that year the ITCZ was far south so we decided to cut north and then catch the trade winds to Hawaii.
That brought us right on a path to Clipperton. At first I didn't expect that we would get close, and even if we did the timing would probably not be right. We had no charts of the area (none exist, as far as I know). The general nautical chart we used only showed a cross to signify the approximate location of a danger to avoid, so we needed stay clear at night. But as the winds got us closer it became more likely that we'd be near the island early in the morning.
So I mentioned it to my dad by email on my daily report to him (via satellite). And he replied that he knew a lot about it because he saw a documentary on television about a French scientific expedition to the island. I told him it was too bad I didn't have any chart of the area. He replied that there was a map in the TV guide he likes to buy. "Wow," I said, "ask Mom to scan the map and send it to me!"
The map was, huh, barely useful, but it gave me a sense that maybe we could anchor somewhere. So we decided to try it. We got close to the lagoon around 8am. Perfect. We entered a cove on the east side that looked promising on the "map". But although the depth looked good (10 meters), it was clearly full of rocks, and the swell made me very nervous. One thing I didn't want was to get wrecked 1000 miles away from the nearest port. So we moved to the west side, which I hoped would be more sheltered from the trade winds and the swell.
We dropped the anchor in 12 meters of depth, but once the chain was extended the depth was 30 meters! The island is the tip of a volcano and we were sitting on a steep slope. Still, we got in the water with mask, snorkel, fins. It was INCREDIBLE! Hundred feet of visibility, super clear water, friendly fish, a few sharks (also friendly!), and many boobies.
At some point I was swimming down and could see a booby on the surface. He was putting his head regularly just below the surface and maybe eating plankton (?). He looked like he could see me, but as I got close he totally ignored me. So there I was, swimming maybe a foot under a booby, looking at him and him totally ignoring me, just doing his business.
We only stayed a few hours. The swell breaking on the reef made it extremely difficult and dangerous to land. And like I said, not a good place to be stranded (or hurt). We had lunch and dinner at anchor, then left toward Hawaii in the evening.
Though I'm looking at the "artist's impressions" of the New Garden City and then the real landscape and going "No [expletive deleted] way that is going to translate into reality".
I *can* see what they mean about some farmland, but I have a notion they might go for commercial forestry, that kind of scrubby land is best suited for it. As for the rest of it - mmm, well. Maybe? I'm wondering about where they're going to get the water for all those tree-lined streets and boating and marinas and so forth. Is there a river nearby?
(Mostly I'm going "What the hell are the Collinson brothers doing involved with this? Too rich and grand and posh now for Tipp, are we?")
(Also, "Gosh amighty, is there no limit to the brazenness of artist's impressions? You are not going to recreate a Tuscan or Umbrian village on the banks of the local whatever river or lake is there, no matter how many red-roofed houses sloping down to the shore with cypresses on the skyline you paint in").
Dormitory town for the tech workers needed by the various employers putting money into this is the most likely result, I'm thinking.
EDIT:
"Three months ago, Flannery sued a group of local farmers who wouldn’t sell to them, accusing them of “conspiring to inflate the value of the land”."
Well, yeah. You'd think a company with a name like "Flannery" would be well familiar with the concept of 'road frontage' 😁
Re: Prospera and its legal troubles - well well well. I am shocked, shocked! I tell you. Who could possibly have foreseen this would happen? I mean, I never expected that if you head off to South America in order to build your own little company town because of weak governments that won't meddle with you so long as you pay off the right ministers and people in power due to political instability meaning everybody wants to line their pockets while they're in power, that this would come back to bite you in the backside when there is rapid turnover due to said political instability and the opposition party comes into power which then decides to soak the rich foreigners even more or boot them out because they made a deal with the last lot, not with them? Never expected that at all!
The area is near the San Joaquin Delta where the rivers of the Central Valley drain into SF Bay, and there's some swampland nearby, but I wouldn't have associated it with large bodies of water. One of the founders said in an interview that he enjoys kayaking in the area, so there must be something.
It's the "in the area" bit that is ringing alarm bells, because that can cover a lot of ground. Apparently there is a Lake Solano which is a national park and you can go kayaking there, but that does not seem to be at all the same thing as "when we build our new city, you can kayak and boat by the shoreline" because I'm not seeing any shoreline as such:
The Guardian article says the Flannery company has been buying up land around Travis Air Force Base, which is just east of Fairfield, and zooming in on that map and looking at it - there's not really any kind of shoreline like the pretty pictures, which are definitely misleading and definitely selling a *vision* of Norman Rockwell Utopia which is not going to be the reality.
There's rivers east and south, but around the air force base it looks like desert/scrubland (which I would expect). I'm in agreement that if you start building there, yeah you'll have plenty of open space to put up buildings but you better make damn sure you have the water supply, sewerage, and other utilities well planned out as to how you're going to manage them. There aren't going to be leafy green streets and kayaking by the shore, not unless you travel a fair distance to go to the river or sea-coast.
Travis AFB is a MAC base, Material Air Command. They fly freight, and its really loud. When its foggy, which it is often in the delta region, the foggy air really carries the sound. Flying freight is done with really big heavy aircraft, and they're very loud.
What these schemers do, is 'model the noise level' so ... basically all models are wrong, but some models are useful. So they model the noise level in a manner which allows development on the property. Then they build, then the residents complain, then the federal government gets involved, and starts to regulate the air traffic out of the air force base. The developers have long since absconded with their $$$$, and the shit-storm, its all SEP (Somebody Else's Problem).
Look, we have to have air force bases, and we intentionally put them in God forsaken out of the way places, where they can make shit-tons of noise, drop the occasional airplane, and do it in some out of the way place where the only casualties are the air crew. But then NOPE, some schemer sees a scam, and this is it, the taxpayers are being had yet again.
I think if you provide housing for 100,000 people in a state that's becoming a disaster area due to a massive housing shortage, this isn't a "scam" even if it requires a local air force base to change its noise policies.
My takeaway: some of the plots are in the Noise Military Compatibility Area (MCA), which is unsuitable for residential (without significant noise attenuation), but could be used for office/retail/industrial. Most of the plots are outside the Noise MCA, and are fine for residential: No change in Travis Base's Noise MCA would be needed to develop there.
You'll hear planes, but it will be like living in Vacaville.
At least in the last forty years, what the federal authorities have done about airport noise is not reduce the airport noise. It's to tell cities that they can have some assistance with residents' noise insulation improvements, _if_ they alter zoning to prevent any further construction. See for instance the Comprehensive Airport Land Use Compatibility Plan for the Environs of San Francisco International Airport:
I am a Planning Commissioner in San Bruno, and I live less than a mile from the airport, in the Belle Air neighborhood, just across 101. Basically under the deal that the local cities (South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Millbrae) made with the airport some decades back, we're not supposed to let anyone add housing too close to the flight path. (The technical term is "noise contours".)
South San Francisco has recently been trying to build some apartments just at the northwest tip of the area affected. They had thought they were going to be able to reach an agreement where they told the ALUC "hey we know the airport exists, we will build to high noise insulation standards and we agree we can't sue you". But the ALUC so far seems to be saying they don't want to grant an exemption.
It's not exactly clear yet what's going to happen with this, because it's bringing state law (which has been changed to push for more housing) into conflict with a quasi-federal authority. If the ALUC really stands firm, I suspect they'll win in federal court, but maybe they'll change their mind. (I've talked with my Congressman about this, I'm hoping there may be some action from Congress to get airport commissions generally to lighten up on blocking housing; it's kind of a wonky issue where you might be able to get bipartisan interest. Call it "deregulation / preventing frivolous lawsuits" for the Republicans, and "dealing with the housing / homelessness crisis" for Democrats.)
If I lived about 2-3 blocks further northeast, I would've been personally affected by this issue. I'm _just_ outside the 75 dB noise contour, and it's unclear whether the state ADU-streamlining laws would apply there. (I have just broken ground on an ADU, the design of which is taking advantage of some brand new rules letting you build at a slightly smaller setback if you're within half a mile of transit.) Our city planning department is kind of unsure what they should do with ADU applications under the contour. My impression is that they are inclined to just go ahead and approve stuff, because they're more afraid of Rob Bonta and YIMBY Law than they are of the ALUC. They'd just see if the ALUC notices / complains, but so far it hasn't come up.
YIMBYs already prepped a lawsuit against San Bruno once:
Ultimately the suit was dropped because the city came back and approved the project, although by the time they did we'd hit COVID, and then rising rates and construction material inflation, so the project has never broken ground. We extended their permits another couple years, earlier this year. I am skeptical it will ever happen, I think it is more likely we'll get the featureless seven-story concrete towers that were threatened under SB 35 in the immediate aftermath of the original rejection.
Yeah, but I don't think a military air force base is going to get regulated out of it, so I imagine any proposed development is going to be protested for the very reason you put forward. That does explain the concerns of Senator Dodd about 'harming the base', but I think Travis is probably a big enough local employer that any building proposed to go up near it is going to be pushed back.
If this really is intended as dormitory housing for workers commuting to SF, then the developers will expect "people won't be at home all day so they won't hear the planes". What you say about "God-forsaken out of the way places" makes the proposed "walkable leafy utopia" sound even more implausible with what will eventually be built.
It looks like it's not fully contiguous (yet!). The center (roughly the intersection of the 12 and the 113) is not particularly close to water, but the area is generally bounded by the Sacramento River in the south/east, Montezuma Slough in the west, and Lindsey Slough in the north. (I have no idea how good sloughs are as sources of water).
The area around Travis Air Force Base is in the far northwest corner of the purchased area.
In the Sacramento Delta, there is a legally mandated "X2" line, which is the point in the delta where salinity above that line must remain <2 ppt at all times. That line is upstream of Suisun bay and the marshes north of it. There are salinity control gates in various places in the sloughs in Suisun bay to prevent salt water intrusion upstream during the tidal cycle.
2-3 ppt is generally accepted as the threshold where humans can start to taste salt in water. So water in places like Montezuma Slough and others in the marshlands north of Suisun bay will often (although not always) be noticeably salty (although not necessarily dangerous)
Looking up sloughs, they're wetlands? So probably a ton of environmental protections in place, I wouldn't imagine you'd get permission to use them as reservoirs, and if you did, the point DangerouslyUnstable makes about the salinity means you're going to need one hell of a water treatment plant to make the water potable.
"Sloughs are ecologically important as they are a part of an endangered environment; wetlands. They act as a buffer from land to sea and act as an active part of the estuary system where freshwater flows from creeks and runoff from the land mix with salty ocean water transported by tides. Restoration is a big effort in California wetlands to restore slough and ridge landscapes. Examples of restoration projects on slough landscapes include The Elkhorn Slough Tidal Wetland Project, Dutch Slough Tidal Restoration Project, and the McDaniel Slough wetland enhancement project."
If they're planning on getting water from the river, that's going to be another headache, given California's general problems with water supplies.
In the NY Times map, you can see that a large portion of the purchased parcels are directly adjacent to the Sacramento River, the largest river in California and a source of fresh water well above the X2 line. Physical access to fresh water is no problem. In California, the more relevant question is do you have political and legal access to water. The Sacramento River is highly regulated and subscribed. But they are north of the Delta - that's better than being to the south. It means they could potentially participate in the north-of-delta water markets, making a deal with a State Water contractor for a portion of their annual allocation.
I am reminded of all the canal projects in England in the 18th century. Some of them were reasonable (and got built), but a lot of them looked OK until you looked at a topographical map and said "This canal route of 20 miles is going to need a hundred locks because it's going up a mountain and back down again."
> I suppose if Tom Monaghan can do it with Ave Maria City, there's no reason tech very rich people can't do it in California:
Sure there is.; the vastly different legal and cultural environments around development in Florida as opposed to California. Among other things, Florida's state legislature is in the long habit of creating special local government districts (pretty much starting with Disney World), and did so in Ave Maria's case.
It depends how bad the housing need is, and how unsuitable for other use the land is, to get exemptions. It looks like scrubland, so use for manufacturing/office/residential would be "not using it for anything otherwise" (unless sheep are grazing it).
I agree there will be lots of obstacles in the way re: legal environment, but this is probably as good a test of YIMBYism as you're going to get in California; 'we want to build in the desert and make it blossom like the rose'.
Commercial forestry: this is the year that all of Canada and most of the Mediterranean caught fire, releasing gigatonnes of really nasty particles into the air, and a stack of CO2. Being against the Ents is like being against motherhood and apple pie, but at some stage it has to sink in that trees are part of the problem, not of the solution. Other vegetation does as good a job of carbon capture, some of it burns less, all of it burns less intensely.
Is this one too many zeroes, or from rural Missouri am I misunderstanding what a "town" is: a few "~100,000 person towns scattered across the county." 100,000 is big city where I am from.
Fairfield, Vacaville, and Vallejo are all 100,000+ and I don't think of them as real cities; other people in the area can correct me if I'm being unfair.
"Fairfield, Vacaville, and Vallejo are all 100,000+ and I don't think of them as real cities; other people in the area can correct me if I'm being unfair."
How do you think of Palo Alto (pop. 66,000) and Mountain View (pop. 81,000) and Berkeley (pop. 117,000)? That provides context for size (if not for 'sophistication').
I've never been to Charleston but I would have instinctively classified it as a city, probably partly because it's the biggest one in its area. I do notice Wikipedia says the Charleston urban area is 600,000 people.
"Biggest one in the area" is useful. Now we can focus on what we/you mean by "area" :-)
NOTE: I don't have a problem with city vs town. The PRIZM cluster (marketing) folks have the concept of "Second City Elite" which implies 2nd 'level' of city. I suspect that it is dependent on how far away the next 1st city is. And it implies that Salt Lake City (pop. 200,000) might be a 1st city because it dominates Utah while Fremont (pop. 250,000) isn't because it is dwarfed by San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
A place with a mayor, city government, FD, PD, etc. Probably a city planning department.
I mean if you get down to 500 person towns where the whole town government is 4-5 people not all of whom are even full time, sure maybe not a city. But a city isn't skyscrapers, its an administrative entity. Were there no cities before 1900 in your mind?
This is just a crazy definition of "city". Anything over a few thousand is for sure a "city". And legally they are almost all cities.
When there used to be more "hamlet/village/town/city" classifications in some states, the thresholds were often like 50/200/500/2000 or something like that.
Most states have collapsed that all down to just cities and towns, or even only just cities and unincorporated.
I think population or density numbers are not that useful for deciding if something is a city or not. I think the city is the economic center of its region, where people do most of their trade with other economic regions. 100k towns around San Francisco are not going to be the center of anything. If someone wants to start a business, they're going to San Francisco to do it because that's where all the people and ideas and resources come together. (Silicon Valley is not exactly a city, but it has a very powerful convergence point for people and ideas: Stanford University.)
I think a lot of "real city" comes from "I've heard about it."
I've heard of many of these places, so they end up in my mind as "cities" (unless they've been described as small).
I live in a place called Mississauga. You've probably never heard of it, but it's just under a million people, in a sprawling built up area that has has something like 8 million people in it.
The reason you've likely not heard of it is because it's not in California, so no films are actually set there. When there are movies made, it's pretending to be someplace else.
One of the classic New Urbanist developments, aka nostalgia streetcar suburbanism. Which is better than standard-issue sprawl, to be fair, but can't really be the basis for a core city of any significant size.
> Building progress: last I heard Duna Residences were supposed to be ready Q2 2023, but a recent video shows them still under construction.
Yeah, they're delayed a bit, but deliveries are happening over the next 4 months (they're doing it in phases as they get them finished), starting with the commercial units this month and finishing with the top floor in December.
I assume the project is done in the spirit of YIMBYism, which hates cars and wants to make things as hard as possible for them. This is both trendy and economically useful because it means higher density. Probably there will be some compromise with reality but I don't know where it will be. Even if YIMBYism is practical in big cities (which remains to be seen) it might be harder in Solano County where there's nothing for dozens of miles except whatever these people build themselves.
One model might be a dense walkable center with good buses; a free (or cheap) shuttle to either SF, the nearest BART station at Pittsburgh/Bay Point, or both; and maybe the same level of grudging acceptance of cars as SF or NYC. See the neighborhood of Cul-de-Sac in Arizona for a model that's been shared widely around the YIMBY community and is probably on their minds.
Assume that the location on Google Maps called "Montezuma Hills" is about the center of the Flannery land purchases. Well, it's 30.6 miles by road to the Pittsburg BART station due to first having to drive 9 miles toward Sacramento to cross the Sacramento River at Rio Vista. This city would really need another bridge or tunnel to open up a more direct route across the Sacramento River.
BART goes all the way to Antioch out past Pittsburg, so the shuttle to BART would be less than 31 miles, but still a big number. In summary, the reason this place has virtually nobody living on it is that it is way out in the boonies.
> Even if YIMBYism is practical in big cities (which remains to be seen)
Do you mean politically or from an engineering/planning perspective? The latter has been done successfully in many cities around the world, it's not anything new outside of a narrow post-1950s American context. The former is probably harder but should be doable in this model (especially if you're mostly selling specifically to people who like it), but I guess isn't experimentally proven.
I feel like the whole movement has a weird tension between multiple groups:
1. Utopian dreamers who want everyone to give up their cars, walk home from the supermarket in the rain carrying 20 kg of reusable canvas bags, and at least strongly consider eating cricket slurry for at least two meals a day.
2. Normal home-buying people who want ordinary suburbs, but nicer. They'd like to be able to walk everywhere in theory, as long as they can still drive there nine times out of ten in practice.
3. Property developers who DGAF and just want to cram as many houses onto a piece of land as they're legally allowed and sell them for as much money as possible.
I think the biggest YIMBY group is none of those, but rather people who just want housing to be affordable as a result of increased supply.
(Off topic, but nearly every political movement has a weird tension between multiple groups. For example libertarians and Christians in the Republican party)
This is FOR SURE not the core of the YIMBY movement. The core of the movement is upper middle class and middle class urban planning people, many of whom are childless, who like big city dense living and want to pretend that everyone likes it (or worse yet just don't even consider their fellow citizens preferences).
The random dude who wants a cheaper house isn't like "damn those planning regulations and lack of more budlings. They don't make the connection.
/r/fuckcars obviously hates cars, but who says they are YIMBY? I imagine YIMBYs are overrepresented there, but so are many other demographics such as Democrats, young people, queer people, etc. YIMBYism doesn't require hating cars any more than being a Democrat requires hating cars.
New York isn't "grudging acceptance of cars" - 10% of the land surface is given over to the free storage of cars! They heavily subsidize cars, which is the only reason there are so many cars in such a densely populated area.
You stick a service alley in the back, perhaps with access to a garage. Look up "New Urbanism" and then Google Maps of some of the examples. In theory these places are designed to be transit-oriented and walkable, and I'm sure they succeed to various degrees, but realistically if you put a city in that location people are going to want to have cars, and they are going to park those cars somewhere.
Over my dead body. I will never stop going on weekend trips and longer road trips. I will never "own nothing and be happy" and no IoT drone crap will cross my property lines.
I will not live in a pod, I will not eat bugs, I will not own nothing, I will not surrender my privacy. FAFO.
The whole "new urbanism" movement really fails in that it ignores people's actual real life preferences. I mean the most efficient and environmental solution is we all live in coffin apartments and work from those same apartments and are fed nutrient paste. You could fit the whole global population in like the city limits in Denver in one giant skyscraper. No transportation or outside time needed!
Except people don't want that, not even the most extreme YIMBYS.
So where do you draw the line between that and everyone living on big 40 acre farms? Well that is the beauty of markets, you let the people make the decisions and value what they value.
Instead you have a bunch of childless young urban professionals, living like childless YPPUIES and then demanding everyone else must live like that.
You don't need to. All that matters is that a substantial fraction of people are happy to adopt the new ways. You can be just like the people who still own horses and/or don't have cell phones.
"Come back in a decade or two and people probably won’t own cars."
My _existing_ cars will probably last a decade (quite possibly two - though then they might probably outlast _me_). I don't think I'm that unusual. Tens of millions of existing vehicles will probably still be in use in a decade.
There's no plausible scenario where cars are gone in the US within ten or even twenty years. Some dense cities can survive with most of the population not using them, but most of the US is far too rural to sustain public transport necessary to completely forego cars. What your suggestion will sound like to most people is the COVID lockdowns forever - which they will not support or accept.
They're not talking about people foregoing cars for public transit - they're talking about people foregoing *ownership* of cars for easy access to self-driving cars. It's like how people have given up landlines and cable subscriptions in favor of cell phones and streaming video.
Are there any googleable New Urbanism designs that you'd recommend as examples to aspire towards?
Looking at a couple of examples, Prospect New Town in Colorado looks reasonably pleasant but not fundamentally different to a lot of other new suburban developments. Mountain House California looks similar but worse, a bunch of little two-storey houses, not much greenery, and almost zero shops.
Most of the projects have been fairly small, nowhere near 100k people. One of the biggest is Central Park (formerly Stapleton) in Denver. But that basically looks like typical parking lot urban sprawl in the commercial areas, with houses packed in tightly with no front yards in the residential areas.
You can have something nice and pretty and tiny like Seaside, Florida. But that's 1000 people. With enough money I guess you can scale it up, but the complexity is much, much greater.
If you want 100k people, you obviously need a large number of jobs, and if those jobs aren't in your planned community, the residents need transportation out of your community. And if those neighboring communities don't have good transit, your residents are going to need cars, even if you've laid out a beautiful, walkable city with a good transit system. And if they have cars, they probably don't care if your city's transit service is good or not. So it seems to me (although I'm no expert) that you really need to have some major sources of good jobs as a key part of your city; otherwise you've only managed to build a bedroom community.
I personally played a lot of sports on my front lawn from age 5 to 12 before outgrowing it, but I don't see kids playing in their front yards much anymore. So, getting rid of front lawns seems like the easiest gain in density.
I don't think Seaside scales, and the clue is in the name. Seaside only works because it occupies a stretch of beautiful warm sunny Florida beach; if you put it in the middle of a field somewhere then you couldn't sell the houses for millions; if you couldn't sell the houses for millions then you couldn't pump so much money into making the development look nice, and if you can't pump so much money into making the development look nice then it's just another crappy suburb in a field somewhere.
You can only build as many Seasides as you have unoccupied sections of warm-climate beachfront land.
I agree generally, but wonder if you could create such a development if you could get a group of high-value residents to all agree to live in the same place? That would presumably make the schools great, crime low, etc. Having a beach would obviously help, but maybe being close enough to SF might do the trick?
I think the Mueller development in Austin, TX is a good example, a master-planned exploitation of a 700-acre site that magically opened up mid-city when the municipal airport was relocated. There is a section of big-box sprawl at the West end, but also many areas of high-density residential and mixed-use.
In the late 1990s, I looked at a sort of New Urbanist/Old Villageist development in the Chicago suburbs much like the top picture, with houses arranged around a village green. There was an alley behind the houses for cars but your kids could visit the neighboring few dozen houses without crossing traffic, which was definitely appealing. I recall the asking price being about 40% more than conventional Chicago suburbs, which seemed reasonable for what you'd get but also tough to manage.
What's wrong with giving people front yards, if they're going to be building from scratch? That would allow people to park their car in front of their house, off the street, so the footpath is still walkable (for pedestrians, people pushing buggies and kids on bikes).
I walk the dog around my suburban neighborhood and I seldom see kids playing in their front yards anymore. Instead, they are more likely to put cones in the street and play in their low-traffic street. The athletic family with three kids behind me has created a child paradise, but they have made their front yard ornamental rather than a lawn; instead, the five of them are out playing sports on the asphalt of the culdesac with various devices for slowing traffic. I don't get it, but they are obviously great parents, so that what great parents do these days.
I think we value privacy at our homes more than we used to? Not sure why though. I agree that front lawns seem to be used far less than they used to be. Back lawns (less visible to the street) seem to be used some still.
In Vauban (a development I'm familiar with in Germany) there is a large multi story car park within easy walking distance of the houses, along with a tram service and good bike infrastructure. You don't need a car to live there but you can have one and park it in the multi story car park. There are also a lot of zipcar like services. It's definitely slightly inconvenient for doing car like things, but it is surprisingly nice to walk and cycle (and unicycle) around an environment designed for it.
That style of house often has garage access in the back. There's a pretty front door visitors walk up to (parking on the street) but the owners drive in from the rear. I used to own a house in a development just like that. Here's the redfin link for my old house - photos #8 and #9 show the back alley with garage access:
Those look a lot like parts of London; I live in Terraced housing, my tiny front garden is directly onto a park (so it doesn't matter that I don't have much outdoor space; just enough to let the dog out and relax in private if needed, but the park has a huge play area for my kid and is great for walking the dog). There's a dead-end road in the back, and I have a one-car garage that faces onto that; there's also some on-street parking on that low-traffic road. Public transit is excellent, though, so I don't actually own a car, it's just for visitors. There are lots of small shops and restaurants on the bottom floor of c. 3-story houses.
> So once 10,000 people live in their town, what’s to stop those people from becoming NIMBYs and voting against further growth?
Part of it would probably also be which people you have. Palo Alto nimbys are mostly people who moved to Palo Alto because they like having one-story houses with big yards and lots of roads. Presumably the sort of people who move into smaller high-density apartments in an area advertised as high-density would be more okay with keeping that level of density?
(Or even if they eventually change their minds and start objecting, this takes time and within a decade or two you've already probably built or at least zoned for a lot of the density you want).
I wrote my PhD thesis on this topic and yes: at least in some case studies I looked at, people who move to a place based on marketing for a walkable community are more willing to accept density than people who moved to the burbs with the goal of not being downtown. This is based on interviews and newspaper articles, mind, not quantitative surveys.
Here you go. It's an analysis of four attempts to transform suburban communities into downtowns, focused on political, institutional, and economic barriers (and how to overcome them). The Uptown Core has the clearest example of residents fighting for the walkable community they were sold. They fought a car dealership, and are open to density, unlike their suburban peers, who often oppose any density. If you like, I can also send some more quantitative studies on this subject.
Relatedly, I also find many examples, in all four retrofits, of suburban residents supporting or opposing change. Many accept that density will cut traffic, for example, while others believe it is the cause of traffic. I found it interesting and somewhat surprising that walkability can be extremely popular among suburbanites. In Surrey, the Mayor got a 72% approval rating for attracting sense walkable growth, in an almost entirely car dependent suburb. I know you don't like podcasts but I discuss this all on the most recent Strong Towns podcast.
That's certainly been my experience living in Chicago's South Loop, where I've gotten a lot of firsthand knowledge of my neighbors' preferences by being on an HOA board the last 7 years.
I think it will depend significantly on how quickly the area urbanizes and becomes fully walkable. If the area is mostly car-centered for lack of size for 5-10 years, those people will have to adapt and may be less likely to want the density. If there's continual construction and the place becomes walkable quickly, that's less likely.
> The specific utopian city is going to look like this
The street scene looks fairly retro, like some children's book from the 1950s. Maybe that is deliberate, to look reassuringly familiar to potential investors and buyers. But, among other things, where are the solar panels on the roofs, and the flat roofs to park all the hydrogen powered flying cars?
With a couple of hundred square miles at their disposal, the land footprint is sufficient to build a giant ziggurat, or "pyramid", with sides maybe a couple of miles wide at the base and with say fifty ascending terraces each bounded by an outer wall tall enough to ensure privacy for residents round the outside by preventing them being overlooked by the levels above (Or one could design terrace outer glass walls that are transparent when looked through fairly horizontally, but opaque when looked at with a downward or upward slant). I assume most residents would value privacy when out and about on their terrace gardens.
Shopping malls, public areas, lower value private accomodation, and hydroponic growing areas with artificial UV light, could occupy the interior, and it could be truncated at the top to allow a large park. There could also be a large water storage area near the top, to supply the inhabitants, water the plants, and for emergency use in fires, and to stabilize the temperature throughout. Also, the whole thing could rotate on giant bearings, so that all residents round the outside would get their fair share of sunshine, and to help equalize the temperature.
Given a few weeks I'm sure I could plan the whole thing down to the last detail! :-P
I'm not familiar with either of those. But I think with careful design a proposal similar to what I sketched would be better to live in, and more flexible for amenities, than giant vertical glass box skyscrapers.
Originally “The Night Land” by William Hope Hodgson, a much older book. Wright wrote in the same world.
Either way it’s a very dark and depressing place. Said Ziggurat is surrounded by enormous monsters slowly closing in on it to destroy it, held at bay by the “Earth Current”, the only power source available because the sun has stopped producing light.
"With a couple of hundred square miles at their disposal, the land footprint is sufficient to build a giant ziggurat, or "pyramid", with sides maybe a couple of miles wide at the base and with say fifty ascending terraces each bounded by an outer wall tall enough to ensure privacy for residents round the outside by preventing them being overlooked by the levels above".
The Last Redoubt from "The Night Land" by William Hope Hodgson! 😁
"The Sun has gone out and the Earth is lit only by the glow of residual vulcanism. The last few millions of the human race are gathered together in the Last Redoubt, a gigantic metal pyramid, nearly eight miles high, which is under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark."
On the water question for the California Forever city, would desalination be a viable approach? Assuming they have access to the Bay, and assuming copious solar power and lots of money to spend on desalination equipment, would it be plausible to provide enough water for a city of say 100k people? I seem to recall reading that this is being done in various places in the Middle East (?)
(I expect there would be environmental lawsuits. I'm mostly just curious about the technological feasibility.)
As an economic matter, recent large reverse osmosis desalinated water projects run around $1.00 a cubic meter (assuming an amortized electrical cost from your panels near the CA industrial electricity rate of 10.49¢/kWh), or roughly $1,200 per acre-foot (the usual unit for measuring irrigation water in California). That's well above what farmers in California pay for irrigation water on average, though during droughts the market price for a badly-needed little bit of extra can spike into that range.
As an environmental matter, there's the issues both of intake and discharge on the sea; sucking in water can disrupt sea life, as can dumping high-saline brine (a byproduct of producing fresh water with reverse osmosis tech).
$1 per cubic metre, or 0.1 cents per litre, sounds perfectly fine for household usage. Typical personal usage is 100,000 litres per person per year, and I pay a lot more than a hundred bucks for my water bill already.
Most municipal water costs most places are a matter of treatment and distribution under conditions that maintain safe potability, which is almost everywhere huge compared to the price of getting irrigation-quality water to the municipal system in the first place.
I don't happen to know how the acquisition versus local-to-the-municipality costs in California break down, but when the price billed to residential customers is around 0.4¢/liter (rates from $10.19 to $11.47 per hundred cubic feet in San Francisco, from $7.833 to $12.86 per hundred cubic feet in Los Angeles), an added 0.1¢/liter would definitely be noticed by the people on the lower income levels.
Of course, California even during the recent extended drought didn't have so much a shortage of water as a bunch of rival interests having intense political and legal battles over allocating the water, mostly outside the view of the public because it's the sort of complicated mess few newspaper readers could follow even if it was reported accurately.
Desalination for household use is perfectly feasible, it's when you start looking at what is required for agriculture that the economics start looking impractical. In the case of California, anyone paying desalination prices for water might be understandably miffed that farmers were getting it for dollars per acre-foot.
"As an environmental matter, there's the issues both of intake and discharge on the sea; sucking in water can disrupt sea life, as can dumping high-saline brine (a byproduct of producing fresh water with reverse osmosis tech)."
Well, nearly every action has _some_ negative externality. Is there some comparison of the impact of the desalinization intakes and discharges as compared to some other ways of supplying the water? Naively, with 97% of the water on Earth being in the oceans, I'd expect that desalinating seawater would be one of the human actions with the least impact per person-year.
As a matter of impact on the oceans as a whole, desalination plants aren't a big issue. Worst-case, you need to be a bit careful about specific siting to avoid specific endangered littoral species.
As a matter of dealing with California law and politics, California environmentalist organizations are going to yell and kick. (Of course, they're going to do that anyway, but it's yet another bit of friction to doing anything.)
Many Thanks! Yes, my impression was that stretching the discharge pipe out to dilute the brine in a large body of seawater was sufficient to avoid real damage to endangered sea life.
"California environmentalist organizations are going to yell and kick." Ouch, yes. While it wasn't the main reason my late wife and I moved out of California when I retired, many of the heavy handed bans and regulations that they imposed were both infuriating and frightening. At one point they were pushing for household water use restrictions so severe that just taking a long shower would have been penalized (or possibly prohibited?).
They're next to a weird corner of the Bay which is an estuary - mostly freshwater in some seasons, mostly saltwater in others. I think it's pretty environmentally protected and would be surprised if they didn't just get their water from whatever source the rest of the region is already using.
Yeah, presumably all of those farms already had fairly substantial water rights that should be more than sufficient to support residential development, which tends to be significantly less water-intensive than agriculture. Residential water obviously requires more extensive treatment than irrigation water, but the actual supply shouldn't be a problem.
WRT the 2.7 billion: the most important thing to understand about large piles of wealth is that they always have a huge imaginary component, money that can't be withdrawn without crashing the value of the rest of it. So loans are taken out against the assets instead of just spending the money. This is also the reason for the weird behavior you see from the wealthy. There can be 100 fold difference in how liquidity constrained two billionaires with the same nominal wealth are. If you nominally had a billion dollars but could only do anything with 10 million you'd feel pretty poor compared to your buddies.
I pointed this out in another thread, but the PR campaign for this city (in preparation for the eventual referendum) has been going on for a long time, and you've probably been part of it in one way or another.
Marc Andreessen has been writing articles like this https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/ since 2020, and slowly buying up land since 2017 (while also campaigning against densification in actual Atherton where he actually lives).
Patrick Collisson has been donating millions to "California YIMBY" groups since 2018, and slowly buying up land since 2017. Reid Hoffmann too.
And that's just the above-water portion of the submarine. How many articles have you read in the last six years about how there's a housing crisis in Northern California and how someone somewhere desperately needs to just build a whole lot of new housing? How much of that conversation is downstream of this project?
That's not to dismiss all the arguments in favour of it. To the extent it's a good idea, it's still a good idea. But it's a bit disturbing when you realise that a giant conversation you've been part of has all been engineered behind the scenes.
I think it's more likely that a lot of billionaires who believe strongly in YIMBYism have invested in a YIMBY project.
Patrick Collison for example is a big donor to Progress Studies, which isn't directly related to this new project, but it makes sense that someone who supports Progress Studies would support YIMBYism too.
It's Time To Build barely mentions housing at all.
Reid Hoffman's support for YIMBYism should be viewed in conjunction with his support for a lot of other anti-homelessness measures that don't personally benefit him.
I think it's hard to live in SF and not think something is wrong with the way we're currently doing cities.
There are plenty of cities that aren’t San Francisco, and yet you choose to live there despite having a work-from-home job.
I’m just really confused by all the YIMBY San Francisco hate. The revealed preference is that all of you guys actually *love* SF and the Bay Area. You could move to Dallas or Houston whenever you want, but you don’t.
Dallas and Houston have horrible climate and the geography of the bay area is incomparably more beautiful.
One reason YIMBY complaints are about the bay area is that it is objectively one of the most pleasant places to live in North America and NIMBYism keeps it from being much more affordable.
NIMBYism doesn't just keep it from being affordable - it keeps it restricted to only a few million people, when a few million more people could easily reap these benefits as well.
Has it occurred to you that if you suddenly added 500,000 units it would just suck people from the rest of the country to this amazing climate and economy and you would be right back where you are but with less green space and more crowding?
There is some upper limit to that, but the equilibrium is pretty natural.
SF has a +++++ geography and a ++++ economy compared to most of the country. That is going to lead to it being very expensive in any model, because as soon as you lower the cost more people come.
A) yes this extremely obvious point that everyone brings up all the time has in fact occurred to me.
B) The idea of adding "500,000" units or anything like that is soviet central planning bullshit. The correct move is not to add any specific quota that some guy thinks is correct, it's to allow the market to actually provide housing instead of blocking it.
C) I think before you posit that bay area housing is some sort of magical thing that ignores the laws of supply and demand, you should at least be OPEN to the idea that removing enormous government restrictions on construction will bring the price down. It will be the case that even with no government interference bay area houses will be more expensive than houses in rural North Dakota, but that doesn't mean they need to be 10x or more the price.
D) Why do you think green space is what needs to be sacrificed to increase density? The bay area is full of 1 and 2 story buildings that could all be 3-4 story buildings which would double the density of those neighborhoods without sacrificing any park land, before we even talk about going above 4 stories. In addition, there are hundreds of un-built empty lots that are full of trash and are not in fact green space.
>this extremely obvious point that everyone brings up all the time has in fact occurred to me.
Well you do have to contend with the equilibrium, supply/demand, etc. And the mushiness of things like this.
>to allow the market to actually provide housing instead of blocking it.
I am not remotely against this depending on the implementation.
> think before you posit that bay area housing is some sort of magical thing that ignores the laws of supply and demand
I am not proposing that at all, I am proposing the reverse. That there is a very high level of demand to live there, and so that increases in supply will not change the price much. it might reduce it a bit, but wildly less than guessed.
>he bay area is full of 1 and 2 story buildings that could all be 3-4 story buildings which would double the density of those neighborhoods without sacrificing any park land, before we even talk about going above 4 stories.
Well it depends on what the current residents want at least a bit eh?
I am actually all for building more housing, but I think a lot of the YIMBY polices aren't very good (for example upzoning SF neighborhoods against their will so developers can buy people out and change the character of the neighborhood instead of using vacant land etc.)
I know there's a housing crisis in northern California because I live there and I know what rent I pay for what quality of dwelling and I know what it costs to buy a house here. I am in favor of building more housing in northern California and I'm glad these billionaires agree and are putting some of their billions of dollars towards that aim. I suppose that if I were an incumbent homeowner I might object to building more housing near me because of the negative externalities associated with it, but 1) this project's aim is precisely to do greenfield development in an area relatively far from existing housing, and 2) I can't afford to buy the housing necessary for me to become an incumbent homeowner at current prices anyway.
No, still extremely difficult. We're talking sums of money that far exceed the combined wealth of the people involved - not even considering how much of their wealth is actually liquid enough to tie up in this way.
Houses sitting vacant also tend to have lots of problems over time - insects or other animals, unfixed water damage, mold. The longer they sit before allowing people to buy and move in, the more value potentially (likely) lost. There's a significant tension between letting people buy the housing as soon as its ready, and waiting as long as possible in order to finish building.
I'm the author of the last link about Christiania Freetown, happy to answer any questions here or on the post comments! That post was mostly from the lens of evaluating how "free" Freetown really is and contrasting it the rest of Denmark, an opposite sort of freedom.
A belated update from our friends in The Black Hammer Party bodes poorly for the prospects of Hammer City. Apparently their leaders were arrested and are facing charges for “kidnapping, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, conspiracy to commit a felony, and taking part in street gang activity,” and one of them for sexual assault.
Wildly, they also are under fire from the Justice Department for spreading Russian propaganda in exchange for payments from a Russian influencer, who has since been arrested by the FBI and was allegedly bankrolling Hammer City.
I don't know man. I'm no socialist, but don't the Hondurans have the right to do what they want with their country? If some Chinese company had bought up the land around San Francisco and was doing stuff we didn't like we'd be pissed.
(A Japanese company would of course distract the nerds with anime so there wouldn't be a problem.)
The Hondurans previously made some commitments as how they would behave. I personally am ok with their being consequences for trying to reveres those commitments. No one forced them to make the original commitments. In the absence of some evidence of corruption or some other reason why we should think the original decision wasn't valid, then stick to the rules that you set.
It was the previous government made the deal. The new government has decided it wants to scrap it.
Governments generally take the power to change what the last lot did, otherwise the Biden Administration could not have rolled back or undone things the Trump Administration did.
I agree if you sign a contract, there should be consequences for breaking it, but it's up to the lawyers to decide if it was Honduras who made the deal with Prospera, or only the former government of Honduras.
And certain actions are made difficult-to-impossible for even the government, which it sounds like the previous government did.
As for "who made the deal": again, absent extraordinary circumstances like a revolution, it seems pretty damaging to international order for them to just say "wasn't us, that was the other guy". Doing want to pay your debts? Hold an election.
Now look, I'm a big believer in national sovereignty, they _can_ so whatever they want, but in so much as they want to participate in intentional organizations, trade, and relations, those relations require certain norms that sounds like they are at least potentially violating. That comes with consequences.
That would probably make me look pretty closely into his dealings while president, but unless evidence that those actions were, themselves, corrupt or in some other way fraudulent, no that's not disqualifying. Not to mention the fact that my understanding is that the original rules required a _lot_ more than just his buy in. If the president can unilaterally pass things that require a constitutional amendment to overturn, then there are some bigger issues.
Debts are one extreme. On the other extreme you could imagine a government making a deal with some foreign entity that says that from now on that foreign entity will rule the country. Should such a deal be upheld? It's not even different in principle from charter cities, the only difference is that usually in a charter city a country gives up sovereignity only over a small portion of its territory.
Well, at that point overturning it becomes a revolution, which luckily enough I explicitly mentioned in my exceptions!
They outlined a completely peaceful, democratic (if difficult) method of revoking the charters. They want to go back on it _without_ following those rules. This deal as signed doesn't seem (to me) to be exploitative enough that I'm going to feel bad when they suffer consequences in the international arena. Again, they do (and _should_) have the right to overturn them however they want. But engaging with other states and the international relations more broadly requires adhering to norms and standards. Those norms and standards don't and shouldn't over-rule national sovreighnity, but it does mean that when you break them, the international order is going to impose consequences.
I do not see an issue with that. Some things are worth those consequences! And in many cases, if you argue your case succesfully (as they are apparently choosing not to do), you can avoid those consequenes. But in the cases where you can't, you either have to decide if it's worth it or not.
My (relatively uninformed and therefore weakly held) belief is that in this case, the deal was made fairly and openly, was not obviously unjust or corrupt, and is being walked back in contravention of the rules as they were established, and therefore, repurcussions are fair and to expected. The value being sought? Sounds high and I have no idea if it's fair or reasonable. Sounds like something they might want to argue about in court.
There's two separate questions. One is whether foreigners should be able to tell Hondurans what to do with Honduras - the answer is no.
The second is whether Hondurans should be able to tell future Hondurans what to do with Honduras - the answer to that is a lot more complicated, but seems to be generally yes.
Why? I can't see any justification for that. The people at year t pass a law, the people at t+30 have no power to repeal it? Even if a clear majority of them now oppose it, and those people were children or not-yet-naturalised immigrants at the time of the previous vote, and so never get to decide the laws of their own country? How is that compatible with anything resembling democracy?
(And it's infinitely worse if there *wasn't* a popular vote. It seems that under international law in some cases, a government can be elected in a country on a platform of *not* signing a treaty or trade agreement, break their promise while in office and sign it, be voted out in a landslide at the next election...and the subsequent government is not able, under "international law" to revoke the treaty! This is the most tyrannical situation imaginable, and just another reason why "international law" is a cruel joke).
In the case of Honduras, if there was a popular vote (majority or supermajority) to amend the constitution, then of course repealing that would require another popular vote (with the same margin requirements) in the other direction, I presume. If that *does* happen, then the repeal is perfectly democratic and the businesses don't have a leg to stand on. They should ask themselves what they did that turned the people of the country against them, and next time *not do that*.
I'm all for the West promoting democracy, and pressuring, sanctioning and even deposing, if necessary, a dictatorial regime. I am *not* in favour of using such methods to *prevent* democratic decisions by a sovereign country.
So let's separate things out a bit. You can absolutely repeal a law. That doesn't mean you can avoid the consequences of having had that law in the first place.
For example, debt. The U.S. government took out a lot of debt in 2020. We can repeal the laws authorizing the spending, and we can even default on the debt. Can we vote to avoid the consequences of default? Can we hold a vote and say that all governments and companies around the world have to act as though we never issued the debt?
Contracts are ways we limit our own freedoms, and generally contracts make it easier for things to get done. If could decide, democratically, to just renege on any contract without consequences, what do you think the result would be?
Debt is different, I think, along with things like declaring war, because those things directly impose on other countries. And there are lots of important distinctions here that I think matter a lot and I can't cover and separately justify them all. But as a start:
1. If country A (i.e. its government) borrows money from country A's own banks, then absolutely they can later void the debt with no compensation. Just like they can nationalise the banks, or tax them at 100%, without compensation. That's just an inevitable consequence of national sovereignty. Bearing in mind (with the failure to bear this in mind being at the root of my philosophical objections to libertarianism) that all workable notions of private property rely on law and government force to back them up, who owns what is *always* a matter of government fiat (hypothetical anarcho-capitalism notwithstanding I suppose). The only recourse to the situation above is entrenched restrictions in the national constitution, together with avoiding leaving your citizens in such a desperate state that they would have the desire to do that sort of thing in the first place.
2. If country A borrows from country B, say 1 billions dollars in 2020, then in 2023 decides it won't pay back the debt...well I think that's roughly equivalent to country A invading a part of country B in 2020 and seizing 1 billion dollars of resources, and then in 2023 (under a new government) saying it regrets the invasion, but won't return the conquered province. Technically, both acts are within the scope of national sovereignty, but they are acts of aggression against the material integrity of another sovereign country, and country B (or the "international community" if there is such a thing) are justified in taking all necessary measures (including military force) to restore what was stolen. Country B is entitled to the value of a billion dollars *in 2020*, which in 2023 will include appropriate interest. If country A agreed a single trade with country B, received the imports first, and then refused to give up the exports, that would be similar, and an even more blatant instance of theft.
3. Finally, what we seem to be dealing with here, if country A made an agreement with country B to trade such-and-such for such-and-such *every year indefinitely*, or to allow free trade indefinitely, or to allow country B's businesses to operate in such-like way on its territory indefinitely, and then decided in 2023 to simply *cease* following that practice...no more yearly trades will be made, tarrifs will be imposed *from now on*, the foreign business are *no longer* permitted to operate...without forcibly seizing any of country B's property, or refusing to pay for something they've already received...I don't see how they've tangibly harmed Country B in any way. Expecting that an arrangement will continue, and the arrangement not continuing, is not a tangible harm; you didn't have a *right* for the trades to continue, only for the trades you've already made to be paid for. Countries are soveriegn, and that means always being able to change their mind and have the final say on what's legal.
Contracts between individuals, where individuals can place legal restrictions on their future behaviour, can only happen because individuals are *not* sovereign (despite what some citizens may claim); they are *citizens* of a country with a set of laws and a process (hopefully democratic) for changing those laws. Until there's a world government with world police that can reliably enforce its will, the idea of legally-binding contracts between countries is incoherent.
Is a contract to allow someone to do something a debt (obligation) to them? I see the Prospera situation as the government incurring a debt to Prospera - they obligated themselves to Prospera (autonomy) in order to obtain something from Prospera (investment dollars). Taking away the autonomy now would be like stealing the investment dollars, in a sense.
No, not unless Honduras is revoking the previous profits of the investment. Refusing to allow continued profit is not stealing anything. I can't countenance the idea that you have a "right" to force someone to keep doing the thing they said they'd do, anymore than the "right" to not be discriminated against by a private entity. Rights are freedom from force, not entitlements to have force used to compel others to give you something.
Contract laws and discrimination laws are not rights, they are public policy decisions by the government to legally compel something on the grounds that it serves the public interest. This means that (a) in a domestic contest they must always give way to actual negative rights like freedom of speech (in a free country anyway) and (b) there can be no such laws between states, as states are sovereign and there is no higher authority to legislate them.
I'm not really sure you can distinguish between debts and expectations. Take a lottery ticket. I'm the government of Honduras, and you, a foreign government, have purchased a lottery ticket for $5. Am I obligated to give you the jackpot if you have the winning ticket? Or can I simply change the rules after you win - after all, you gave me $5, and I gave you the ticket. Do have an interest in the lottery rules staying the same, and doesn't that conflict with my sovereign right to change the rules?
Regardless, let's also ask the follow up question - why do we want this state of affairs? With regular people's contracts, expectation damages are the norm. And these expectation damages work great! They prevent people from just dropping contracts willy-nilly and yet they don't overly punish people from breaking contracts. Seems like a great system - why would we want to only have reliance damages in an international law system?
Finally, what do you think the effects of this system will be on Honduras? If international businesses cannot have expectation interests in their contracts with Honduras, do you think they'll want to invest in Honduras?
"why would we want to only have reliance damages in an international law system?"
Mostly because there's no international law system, which is basically my entire point.
Let's back up a bit. Despite my use of "should" language, what I'm largely emphasising is not how things should be, but how things are. It's just a basic *fact* that independent countries can do anything they want (and can get away with). Absolutely anything, with no reliable way to restrict it. The only method for actually restricting another country's behaviour is war, and that's not reliable: either side might win. The waging of war is itself, of course, among the things sovereign countries can do, in whatever form and for whatever reason they choose.
Now, ideally we'd like to prevent wars as much as possible and so have various rules that hold, as a general practice, between countries. We should remember that these are not real rules but guidelines. Norms that are in everyone's interest to adhere to. The moment we start pretending they are anything more than that, we're engaging in deception and increasing the risk of war: we might start making demands of other countries that are not in their interests to follow, appealing to "international law" as if that's the final word, and one day those countries are going to wake up and realise they can actually do whatever they want. And then war is just around the corner.
So assuming we want to avoid war, we need to be transparent that these are mere guidelines. We also need, I think, to keep these guidelines as minimal as we can. Unlike disputes between citizens within a country (or between subordinate authorities within a country) there's no overriding legal process by which one side can get their way and the other just has to accept it. If you push a sovereign country too far, they might just decide to stop cooperating. Or even declare war themselves.
(If you *don't* care about avoiding war, then of course you just stick with the simple and accurate rule "countries can do whatever they can get away with".)
So, minimal "rules" that we acknowledge are really guidelines. What should these be? It's debateable, but I think these are somewhat workable: you should be a democracy if possible, you can't invade another democracy except in self-defence, you must pay for the goods you receive from other countries (of which paying back debt is an instance, as is your lottery ticket: the buyer of the ticket is literally paying for a chance of receiving a jackpot, conditional on their ticket being drawn). All of these are *reasonably* easy obligations for a well-functioning populace to meet, and are clearly (the vast majority of the time) in their own long-term interests to meet. They also don't contradict each other.
Once you start imposing more obligations, especially longer-term, more subjective ones, e.g. respecting minorities (beyond giving them votes and not committing violence against them), or following through with investments and trade deals you've made (beyond paying for what you've directly received)...you're essentially restricting their ability to be a full democracy (as I described above) and to make their own decisions about their national interest. It's also not clear who even decides these things; an international court or body of some kind, but is this body itself democratically constituted? Do authoritarian states have equal say in its construction as democratic ones? Does a nation of 500,000 people have an equal say as a nation of 100 million? And most importantly, is it clearly in the country's own interest to follow these rules (at least most of the time)? If not, there's no reason for them not to defect from the rules. And that weakens the whole system of international "rules".
And there's *also* the issue of empowering private businesses, not other states, to make claims against a state, which I find extremely disturbing. These are *clearly* not democratic instiutions, and it's not clear if they "represent" a particular state or not. If they do, that state should be the one making the claim, to keep things transparent. If they don't, then you're creating non-sovereign non-states with claimed rights against sovereign states, which are both unenforceable and (at least on face value) unjustifiable. And that again makes the international "rules" neither minimal, nor transparent, nor clearly in the interests of each state.
And so in light of all that, to answer your last question. Businesses can of course decline to invest in Honduras in the future, that's a matter of their own freedom. If, on the other hand, many countries conspire to punish Honduras for a previous decision that doesn't effect them directly, to consistently deny trade deals or loans to them, or even use more direct international pressure...well, that's something those countries have a right to do, being sovereign, but let's remember that Honduras also had the sovereign right to defy them, and to interpret that pressure as an aggressive act and respond agressively themselves. The more the pressure goes beyond minimal norms clearly consistent with democratic governance and clearly related to the tangible interests of other states, the less respect it will get and the more likely the norms will break down, in this case or another case, and descend into a war-adjacent situation. We can't hide behind fake "international law" to tell sovereign democracies what to do, and think that will be a sustainable situation.
Realpolitik is a very cumbersome way to talk about international relations and doesn't line up with what the decisionmakers themselves say about their jobs.
For example, take the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty or INF. Signed by Reagan and Gorbachev, it banned ground based ballistic missiles. After the treaty was signed, the U.S. destroyed 846 missiles that were banned by the treaty and the Soviets destroyed 1,846 missiles that were banned by the treaty.
If you asked me why, I'd say "Because the missiles were banned by the treaty." If you asked the government, they'd say "Because the missiles were banned by the treaty."
If you asked a proponent of realpolitik, I have a feeling it'd be a lot longer and a lot more complex and lot more abstract. Maybe it'd bring up power politics and vital national interests and such. If you subscribe to realpolitik, maybe you can take a crack at it.
Why did the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. destroy the weapons that were banned under the INF Treaty?
> Solano County has a so-called “Orderly Growth Measure” saying that new building should happen in existing cities and not on empty land.
It's insane that these are legal. This is just an enforcing an oligopoly on cities, when the whole point of federated government is that you can move to a different place if you want. Hospitals have the same bullshit, where you have to get a "certificate of need" because apparently we're just overflowing with a surplus of health care right now, it's so darn cheap.
Scott, I don't know if you'll ever see this. But... how the hell did you ever write that thing about tacitus and stillness.
"The timer read 4:33, which is the length of John Cage’s famous silent musical piece. 4:33 makes 273 seconds total. -273 is absolute zero in Celsius. John Cage’s piece is perfect silence; absolute zero is perfect stillness. In the year 273 AD, the two consuls of Rome were named Tacitus and Placidianus; “Tacitus” is Latin for “silence” and Placidianus is Latin for “stillness”. 273 is also the gematria of the Greek word eremon, which means “silent” or “still”. None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence."
What was your process?
I often look at other's writing and think "This is something I could do if I just polished things enough." But this passage is, frankly, beyond my current abilities.
This article made me think of a Youtube video I saw recently about The Villages, a "master-planned age-restricted (55+) community" where a developer bought up 34 square miles, built thousands of houses, sold them to people, and charges them a $189 amenity fee.
It's not quite like a model city in that it a. doesn't appear to have a real ideological bent and b. actually exists, is financially solvent, and has residents. However, it is encouraging to me that the only obvious differences between it and the Solano build are that it is in Florida (laxer regulations?) and that it was never billed as a technoutopia. It seems like starting up a city from scratch can be done, and done profitably.
I think model city builders in general should be spending more time looking at successful new cities and adapting a model to match them, rather than starting with an ideology and trying to build a city to fit it.
There is an ideology of sorts, it's segregation. People want to live near people who are like them, but age segregation is the only form of segregation that's currently legal in the US.
"The piece mostly served to make me really dislike Sam Kriss"
I see what you mean. I'm not sure who he begrudges more, the realtor that showed him around the place or retirees. At least Kriss smokes. Perhaps he won't wind up retiring.
I'd previously only heard of The Villages as that one retirement community where four Trump supporters illegally double-voted. Learning that it has 140k people puts a different spin on things - I was imagining a much smaller place. It sounds like it has a pretty clear conservative ideological bent though.
The residents of it have a conservative bent because they are old and rich, so demographically red, but it doesn't seem to have been founded with any ideological goals aside from "build nice things and sell them to people and charge them money for services profitably"
"But you would think scammers would be extra careful not to invest their own money in scams!"
You would think! And you would be wrong!
David W. Mauer's "The Big Con" is a history and dissection of classic confidence games, as practiced in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. It was the source book for "The Sting" (every twist and hidden curve in that movie is described and classified, with historical examples, in Mauer's book), and it still explains such things as the "Nigerian prince" scam today.
And one of the things the book makes clear is that confidence men ALWAYS feed on would-be crooks. They, in fact, are the marks that the con man's pitch was honed to seduce: "If you help me out with this plot to cheat that fellow over there, you and me is gonna get rich!" And so it was always the slightly crooked, just-clever-enough man with money that the con men targeted. And their BEST victims, the ones who fell most easily for the patter, and sometimes came back to the same scam again and again, were the would-be crooks convinced they were too smart to be taken in by a scam. Disarmed by a vain over-appreciation of their own shrewdness, they sometimes wouldn't realize they had been rooked even after it was all over. "How can I have been cheated?" they would bluster. "I'm too smart to be conned!"
Nor were the con men themselves immune. Even the most talented of the breed, Mauer writes, were frequently broke, and most ended up in poverty, because they were inveterate gamblers who tended to quickly lose their scores at crooked games of chance. Even when they were raking in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a scam, many of the best confidence men were still living hand to mouth, scrambling to set up new cons on the heels of the old, because they were hemorrhaging money at the tracks and gaming tables. (Again, "The Sting" borrows from Mauer's research: early in the film, Redford's character blows a big payday on a single spin of an obviously rigged roulette wheel.)
"But you would think scammers would be extra careful not to invest their own money in scams!"
There's multiple lawsuits in Honduras, not just from Prospera but from multiple corporations. Prospera is demanding that the government not proceed with disestablishing them. They said it could be billions of dollars if they lose all of their investment or if the disestablishment proceeds. But they are seeking to block the disestablishment, not to get paid. The logic behind the $11 billion is they're calculating over the original 50 year agreement.
Meanwhile several other companies which have suffered similarly have collectively asked for about half a billion with more on the way. But these are mostly normal companies. The largest is a Mexican firm, JLL Capital, which is suing for $380 million. Previously some Scandinavian firms sued for even more.
If you ignore the World Bank then you get suspended from the World Bank which makes getting loans and international aid harder. Honduras has paid in the past. As Honduras receives between $500 million and $1 billion in aid each year it's doubtful they could do without. But perhaps the left wing governments of the US and so on will ignore it? Not entirely sure.
The Public's Radio article has a map in it that gives a better idea of the location. It looks like most of the land is closer to Rio Vista and does include a good stretch of riverfront. The land close to Travis is probably intended as industrial park rather than residential.
> a 10x upside is not that impressive by VC standards.
Right, but the downside risk is much lower here than a typical VC investment; in the worst case scenario you sell the un-rezoned farmland off for roughly what you paid for it (after an expensive PR campaign).
They would still take a big hit on it, since they likely overpaid and there were those issues with farmers raising the prices on them. Also, finding buyers willing to even pay what it was worth in farmland. That said, the typical loss for a VC tech investment is probably closer to 100%, so I'd say you're right overall.
And to think that the smart people used to envision a moratorium on pavement.
Yesterday I heard something about how rufous hummingbird numbers are down 50% since 1970 and the explanation gave equal weight to cats and habitat loss. When did we decide to, collectively, act dumb?
All this is, is a do-over. Like all the ones before it - but presented as a bold venture! The "concert venue" is much of a piece. I don't know Cali so will analogize to my state: it's e.g. the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion of The Woodlands (which is now, to ignorant urbanists, synonymous with mindless sprawl but was once a "visionary" development ("Life Form" homes) and conceived itself as a way of accommodating oneself to the need to live in or about the metropolis); which itself was the more modest, hopefully-civilizing Tuesday Music Club auditorium of an earlier day.
Again, don't know your state or what I'm looking at in the photo you describe as "hot, dry, without a lot going on". Former scrubland or range land, former ag land now in the hands of speculators - dunno, but what I do know is that Collison et al assign no value to it. Ironically. What they assign value to is pavement. Sure, the pavement disappointed them with its [crime, filth, traffic, annoying NIMBYs? - whatever] but their big vision is more of it.
Whatever role that land is playing - raw or more probably, heavily disturbed as in the vast majority of my state - it will never get a do-over whether for food or wildlife. (Yeah, yeah, we've been wringing more food out of less land for a number of decades and this trend must continue forever until we're all growing our own food in a trash can!) Nor will the land which this play will put pressure on, the next valley over. This only goes one way. Nothing could be more tediously mundane than such a project.
There was at one time a different strand of visionary thinking, is all I meant, didn't mean to disturb the pleasant peace of the blog: thinking that is virtually gone now - but very much what you would have been exposed to *if you were my age*, growing up in a wholly un-reflective, stolidly un-intellectual family - and had ventured into the library or the bookstore, withal whatever little you could get out of the daily newspaper, in search of ideas much as your followers come to the internet or to you for same. The death of environmentalism is a curious thing but I don't think anyone will ever anatomize it, so thoroughly has it passed away. I mean, it didn't even merit mention in your piece, beyond the usual invocation of Boomer-derived legal, regulatory hurdles that must (and will be) overcome.
Which reminds me that Dave Foreman used to complain the environmental movement had passed from being the concern of "English majors" (he might also have said, gardening club ladies) to lawyers (and MBAs). Maybe it's an example of an idea that dies with the people who had it. That would I suppose make it a suspect idea in some quarters. Beware the fate of your own ideas.
Let me tell you about a do-over for nature, the exception that proves my rule? You decide. People I know worked for years to restore their ranch, its blasted rangeland was covered with exotic, useless-for-wildlife-or-for-water-holding grass. They made it a lovely place with much native grass and forbs. They even won an award from the state for being such good land stewards.
No sooner had they done so, than the state - yes, that would be the same state that gives the awards - decided to flood their land. New reservoir to serve sprawl not yet there, to encourage and subsidize it. 'Cuz what that county evidently needs is a second bass-fishing lake for bubba. Even the county sheriff testified against the need for this, on the grounds that "my deputies spend all their time policing bad behavior on the fake lake we already have".
Well, you might think, something so evidently stupid and wasteful probably won't happen. No, it very probably will; and if it doesn't, it will not be because of anybody from your generation. It will be because of literally 3 or four old Boomers who have the energy, tenacity, intelligence (this is not a game for timid or stupid people) - and values - to fight a dam, sometimes for decades.
I would be shocked in Proposition 13 related tax shenanigans are not underlying a major part of the Solano "new city" development. Having valuations increase is great - but having to pay almost no taxes on it is a major force multiplier. As I have noted before: people who bought property in Pacific Heights in the late 70s and early 80s now pay annual property tax that is less than 1 month's rent for a 1 bedroom in SF - and there are many ways to make this intergenerational.
My understanding is that Prop 13 locks your property tax at the price when you bought your house. Nobody can buy houses in New City until they've already gotten most of the way to making it a real town. I wouldn't expect the price to go up much after that, except to the same degree that all houses in California go up.
Proposition 13 applies to all real estate - land included and empty land specifically as well.
Solano land in the middle of nowhere has low value per square foot, but Solano land with a city built on top of it is a completely different matter. Whether it is an outright rental situation, a China setup where houses are owned by people but the underlying land is owned by the founders (the state in China), a "city tax" type setup where all residents get charged "rent" for the investment needed to put in roads, sewage, water, electricity; or some other wrinkle - there are many many ways by which the original investment can be multiplied *and* generate income but without the taxes that regular people cannot avoid. Note it can be more than one of the above simultaneously or something as banal as a "super HOA" setup.
Whatever the specific mechanism - the general dynamic is exactly like Dr. Michael Hudson describes property values next to a brand new subway station: they skyrocket. Thia example is a city building a subway but the "new city" takes this further - build the whole city to start with.
It’s interesting how much a radical departure this is seen as - founding a city.
But starting a city from scratch is common in the history of the US. A few bleary eyed pioneers cross a mountain, find a nice river, pitch tent and call it Sheldonville.
It was probably not even reported that much in the national media. On the founding of SLC, the NYT reported:
“Religious pioneer Brigham Young has created a new city, called Salt Lake City, on the shores of what I assume is a salt lake in the Utah territory, or out west somewhere if that hasn’t been incorporated yet. That’s right, it’s named after an attribute of a local lake. Hopefully the city planning is more innovative than the naming department. That’s the umpteenth city to be founded this month, barely even news. Don’t know why I’m writing this, I’d prefer to be a theatre critic”
Starts off talking about gold supplies. There is indeed some big city smarminess, with them complaining about the newspaper quality:
"Passing to another subject, the talk is that a newspaper will soon be published here under "Gentile" auspices. Somehow or other, the newspapers of Salt Lake are not very successful as candidates for popularity. The Deseret News, under its last retiring editor, was too blunt in delivering its views -- too outspoken. Under the new regime, the weekly bill of fare is not generally considered particularly attractive nor appetizing. Not that I would convey the idea that the Mormon public is in anywise surfeited with literary luxuries. Without descending to minutiae, the following presentation will give a good view of said weekly bill of fare: "Telegraphic," "Salt Lake Sermon," "Dig at the Merchants," "Eulogy on Salt Lake Theatricals," "Local Letter or Essay," "Bit of Horticulture," "Advertisements," "Large clippings from outside papers to fill up the big chinks, ad infinitum."
Which the above pattern, any tyro could "make up" the News from week to week. There is some variety, with very few variations. Conducted on this principle, it would be scarcely fair to presume upon preeminent success for the paper."
Oh, and then there's this bit:
"An able, enterprising newspaper of the right sort would be a success at Salt Lake, but a rabid sheet, descending to cliqueism, would have some staunch friends, and a legion of bitter and powerful enemies."
And there is in fact a theater review:
"At the theatre Mr. and Mrs. IRWIN have appeared twice in "The Lady of Lyons" and once in "Ingomar." They are very well received, being considerably in advance of the local stars. The lady takes the palm. Both have entered into an engagement for a term."
And gun control editorializing:
"A warning against intrusting firearms to children has just occurred in this city, in the accidental death of a youth, named LAMB, who went on the mountains with his gun, and was brought home mortally wounded by a premature discharge of its contents."
I suppose city slickers and country folk are eternal.
Though some things do change. Heck, Salt Lake City was probably more tolerant than New York City of (certain forms of) polyamory at this point. ;)
Actual polyamory people get very angry if you compare polygamy to polyamory, since one is far-right and patriarchal and one is far-left and feminist.
I've been in poly situations but I never got that attached to ideology or felt the need to defend the lifestyle. Worked for me at the time but I'm not sure it scales.
I find these left/right symmetries amusing--apart from the obvious genocidal nazism/communism example, you have dislike of displaying women's bodies in media from feminists and social conservatives, attempts to restrict freedom of speech by wokes and conservatives, and I'm sure some social conservative will be by to point out a bunch of ways libertarians sound like communists (atheism comes to mind).
"starting a city from scratch is common in the history of the US."
Sure. As is, the great majority of those attempts coming to nothing.
E.g. a bunch of speculators in the 1830s succeeded in getting Chicago started as a city, and it ended up being one of the all-time great boom cities. Meanwhile though the southern rim of Lake Michigan is dotted with other attempts by speculators during that same period which ended up just being places where some sucker money ended up as dust. Hardly anybody remembers those of course.
It was common in the 18th and 19th century, when the previous residents of the land were either killed by disease, or easy to expropriate because they weren't part of our nation.
But in the 20th century, new cities (in the sense of whole new urban areas, rather than just existing urban areas sprouting new suburbs around them) have only a bit more common in the United States as in Europe. Basically Miami, Las Vegas, and maybe Phoenix, compared to Milton Keynes in England.
It's not that it's a radical idea - it's that it's a very difficult-to-implement one unless there's a lot of good land that for some reason has inhabitants that are either gone, or easy to remove.
"When Elon Musk buys a company, its value goes up"
Erm. I mean it's private now, so it's not like there's a market, but does anyone really think there would be a buyer for not-Twitter at $44B today? I mean how much has the value of the company gone down _just_ because of the loss of intangible value (what accountants call "goodwill") from scrapping a well-liked brand in favor of something that is only liked by crypto-scammers and right-wing trolls?
I don't mean to entirely condemn the man, he clearly is brilliant in some ways, and has been instrumental in making Tesla and SpaceX successful, which is of immense value to tall of humanity. (Worth remembering though that while he finagled the title "founder" at Tesla as part of a bargain for rescuing the company when it went through a crunch ahead of the Model S release, he really wasn't -- Eberhard and Tarpenning were the actual founders, before he came in as an investor. It was honestly a heroic thing to do, he put up virtually everything he'd made off of PayPal, and if the DoE loan hadn't come through he stood to end up reduced to being merely well-off instead of unfathomably rich, back to trying to make a fortune from scratch, like a zillion other smart strivers.)
But in any case, it's not like he has a magic touch. He's pretty much been feeding $44B into an immense bonfire in SoMa. I still think Yishan's take on the Twitter acquisition is one of the smarter things published about it.
I think this attempt is a great example of why/how Georgist LVTs would mess up incentives. Were a LVT to be put in place, positive spillovers from joint development of an area would be impossible, preventing such groups from coming together to develop land.
You can still recover the value you've added to the land. You'll be taxed on the unimproved value of the land.
You're right that you won't be able to just hold an unimproved parcel and make money because your neighbors are improving their land. But that makes some sense, no?
If you want to make money from land, improve the land. Don't just buy land and speculate that something else will cause its value to go up.
*Right now*, these investors have spent $800 million just getting the land. They might not have much money left, and they might outsource building the buildings to some developer who pays the costs and reaps the profit, and hope to profit entirely off their land ownership.
There's no way they could do something like this if their $800 million in buying the land was completely useless, and just an admission ticket to the real game of building the buildings.
I think the counterargument would be that in a Georgist system, random agricultural land wouldn't cost $800 million dollars.
'*Right now*, these investors have spent $800 million just getting the land. They might not have much money left, and they might outsource building the buildings to some developer who pays the costs and reaps the profit, and hope to profit entirely off their land ownership.
There's no way they could do something like this if their $800 million in buying the land was completely useless, and just an admission ticket to the real game of building the buildings.'
Yeah. There's a lot of economically costly activity that goes into successful area development that Georgism completely ignores - mainly co-ordination and search costs. All that activity depends on 'unimproved' land prices performing their basic economic functions of signalling and incentivisation in the right direction, and this includes the very important component of signaling the value of spillover effects! How are we supposed to judge whether 'improvements' made to land have agglomeration effects or not? And how much of these effects come from the fact that you have made a building on the land that you own or from the fact that some group has bought up land parcels and is encouraging people to come and take up residential and office space?
Georgist LVTs break both of these functions of land prices (signaling and incentives) when it comes to spillovers, and Georgists think of this as a feature. In the very narrow case of speculators squatting on land this might be true if you take a very short run perspective (and even then I don't buy it - where are the massive unused land parcels people are speculating with in our cities?), but by and large LVTs mess with incentives and spillovers along a very important dimension of urbanisation (agglomeration effects), and I see practically no recognition of this fact amongst Georgists.
I'm having a hard time understanding, so let's just go topic by topic.
I'm not seeing why Georgist LTVs would interfere with co-ordination or search costs any more than property taxes currently interfere with those. You could look up a property on Zillow, same as before, and get some idea of what your annual tax cost would be. I'm not sure why it'd be harder to co-ordinate or search for land in a Georgist system. Now--to be sure--it might be more expensive to buy that land, but that's true with high property taxes or taxes on real estate sales, etc. Taxes make stuff more expensive, that's definitional.
To the spillover effects, my understanding is that these are externalities. Meaning they're not being priced in by the owner because they flow to third parties. So if I build a university on my parcel, then (perhaps) all my neighbors' property values go up. But I'm not going to recoup that value. So I struggle to see how a Georgist tax would mess with spillover effects - individual market actors aren't currently making decisions based on spillover effects, and they still wouldn't after an LTV. So if I was going to build a university under the current system, why wouldn't I under a Georgist system?
(The same analysis applies to agglomeration effects, which I also understand to be externalities.)
To your point about massive unused land parcels, I concede that we don't see this. But we do see massive underused land parcels. In fact, Prop 13 all but guarantees that people do not put their property to its most economically valuable use. New construction can trigger a reassessment.
Finally, let's just note that LTVs would be exchanged for currently-existing taxes. I'd love to hear an economist defend California's income tax, for example, and say that it is less distortionary or economically damaging than an LTV.
'I'm not seeing why Georgist LTVs would interfere with co-ordination or search costs any more than property taxes currently interfere with those.'
Because current property taxes don't mess with prices and Georgist LVTs do. Under a perfectly administered Georgist LVT(big assumption, but I'm happy to grant it for discussion), the price for building something in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of an agglomeration would be equivalent. This is clearly absurd! Doing things around agglomerations is very valuable and prices need to signal that to incentivise valuable activity appropriately, so that we can get more of it.
'To the spillover effects, my understanding is that these are externalities. Meaning they're not being priced in by the owner because they flow to third parties'
Yes, in a narrow model spillovers are externalities. But narrow models are only useful to an extent. Spillovers are a huge part of how coordination, search and development happen for land. How does a developer decide where to build residential apartments? Wherever office buildings are coming up. How do office buildings decide where to come up? Wherever there is economic opportunity. How does it get decided where economic opportunity is? Nobody knows! So everyone involved in the chain above has to search, co-ordinate and then, importantly, take a big risk! Capturing the value of agglomeration spillovers is how the coordination, search and risk is worthwhile. LVTs would send that spillover value to the state, removing an extremely important signal/incentive.
I'm still not understanding. Why would a perfectly administered LVT cause the price of building anything to change? If you want to build in an economically valuable area, then you have to outbid the other people who also want to build there. That causes the value of the land to go up. An LVT just means you pay the government based on the unimproved value of your land - it doesn't have anything to do with the price of building anything on the land. So if it cost 250k to build a house in our world, it'd probably cost 250k in Georgist mirror world to build a house. The difference is in the amount of the tax bill you get at the end of the year. Now sure that'll affect land prices, but lots of things affect land prices. Those don't prevent signaling - they are signaling.
To spillovers, from what I'm seeing online, they're defined as even more distant than externalities. So it's even more unlikely that anyone out there is saying "I better build this apartment building so that someone else can improve their parcel two miles away." They want to build an apartment building because they think they can make money - LVT does not change that incentive at all. It just changes the conditions under which they can make money.
They lose the ability to make money by simply holding land and hoping other people improve their parcels. They gain an even greater ability to make money through their own actions, like improving the property themselves. Of course, that ability is still going to require searching and co-ordinating and taking big risks, as it does now. The only difference is that if your risk pays off, the money your neighbors would get is now going to go to the government.
Can you seriously tell me you wouldn't build an office building if you knew it would raise your neighbor's taxes? What economic theory predicts such behavior?
'But we do see massive underused land parcels. In fact, Prop 13 all but guarantees that people do not put their property to its most economically valuable use. New construction can trigger a reassessment'
I'm not American, but my understanding from what you're writing is that some current law disincentivises construction. There are likely many better tweaks than LVTs to fix this problem!
That there are problems with existing systems doesn't automatically mean a new system, or even a system that would remove the problem you can see with the current system, is better. Beware unintended consequences. The cure can be worse than the disease and LVTs almost certainly would be.
I'm wary of every change and I'm wary of the status quo. Of course, being super wary of everything is indistinguishable from being completely risk neutral.
Is there some reason to be especially wary of LVTs? Like take the places in America that have implemented LVTs. Are they uniquely bad off?
"To the spillover effects, my understanding is that these are externalities. Meaning they're not being priced in by the owner because they flow to third parties. So if I build a university on my parcel, then (perhaps) all my neighbors' property values go up. But I'm not going to recoup that value."
The spillover effect of the university on home values is a (positive) externality if the land under the university and the neighboring homes are owned by different people, and the builder of the university typically can't capture it.
But if the same developer initially owns all the land, and builds both the homes and the university, and only sells them off afterwards, then it can capture the effect of the university on the value of the homes when it sells them—except if the presence of the university massively increases the LVT the homeowners will have to pay.
Similar considerations also apply if the university and the homes are built by different developers, but they all coordinate about what they are going to build, so e.g. the builder of the university can get the builder of the homes to pay it in exchange for increasing the homes' value by building the university.
Hahaha, a great point! It's like the anti-tragedy of the commons. Somehow putting in a single owner makes everything worse.
I think you could make a quick workaround by just holding the LVT flat for both the developer and the first buyer. Then when that first buyer either sells or dies, the LVT goes up to reflect the unimproved value (including the university, etc.).
Nifty problem though - it's like the opposite of most economics problems. Very fun!
AFAIUI with Doucet-style LVT, the increase in the land value of one parcel resulting from improvements to nearby parcels would be taxed away. So if a developer builds a city, it could capture less than the entire value it creates. If the cost of building the city is less then its value, but more than the value the developer can capture, it doesn't get built, even though it would be worth building.
For instance, it's difficult to recover the cost of infrastructure like city roads or parks directly by owning them, since it's inconvenient to charge usage fees for them. The main way the developer could recover their cost is that they increase the price it can sell homes for—which the LVT would tax away.
Well, IIRC Doucet didn't make it clear how the LVT would be assessed when one owner owns a large tract of land: is it taxed based on what it would be worth if the entire land were undeveloped, or is it divided into normal-sized parcels, with each taxed based on the value it would have if it were undeveloped, but the rest of the land were developed as in reality. In the former case, the developer could capture the value improvements to some land create for residents of nearby land as long as it keeps ownership of the entire city, only renting homes and buildings out to residents; but the increase in land values would still be taxed away as soon as it divides the city up into parcels and sells them to different owners.
Heh, funny. I had the exact opposite thought. That the reason why the whole project to build a new city is so complicated now, is how broken are the current incentives and how the situation would be improved with LVT.
Non-Georgist capitalism leads to land values capturing most of the economic gains and desincentivise development. As a result, any project to build new city requires a lot of initial investments just to buy the land, and you have to do it in secret because people would not want to sell the land that is expected to rise in value - and rightly so as selling such land cheap would mean that they will not gain their fair share of trade. And don't forget about overcomming all the ridiculous bureaucratic attempts to patch the broken system.
On the other hand, under Georgist system, when you know that people are going to develop the land around you, you are either motivated to develop your land yourself to the similar level or to sell it as soon as possible. And you are not going to be worse of for doing so. As the gains of development will be partually distributed via UBI. Entry level for the developper is much lower and the previous land owner isn't screwed either. Everyone wins.
And, relative to when progress got started, there are substantially more valuable asset classes around, like stocks. And in fact, the richest people are all shareholders of valuable companies, not landlords! Land values are capturing a smaller share of the economic pie than they ever were (and not too high a share anyway, you're free to look up what percentage of assets are land, I think in the US it's something like 20%).
I am an international lawyer, expert in investment arbitration, and write for the main news source in that field; hopefully I can clarify a few points here.
The first thing to understand is that all investment arbitrations involve independent, one-off tribunals, whose arbitrators are appointed by the parties. For a tribunal to rule, it needs jurisdiction, typically under an investment treaty (here, the multilateral CAFTA-DR, but most cases take place under bilateral investment treaties, or BITs). These treaties basically says: "investment disputes can be arbitrated".
In this context, some tribunals are overseen by an administering institution, which provides some logistical services, a set of procedural Rules, and appoint arbitrators when a party does not participate - that's what ICSID is. But the final decision (the award) is not rendered by ICSID (let alone the World Bank): it's rendered by the BIT tribunal, under the ICSID Rules.
Now, ICSID is a very special administering institution: not only is it associated with the World Bank, but it has been set up by its own multilateral treaty, the ICSID Convention. A tribunal administered by ICSID needs to have jurisdiction not only under the investment treaty, but also under the ICSID Convention. Respondent states ALWAYS argue that the tribunal lacks jurisdiction under either treaty, to toss the case out before it reaches the merits, and there are many arguments that can be made in this respect. A good third of investment arbitrations fail for lack of jurisdiction. (This being said, the article linked above is right that the arguments made by Honduras so far are non-starters.)
As for why the 100x in penalties, I regret to say that international lawyers have not waited for the developments of behavioural science to discover anchoring. You typically ask for an enormous amount (as "lost profits"), with the hope of securing a big pay-out. "Lost Profits" is indeed a basis for compensation, if you can prove it, but most tribunals in the jurisprudence tends to be very sceptical of big amounts, and would tend either to award the investor its sunk costs, or to land on something more reasonable given the parties' submissions - but that's again why you want to anchor them high.
As for enforcement, the ICSID Convention notably provides that ICSID awards should be recognised as judgments of the highest jurisdictions in every state party to the treaty (in exchange, ICSID provides a dedicated, high-quality challenge mechanism to ICSID awards). That's how the investors will hope to collect on whatever award they obtain. Although the respondent state will typically find a reason to ignore their ICSID obligations to enforce, the play is to find non-immune sovereign assets in friendlier jurisdictions. Enforcement lawyers can be very creative.
Final note: other arbitral Rules and institutions exist, and investment treaties typically provide options, so denunciating the ICSID Convention is often done more for domestic headlines than anything else. (Rejoining it, as Ecuador recently did, is done for international headlines, as in "we are open for business".) As the article notes, the ongoing arbitrations would not be impacted by the denunciation.
Now, given all that, what to do of the Prospera case ? In my view, and having not seen anything else beyond what's publicly available, it's a typical investment dispute, could fare relatively well (they have good lawyers), but they won't get 11 billion USD (though that depends a lot on the arbitrators).
(1) Thanks for sharing this! (2) Regarding sovereign assets abroad -- how many of those are really available for a typical Banana Republic? Presumably any liquid accounts could be easily repatriated in advance of any judgment barring some injunction issued during the pendency of proceedings, and for a country like Honduras, barring a stray presidential plane or two, what do they even own abroad, let alone of a value commensurate to hundreds of millions to billions of dollars (depending on the award amount)?
That can definitely be an issue ! For instance, the ex-Yukos shareholders that won a 50+ billion award against Russia in 2014 have barely collected anything, I think, as proceedings remain pending throughout the world. But the hope is always that the state will settle or pay up the award, instead of engaging in a long enforcement battle.
What you describe about banana republics is true, but is counter-balanced by a few factors:
(i) these states typically have a hand in many private sector entities, which themselves might have assets abroad (e.g., Venezuela creditors are trying to enforce against PdVSA and its assets in the US);
(ii) they often possess luxury assets for their corrupt, ruling elites, and these can be targeted, be it only as a harassment method. For instance, presidential planes do not have a great value, but work wonder as a reputation blow that could lead states into settlements;
(iii) All states partake in international activities that involve cash flows, be it by holding Central Bank deposits (now increasingly immune), airport control and traffic fees, receipts from international trade, etc.; and
(iv) low-state capacity states may simply fail to repatriate or reorganise their assets in time.
None of that means you'll be able to collect fully on the award, and this is why there is a secondary market for those as well, with sometimes substantial discounts.
Thanks again! Enforcing judgment against a partially owned state entity certainly seems like a can of worms. When I was young I always used to wonder why owning "part of the company" wouldn't entitle me to, like, just take a desk chair if I held stock in it. Sounds like in the case of (partially) state-owned enterprises, maybe sometimes that actually *is* how it works?
Unless you work for the state government in Sacramento, all the jobs are to the southwest. But there's a big river/estuary between there and the jobs, with a limited number of bridges inconveniently located for this planned metropolis. If you could build a bridge to the end of the BART line in Antioch, you could get commutes down to something reasonable, but this looks pretty nightmarish for commuters otherwise.
'But in fact, they’re talking a lot about “walkable, liveable, sustainable communities”, all of which are code words for “dense”.'
This tells me that urbanists (of whom I am one) have completely failed to communicate what we're advocating for. None of these three things require density (although walkability *does* correlate with it, it just doesn't necessitate it), but apparently when people hear us say these things their brains just interpret it as mostly noise rounded off to "mumble, mumble, skyscrapers". As if traffic calming, mixed zoning, and greenery somehow required you to build fifty story buildings first.
I've had this reaction before when reading Scott's ribbing of urbanists in his Bay Area House Party posts – somehow the impression is apparently that people like me want to pave everything over, throw up a bunch of concrete cubes, and call it a day, which is almost diametrically opposite of what I'd actually want. I have some guesses about how this came to be, but the overarching lesson is that we screwed up, in many people's case.
Can you explain walkability without density? I'm not claiming that it has to be literal skyscrapers or that they have to be concrete cubes, but I would be surprised if you had an argument that walkability was compatible with Fairfield style exurban sprawl.
I'm expecting their plan looks a lot like the top picture - row houses without big lawns. That's still dense compared to anything else in the area.
Mixed zoning, mostly, and streets where people feel comfortable walking/cycling (so traffic calming and shade, basically). Your average American car-dependent suburbia is a miserable place outside the car because there's nowhere to go in the vicinity and the trips themselves are unpleasant. If you have destinations within a 10-15 minute walkshed (shops, bars, parks...) you don't need a car on a daily basis (you might still use one but it's not necessary to survive).
Edit: Of course if you push density low enough something like a car becomes more and more necessary. As an extreme example, if you live in a house in the middle of a desert then yeah, you won't be able to do shopping on foot. But people (especially those from car dependent environments) vastly overestimate the density necessary. Also, walkability doesn't necessary mean you don't use a car — it can just mean that you have the option not to use it, at least some of the time.
I live in the suburban San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, but only about a 15 minute walk from Ventura Boulevard, the main locus of upscale urbanity. I got by without a personal car for a year recently, but that's because my wife had a car and she does the shopping. I can't imagine shopping at Costco without a car. On the other hand, now that Costco delivers, not having a car is slightly less awful than it was before 2020.
But, keep this in mind, I was reasonably content being restricted to walking around my pleasant, mildly interesting neighborhood for a year only because I'm now old and don't care very much anymore about getting out and about and seeing new sights. If I were still young, pedestrianism would have been intolerable.
Also I'm still young enough to walk 3 to 4 mph, so I'm in a fairly narrow age range in which I don't really care much about visiting new places but I can still get to old places at an efficient pace on foot.
Yeah, but that brings in some assumptions. The point is that with the kind of development I'm thinking of there is not really such a thing as a 'shopping trip'. When you've got small shops everywhere getting groceries ceases to be a thing you do, it's just happens when you're on your way from work or what have you. The "let's go get groceries for the whole week" is not something I've ever done. I don't drive and have never felt the need to. And the 'being restricted to walking around my pleasant, mildly interesting neighborhood' thing is again the artefact of living somewhere where walkability is exception rather than the rule — if a walkable place is an island surrounded by car centric development, then of course it's not feasible.
This is a bit of an aside, and I hate to sound like I'm America bashing here (really not my goal), but in my experience what Americans consider "walkable neighbourhood" really isn't great. I live in a middle sized city (400k, thereabouts), get everywhere by bike (occasionally public transport), am not old (late twenties), and I can guarantee you that I'd never trade that for what I've seen in North America. And, it bears repeating, this is not about banning cars. This is about creating an environment where they're not an absolute requirement for survival. I don't want to prevent anyone from driving, I just don't want to be forced to. In very many (most?) places in North America if you want to buy a bottle of milk or something it requires getting into a car, driving, braving a massive shopping centre etc. But I have literally 5 shops within a 5 minute walk. I have a safe, pleasant, direct cycling route to almost anywhere within the city. This isn't hard to do, there are countries where it's the norm.
Plenty of young people love walkable urbanism. The key is living in a city that has excellent amenities easily accessible by public transit. Back in Boston I could access several world class museums and the symphony by public transit.
I’d also say a metro system counts as walkability - London (UK) feels extremely walkable while being large and only having a low % of residential capacity in high-rise buildings
Sure, good public transit helps (and in large cities is a must). That's a major reason NYC, despite having made some horrendous decisions regarding urban planning, is actually OK walkability-wise. But as I said, my main point is that density and walkability are largely orthogonal, and it's certainly false that "walkable, liveable, sustainable" are just code words for "dense".
I'm not sure - walkability seems to me that it really *does* require density (since you need enough residences within the 15 minute walkshed of each business and enough businesses within the 15 minute walkshed of each residence) but density *doesn't* require skyscrapers.
Well, it all depends on what you mean by density. I feel like people reading Scott's original remark — that all of these things are just code for "density" — get the wrong idea, and that was my original and fundamental objection. Some baseline level of density might be required for what I'm envisioning, but it's less than you might think, and, more importantly, what I'm advocating for is largely orthogonal to people/km squared. I've visited NYC recently, and I can tell you, that place has density coming out of its ears, and still disappointingly little in terms of what I'd call good urbanism.
"How would ICSID collect against Honduras if they lost? I don’t know, but I assume the global financial order has some way to make your life worse if you defy it."
Yes, it has, and much worse. Something similar happened to Argentina. In 2001, Argentina defaulted. Esentially they said that they can only pay back part of their debt (about 30%), and that they won't pay back the rest.
Most creditors accepted that in two rounds in 2005 and 2010. But a small number of hedge funds and vulture funds refused. Argentina's opinion (both government and Argentine courts iirc) was that they don't have to pay back, and that they could ignore foreign court decisions on this.
The creditors first tried to seize all kind of abroad Argentian properties. Famously including a training vessel of the Argentine navy, the presidential airplane, and their bank deposits in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. This only partially succeeded (some things were frozen for some time, but not confiscated).
When this wasn't enough and the creditors were backed up by some courts, Argentina was essentially excluded from the international financial markets. Rating agencies like Fitch and S&P declared Argentine to be partially defaulting. Argentina could no longer borrow international money. Argentina's shares were excluded from indices like the MSCI index.
Finally, Argentina gave up in 2016 and the creditors won. The impact on Argentina was pretty dramatic. The Argentine Peso dropped by a factor of 100(!!!) in the last 15 years and local markets crashed. The interest rate increased to 60%. In total, the 20 years until this was settled turned Argentina from one of the most successful South American countries to a zombie kept alive (barely) only by the IMF. This is not *only* the result of having lost to the creditors, after all Argentina had to default in the first place. But the crisis would not have been nearly so hard without them.
> In total, the 20 years until this was settled turned Argentina from one of the most successful South American countries [...]
If they were so successful, why did they have to default on their debt? Or was their supposed "success" just a facade kept up by taking on more credit than reasonable?
> But the crisis would not have been nearly so hard without [the creditors].
I find it somewhat ironic when debtors blame creditors for all their problems only when they have to pay back the credit, but not when they voluntarily take on the debt.
"If they were so successful, why did they have to default on their debt? Or was their supposed "success" just a facade kept up by taking on more credit than reasonable?"
The decline started much earlier, already in the 30 years before that. In the early 60s, Argentina was still wealthier than lots of European countries (like Italy, Spain, ...) But that decline in the 70s-90s was not comparable to the deep fall after 2000.
"I find it somewhat ironic when debtors blame creditors for all their problems only when they have to pay back the credit, but not when they voluntarily take on the debt."
This is a sentence that superficially sounds good, but it becomes a lot more complicated when you start thinking about it. If a country owes a debt to a private company, this obliges the country to make an effort to pay back the debt. But how far does this obligation go? Should the country be forced to raise taxes? Probably yes, see Greece. Cut food programs, even if citizens are starving? What if even this does not suffice, sell their own people to slavery? At some point, the answer must change from Yes to No, and it is not so clear where this point is.
Formally, it is the question of when exactly a country can declare bankruptcy. In extreme cases, of course a country should be able to do this. But the issue is that there are no rules for countries. When a company declares bankruptcy, it is simply dissolved. But you can't dissolve a country, nor its people. In most countries, there are also rules for bankruptcy of individual people. If I declare bankruptcy, I have to give most of my income to my creditors for some years, but I don't have to sell my kidney, and I may keep enough money to buy food. But for countries there are no rules, so it is up to negotiations for what should happen.
Specifically for the case of Argentina, I think Argentina should have won. In the negotiations, a vast majority of creditors agreed to the bargain, and only a very small minority rejected, and essentially they held veto power over the deal as a whole. I think a good rule should make it possible to squeeze them out in such a case, and this was also (conveniently, but not easily dismissed) the standpoint of Argentina. There is a similar rule in the stock market: when a company buys another one, and a small fraction of shareholders refuse, then they can be forced to sell.
The more succinct argument for Argentina-as-debtor is that undertaking default risk is the basically the entire service provided by creditors that justifies a risk premium. Being a creditor is *not supposed to be a risk-free proposal* in general[1]. The fact that Argentina had a default risk (and that you don't liquidate countries in the way that you liquidate companies) was supposed to be accounted for the interest rate premium. That's just how debt works!
[1] U.S. Treasuries get weird, but this isn't a U.S. context.
Taking credit risk doesn't mean you just roll over and accept that debt will never be paid, or else nobody would ever repay and nobody would ever lend. Debtors need to make an effort to repay, and it's perfectly reasonable for Creditors to exhaust every possible option for repayment.
Also perhaps they could have simply not tried to take the Falklands and avoided incurring some of that debt.
The risk that nobody would ever lend to Argentina again (which is indeed basically the situation it presently faces) is meant to be the disincentive for default, though. We basically *do* expect (unsecured) creditors to just roll over and accept that debt will never be paid - that’s what bankruptcy exists to facilitate occurring in an orderly manner. Unsecured creditors typically just take it on the chin in practice.
The disposition of assets of the bankrupt’s estate in partial settlement of debts is obviously something we expect creditors to seek satisfaction for, but countries don’t liquidate like corporations do, and everyone knew this going in (and could and should have priced that into risk premia) Given that apparently the lion’s share of creditors agreed to the restructuring agreement, the success by the minority debtholders is obviously “legal,” but arguably has little or no compelling economic rationale as far as furthering the goals of the general system of debt and credit (particularly given thar Argentina remains a garbage credit risk with high interest rates and inflation anyway). It’s at least arguably a sui generis free lunch.
Mind you, with respect to your last paragraph, none of this is meant to imply that Argentina is or has been competently governed—just that sovereign default is meant to be its own punishment and bankruptcy exists.
> The decline started much earlier, already in the 30 years before that. [...]
That sounds like it would actually support my hypothesis that Argentina's economic decline was merely _postponed_ by an unsustainable amount of debt, instead of being _caused_ by greedy creditors.
> Should the country be forced to [...] cut food programs, even if citizens are starving?
Oh no, certainly not! And that's not the point I was trying to make. Rather that it's quite audacious to complain about investors not being willing to give anymore loans to a country that has recently refused to pay back loans.
> Argentina's opinion (both government and Argentine courts iirc)
This also runs into the issue that the bonds had a clause saying they were governed by New York law, which is why the New York courts felt justified in ruling. But if the bonds didn't say this, then lenders would have been less likely to lend to them.
> Prospera announces another $36 million in recent investment, which I take as evidence that VCs with good lawyers and research departments also think its case is very strong.
I'm skeptical that they researched it all that much since it's a hit-driven business where one winner pays for a lot of losers. So it seems like odds of winning the lawsuit don't need to be all that great to invest? But sure, it's a vote for them having a chance.
Never mind the detail, stuff like this is what has got to happen if we want people to have any sort of basic quality of life. The internet seems to think California (pop 40m/housing deficit 3.5m) has an even worse crisis than the UK (65m/4m). Why the state is not doing it via eminent domain is the real question.
"California Forever was founded in 2017 by our CEO, Jan Sramek. After moving to California a decade ago, Jan spent time in Solano County during fishing trips on the California Delta and fell in love with the area. Having previously lived in many of the world’s most walkable, livable, and sustainable towns and cities, Jan became interested in fusing what he learned about those livable communities with those old plans for eastern Solano. He became committed to a vision for the future of Solano County. Jan and his wife Naytri recently purchased their first-ever home in Solano, and they are excited to live here with their toddler daughter, her soon-to-arrive little brother, and golden retriever Bruce."
Sramek is a Czech. Americans with 3 digit IQs admire Czechia. Prague is one of the few cities in Central Europe to not get flattened in WWII, so it offers lessons in Austro-Hungarian Empire city planning that are worth paying attention to.
He sounds like he'd be a good neighbor. He has two kids, a wife, and a golden retriever, not a pit bull.
Just on the Saudi Arabia loan - it's something that companies do all the time, probably for some combination of (1) cash flow reasons; (2) maximising leverage; and (3) the pricing works out.
Pricing: If Saudi Arabia's existing investments give it a return of 6% a year, and the interest it owes on the loan is 4% a year, then it can pay off the interest using its investment returns and keep an additional 2% of profit. It wouldn't want to liquidate its existing investments and lose out on those returns.
I moved from Almaden Valley in the SF Bay Area (2 cars, 90 minutes to work, 2 miles to nearest shops, 4 miles to the nearest pub & Costco) to Bristol, England (0 cars, walk to work, grocery 100 yards away, 100s of pubs and restaurants within a mile).
This is not just a city vs suburbia thing. It's about designing a place where you can accomplish most things without getting in your car. As soon have the city planners have decided that most people will drive to get their groceries, all the other decisions about parking, walking, zoning are decided for them and sprawl is inevitable.
Gotta say, I did not realize that "conspiracy" was a cognizable cause of action against land-sale holdouts. It sounds facially like a demand that zero-sum surplus allocation go to the buyer rather than the seller, and thus basically like Flannery are clearly the bad guys here engaging in a pure SLAPP lawsuit -- sue these guys under antitrust or go home.
That rendering is just a bunch of single-family homes it looks like. Even as rowhouses that's not sufficient for walkable dense urbanism. What I want to know is: what is the plan for density that doesn't just involve a bunch of hideously ugly five-over-ones? That is the real innovation US urbanists so desperately need.
What do you want to know? Milady people just like partying, Praxis people just like the sheen of being intellectuals + leveraging VC money to seem more legitimate, neither does anything with their niche fandoms beyond using them for clout in lower manhattan. I know funnier more specific things about how Praxis people operate, and some people who "work" there, but hesitant to doxx that much.
What *is* Milady - I know it's NFTs, but how come people talk as if it's a whole subculture? Have you heard rumors about Praxis being competent, or is it just pretentious parties as far as you know?
Milady is a subculture insofar as there is a twitter "aesthetic" people adopt when they make it their PFP, and in nyc (and elsewhere) they throw parties, "milady raves," that are popular to attend. It is mainly a branch of people in their 20s in NYC culture, but as most NFTs don't come out of any subculture at all I think it just makes the Milady thing stick out more.
I've never heard any talk of Praxis making any actual concrete progress on "building a city" and am around those people and their friends a lot. I've heard of them throwing parties (and some social issues) but that's it. They could have something up their sleeve that I don't know about, but I assume they would be talking about it if they did.
The part about "as most NFTs don't come out of any subculture at all I think it just makes the Milady thing stick out more" is definitely true. I don't hold many NFTs but I bought a Milady when a cancel thread about the creator Remilia started circulating (one which it turned out was intentionally amplified by Remilia), since I realized it actually had an antifragile culture (between the gabber raves and the Touhou-named creator) as opposed to just being grifters who are weirdly obsessed with bringing the concept of copyright to the blockchain like most NFTs.
From what I know of Milady culture, I'd say identifying with the culture is completely orthogonal to ability to make a city, which means most of the weight of handling the logistics would be on the Praxis end (which I'm unfamiliar with). What you say about Praxis doesn't particularly inspire confidence there though, but it probably does make for a good party/meetup space.
I've spoken to the Praxis people and it doesn't seem mysterious to me.
It's fundamentally a real estate development. "Let's build a new town in your country, bring lots of foreign investment and high-human-capital expats, and maybe you'll give us some kind of limited business-friendly perks or help us fast-track things somewhat." That's it.
The "innovation" is that they've done some community building and are trying to get "preorders" from people making a (not legally binding) commitment to move there, and they think that this can be used to get more favorable financing.
They are still in the process of working out agreements with host countries (i.e. they've had any meetings but nothing has been secured to the point they're ready to announce it).
I think this is the kind of thing where it's not obviously dumb that well-known VCs invested a few million dollars...but also maybe a <20% chance that it gets as far as Prospera (a real place with buildings where at least some people actually live full time).
"I think everyone is hoping Honduras realizes that cancelling a flourishing economic zone that’s bringing lots of investment into the country at no cost to them - just isn’t worth taking an $11 billion loss, cancelling international treaties, and scaring off future investment. But who knows how these people think?"
Never underestimate the willingness of socialists to destroy prosperity on purely ideological grounds.
This is irrelevant, inflammatory, and weirdly confrontational for someone who hasn't expressed an opinion on this subject, on top of a history of this person doing comments like this. Ban.
>Local congressman John Garamendi noticed the weird land purchases, saw they were close to a military base, and spent years raising the alarm that it must be some sort of Communist Chinese conspiracy.
Adding this to my scrapbook of "capitalists seeing other capitalists doing Very Capitalist Things and calling it communism". (But seriously, the irony is tangible)
What isn't the Bay Area? If you mean the city, I don't think I said it was, but I'm not sure it isn't - I think the city limits literally touch the North Bay.
Yea I've actually changed my mind on this in just the last hour. In a very real sense it BECOMES the Bay Area by such high profile conspicuously Bay Area People moving there.
I thought the Bay Area is usually defined as the nine counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Claria, Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Napa, Sonoma, Marin.
> I think everyone is hoping Honduras realizes that cancelling a flourishing economic zone that’s bringing lots of investment into the country at no cost to them - just isn’t worth taking an $11 billion loss, cancelling international treaties, and scaring off future investment. But who knows how these people think?
It should be fairly obvious why a lot of people think that company towns are bad.
The problem is that Honduras is telling everyone around the world and within the country that property rights and contract enforcement are not reliable at all. Don't you see how this may come back to bite them?
You are saying in Prospera, the company owns all the stores and forces the employees to buy things there at very high prices, and the employees are trapped and can't leave?
On Neom wanting loans - I have a guess. Part of why Aramco IPOed was to create proper financial records - not because selling a few percent of Aramco meaningfully diversified the holdings of the Saudi royal family. By being a publicly traded company, there were forcing mechanisms to get the company to do proper financial reporting.
A question for our host, you are generally pro SEZ have you considered doing a analysis/review of one of the ones that have been flagged as highly problematic?
To give you an example of one that is infamous is the Golden Triangle SEZ.
To start with its within Laos and on the border of Laos and Thailand. It is 3,000 hectares on a 99 year lease and is owned by triad head Zhao Wei who is under US sanctions.
There are multiple casinos on in the SEZ and it is a locus for wildlife trafficking. There is a tiger farm in the SEZ, where tigers are produced for food and medicine.
Due to covid many of the businesses in the Golden triangle SEZ pivoted away from casinos to being Fraud Factories. Fraud factories are a name for scam call centres, where often the workers are human trafficked in and are basically slaves. There are apparently significant numbers of people being held, with 700 Malaysians being reported as for ransom in the SEZ.
To link the above with the Honduras SEZ, the current Laotian government is in bed with the Golden Triangle SEZ like the prior government. If a new government comes in ala Honduras (potentially after that president is extradited to the US for drugs and arms trafficking as was the Honduran president who promoted the SEZ), what would the host want the outcome to be?
Forgot to include the Honduran president link, but it's notable that the Honduran who signed off on the SEZ will likely end up in a US prison. Link to the two Honduran presidents prior to the one who wants to cancel the deal.
I've so far focused on cities in particular rather than SEZs, of which there are zillions. I should probably learn more about SEZs but they're not nearly as interesting.
"One strategy is something like: buy some land somewhere. Build some houses and streets. Convince digital nomads to move there on the grounds that you are very cool and visionary. Do some cool and visionary seeming things, or at least throw some really good raves. Other digital nomads get jealous and move there too. Sell parcels of land to these people, get rich, pay back your investors. And then who knows, maybe create a new civilization that redefines what it means to be human"
No idea what you think a digital nomad is. I'm a digital nomad. We're poor people who left the west because we couldn't afford to live in it. Digital nomads can't afford to live in Cali and don't want to.
This is a very strange and nonsensical thing for you to say.
a major urban area in the southwest of Beijing that, once completed, is supposed to host most of the government agencies that currently reside in Beijing. Their ambition, apparently, is to build the Washington DC of China.
"Their ambition, apparently, is to build the Washington DC of China."
Do they not know the reputation of the real one? On the other hand, having the bureaucrats all in one place would make it easier to lock them all up if they misbehave. Hmmm, swings and roundabouts?
"But you would think scammers would be extra careful not to invest their own money in scams!" - this is the opposite of what I'd think, scammers are notorious for getting scammed themselves
This makes me think of an elegant way to implement land value tax on undeveloped land: the owner has to annually publicly declare a price at which anyone can buy them out, and they're taxed a few percent of that declared price. This obviates the need to infer land prices for tax purposes on very illiquid/sparse markets where there might not be enough data to model the prices, and makes it much easier for developers to acquire large contiguous lots of land from holdouts who would otherwise conspire to raise prices to the stratosphere.
I got this from talking to Trey a year ago. He said that the costs of building on the river would have been prohibitive, and the decision was made to move the residences to a different place. Confusingly, the old designs are still featured on the beyabu website, but only as decoration - the more detailed renders show houses standing on a hill, looking quite different from the old circular design.
My understanding is that "charter city" in California merely means that the city's bylaws are written to order, instead of following the standard package the state sets up. It still has to be democratic and legal. There are corrupt cities in California, and there are industrial cities that bribe and manipulate their tiny populations to vote how the industrialists want, but those are 1) small and 2) mostly in Los Angeles County. A big city like this one would have little room for the developers to dictate the charter, which the state would have to approve.
> The government’s other option is to have the Supreme Court declare ZEDEs unconstitutional. This would be a bold strategy, since they were passed through constitutional amendment and it seems like the constitution should be constitutional by definition.
You would be surprised then by the idea of an unconstitutional constitutional amendment. To my knowledge, this has been most notably used in India, but also Germany and Italy, Taiwan, and notably, Honduras. In Honduras it was even stronger, in that it wasn't that a constitutional *amendment* was ruled unconstitutional, but rather a clause *from the original text of the constitution*. (This was in 2015, overruling part of the 1982 constitution.)
I have no idea how likely this is to succeed, but it's hardly unprecedented.
That Angel video is really great though. I’d almost invest just based on that video alone. But have they not seen Wild Wild Country? That’s prob their future.
I think these are the people who were against those politics. Marc Andreessen isn't exactly a fan of the current San Francisco city government!
"hour’s drive northwest of San Francisco"
northeast
Thanks, I'm a moron.
The error was in the Guardian piece. now corrected
This sounds like the backstory for a dystopian movie where the founders appoint a Judge Dredd type sheriff to keep homeless addicts away by killing them.
The car commute from Montezuma Hills in roughly the geographic weighted center of the land purchases to San Francisco looks like roughly 3 hours and ten minutes round trip on the average working day.
So about an hour and a quarter in and then the same back? That's not *terrible* (there's people in my town do that to the city where they have their pharma, etc., job) but of course the longest part of the trip will be getting into the city. Unless they set up some kind of rail service/commuter bus service, and I doubt that is going to happen. So the "dense, walkable city" idea is knocked on the head from the get-go, as you are going to need a car to get to your tech job.
A couple would definitely need two cars. And over three hours of commuting per day to San Francisco would mean it's not that much more desirable of a location than existing downscale exurbs like Stockton, which could depress the quality of residents who'd be attracted by it.
It would nice to have a rail commute: commuting by passenger rail, like in "Mad Men," is the most pleasant way to get to work during rush hour. In the Chicago suburbs, for example, the most desirable suburban locations are within a reasonable walks of train stations: 15 minute suburbs.
There's a train track between Sacramento and San Francisco that's about 10 or 20 miles away, but most railroads in the U.S., other than specifically commuter railways in places like NYC and Chicago, prioritize freight over passengers, so schedules for passenger trains are often fictional, with passenger trains being sidetracked to let freight roar by. (America, by the way, has very efficient freight trains in return for having terrible inter-city passenger rail.)
An alternative would be to extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail line from Antioch under or over the river/estuary to this new city. But that would cost many, many billions and would probably require the new city to have a population of, say, a half million. Also, BART raises fears of Oaklanders or some of the exurban slum dwellers (e.g., Pittsburg) riding mass transit out to the new city to raise havoc. If you can only get to this new city by a long car trip, it will have low crime rates.
In sum, there are good reasons of geography why this piece of land is so empty. On the other hand, this coalition of billionaires is not unimpressive. I wish them well.
It seems to me like the early targets would be people who mostly WFH, maybe only going to the office a few times a month. (Or you're entirely remote but don't want to stray too far from the Bay Area for other reasons)
Having local jobs is clearly part of the plan. These investors are historically more interested in industrial projects than residences.
Speculative: I doubt the wind farm is coincidental. There is even a windmill in the californiaforever.com logo, at the bottom of the page. Note that in the PNW datacenters get built next to hydroelectric facilities.
Wildly speculative: if you expect fusion reactors in ten years or so, where do you expect them to get built?
>The specific utopian city is going to look like this:
Their images are AI generated. Wrong number of stripes on the American flag, leaves floating in mid-air, bricks/vinyl siding that doesn't match, nearly a perfectly square aspect ratio, etc, etc, etc.
Kind of funny to see The Guardian analyse the details of the images ("a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods") like they're not Midjourney sludge that means absolutely nothing.
Doesn't seem wrong to me - if the company prompted Midjourney with "a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods", that communicates information about their plans. The pipeline is always going to be "a leader who knows the strategy says a few sentences to an artist, the artist draws their impression of those few sentences, the leader either takes their work or asks them to try again". AI might slightly degrade the communication step, but not enough that you can't think of it the same way.
Ideally a project like this, at this stage of development, should already have some actual architects involved, and those architects should have some plans at least some thought-through concept art showing what they actually intend to build.
Prospera has this, at least.
Alternatively, they're not going to design it until they have some idea where they're allowed to build?
Why wouldn‘t architects use generative AI to create concept art?
It's a lie though, a deception not even by omission - they're portraying an image of 'the final result' that is not going to happen. I know advertising is brazen, but this is pretty egregious even for that. It's not going to be a Tuscan village, it's going to be stacks of apartment blocks in a scrubland.
The Prospera stuff is poor, but at least they are going to (try and) build the housing/offices as portrayed in their 'artist's impression'. Solano (whatever they end up calling the thing) is not going to be remotely like what they're showing here.
Ah, the wonders of AI - only fledgling as yet, and we're already using it to lie to our fellows!
They're ideological/aesthetic gestures: we want it to look like Ithaca, NY in 1925 or Tuscany in 1500, but not like Cabrini Green in 1965.
Brazen or not, it's pretty much SOP in the world of future project architectural renderings.
Yeah it is literally how this always looks, even 20-40 years ago. Ridiculously over idealized images that make no sense.
Mock Victorians with no front stoop. Must have been created by AI.
Aren't those the things on the left you can see with the railings? AI seems to be a bit confused about how ti line them up with the doors though.
And you see plenty of victorian houses that you don't have to walk uphill to get into in the UK. (Is it to fit a cellar underneath?)
"And you see plenty of victorian houses that you don't have to walk uphill to get into in the UK."
Like this row of terraced houses:
https://www.booking.com/hotel/gb/cheerful-4-bedroom-victorian-house-with-garden.en-gb.html?activeTab=photosGallery
But there are also ones where you do have front steps up:
http://knowledgeoflondon.com/victorianhouse.html
So the AI was using reference photos of (what looks to me like) New York housing, but mashed together with the "walkable suburban street" prompt. I have to admit, I like the flag flying in the background - are they trying to appear patriotic and evoke American values of The Frontier, or is this just an artefact from whatever reference materials the art used? 😀
This billionaire's coalition is pretty ideologically diverse, but they seem like people who might unironically approve of flying the American flag.
They are probably influenced by Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso's highly popular Americana outdoor shopping mall in Glendale, CA, which looks like a prosperous small city in Ohio in 1910. Caruso's immensely popular Grove mall looks like an Italian hill city. People in L.A. will drive long distances and pay to park to walk around a walkable simulacrum of city from before cars.
"Although her concerns seem kind misplaced, her name makes her sounds like a powerful and majestic opponent."
Lmao
I'm pretty sure the Kerguelen islands thing isn't real? I can't find any legitimate sources repeating the claim.
Thanks; removed until I can learn more.
I think Kerguelen Island would be an ideal spot for resurrected Ice Age megafauna like Woolly Mammoths to be hunted by billionaires using only spears assisted by atlatls.
"France offers to sell Kerguelen Island" this is against the French constitution, completely impossible.
Does Kerguelen have residents? It seems to me that uninhabited land would operate differently than what you suggest, because a referendum would be irrelevant if there are no residents.
Article 1 of the French Constitution of 1958 states that "France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic." The term "indivisible" in this context implies that the territorial integrity of the French Republic is sacrosanct and cannot be divided by selling off a part of its territory. This would apply to overseas territories like the Kerguelen Islands as well.
Algeria was allowed to secede from France in 1962, so you aren’t interpreting the constitution the way French government does
Article 11 allows the president to submit to referendum "any Government Bill dealing with the organisation of the public authorities." Algeria's independence was approved after such a referendum, that's the constitutional mechanism, the government had no legal authority to let Algeria go without it.
That doesn’t in any way contradict my point.
It's implied, but the meaning is open to interpretation. Also, if it did mean that, would probably only apply to the Republic proper; the various "departments', both in and outside Europe that are represented in the National Assembly.
True. I've been to Clipperton Island and the only permanent residents are boobies.
(Not a joke.)
Not much to say. We stayed only a few hours.
My wife and I were sailing from the Galapagos Islands to Hawaii on a small sailboat.
Normally you would go west then north to avoid the "doldrums", i.e. the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, where the weather is unpredictable and even dangerous. But that year the ITCZ was far south so we decided to cut north and then catch the trade winds to Hawaii.
That brought us right on a path to Clipperton. At first I didn't expect that we would get close, and even if we did the timing would probably not be right. We had no charts of the area (none exist, as far as I know). The general nautical chart we used only showed a cross to signify the approximate location of a danger to avoid, so we needed stay clear at night. But as the winds got us closer it became more likely that we'd be near the island early in the morning.
So I mentioned it to my dad by email on my daily report to him (via satellite). And he replied that he knew a lot about it because he saw a documentary on television about a French scientific expedition to the island. I told him it was too bad I didn't have any chart of the area. He replied that there was a map in the TV guide he likes to buy. "Wow," I said, "ask Mom to scan the map and send it to me!"
The map was, huh, barely useful, but it gave me a sense that maybe we could anchor somewhere. So we decided to try it. We got close to the lagoon around 8am. Perfect. We entered a cove on the east side that looked promising on the "map". But although the depth looked good (10 meters), it was clearly full of rocks, and the swell made me very nervous. One thing I didn't want was to get wrecked 1000 miles away from the nearest port. So we moved to the west side, which I hoped would be more sheltered from the trade winds and the swell.
We dropped the anchor in 12 meters of depth, but once the chain was extended the depth was 30 meters! The island is the tip of a volcano and we were sitting on a steep slope. Still, we got in the water with mask, snorkel, fins. It was INCREDIBLE! Hundred feet of visibility, super clear water, friendly fish, a few sharks (also friendly!), and many boobies.
I love boobies. And yeah, I know how that sounds.
https://www.google.com/search?q=booby+bird
At some point I was swimming down and could see a booby on the surface. He was putting his head regularly just below the surface and maybe eating plankton (?). He looked like he could see me, but as I got close he totally ignored me. So there I was, swimming maybe a foot under a booby, looking at him and him totally ignoring me, just doing his business.
We only stayed a few hours. The swell breaking on the reef made it extremely difficult and dangerous to land. And like I said, not a good place to be stranded (or hurt). We had lunch and dinner at anchor, then left toward Hawaii in the evening.
Voila.
I suppose if Tom Monaghan can do it with Ave Maria City, there's no reason tech very rich people can't do it in California:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria,_Florida
Though I'm looking at the "artist's impressions" of the New Garden City and then the real landscape and going "No [expletive deleted] way that is going to translate into reality".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
I *can* see what they mean about some farmland, but I have a notion they might go for commercial forestry, that kind of scrubby land is best suited for it. As for the rest of it - mmm, well. Maybe? I'm wondering about where they're going to get the water for all those tree-lined streets and boating and marinas and so forth. Is there a river nearby?
(Mostly I'm going "What the hell are the Collinson brothers doing involved with this? Too rich and grand and posh now for Tipp, are we?")
(Also, "Gosh amighty, is there no limit to the brazenness of artist's impressions? You are not going to recreate a Tuscan or Umbrian village on the banks of the local whatever river or lake is there, no matter how many red-roofed houses sloping down to the shore with cypresses on the skyline you paint in").
Dormitory town for the tech workers needed by the various employers putting money into this is the most likely result, I'm thinking.
EDIT:
"Three months ago, Flannery sued a group of local farmers who wouldn’t sell to them, accusing them of “conspiring to inflate the value of the land”."
Well, yeah. You'd think a company with a name like "Flannery" would be well familiar with the concept of 'road frontage' 😁
https://www.farmersjournal.ie/have-ya-any-road-frontage-680553
Re: Prospera and its legal troubles - well well well. I am shocked, shocked! I tell you. Who could possibly have foreseen this would happen? I mean, I never expected that if you head off to South America in order to build your own little company town because of weak governments that won't meddle with you so long as you pay off the right ministers and people in power due to political instability meaning everybody wants to line their pockets while they're in power, that this would come back to bite you in the backside when there is rapid turnover due to said political instability and the opposition party comes into power which then decides to soak the rich foreigners even more or boot them out because they made a deal with the last lot, not with them? Never expected that at all!
The area is near the San Joaquin Delta where the rivers of the Central Valley drain into SF Bay, and there's some swampland nearby, but I wouldn't have associated it with large bodies of water. One of the founders said in an interview that he enjoys kayaking in the area, so there must be something.
It's the "in the area" bit that is ringing alarm bells, because that can cover a lot of ground. Apparently there is a Lake Solano which is a national park and you can go kayaking there, but that does not seem to be at all the same thing as "when we build our new city, you can kayak and boat by the shoreline" because I'm not seeing any shoreline as such:
https://www.paddlingcalifornia.com/lake_solano.html#:~:text=The%20lake's%20placid%20surface%20is,will%20have%20an%20enjoyable%20time.
Looking at this map, it does depend where they build it in order to have access to the coast/river delta:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solano_County,_California#/map/0
The Guardian article says the Flannery company has been buying up land around Travis Air Force Base, which is just east of Fairfield, and zooming in on that map and looking at it - there's not really any kind of shoreline like the pretty pictures, which are definitely misleading and definitely selling a *vision* of Norman Rockwell Utopia which is not going to be the reality.
There's rivers east and south, but around the air force base it looks like desert/scrubland (which I would expect). I'm in agreement that if you start building there, yeah you'll have plenty of open space to put up buildings but you better make damn sure you have the water supply, sewerage, and other utilities well planned out as to how you're going to manage them. There aren't going to be leafy green streets and kayaking by the shore, not unless you travel a fair distance to go to the river or sea-coast.
The main information I've heard is that it "surrounds Travis Air Force Base on three sides"; TAFB doesn't seem close to the watery parts.
Oh ... shit. I know what this means.
Travis AFB is a MAC base, Material Air Command. They fly freight, and its really loud. When its foggy, which it is often in the delta region, the foggy air really carries the sound. Flying freight is done with really big heavy aircraft, and they're very loud.
What these schemers do, is 'model the noise level' so ... basically all models are wrong, but some models are useful. So they model the noise level in a manner which allows development on the property. Then they build, then the residents complain, then the federal government gets involved, and starts to regulate the air traffic out of the air force base. The developers have long since absconded with their $$$$, and the shit-storm, its all SEP (Somebody Else's Problem).
Look, we have to have air force bases, and we intentionally put them in God forsaken out of the way places, where they can make shit-tons of noise, drop the occasional airplane, and do it in some out of the way place where the only casualties are the air crew. But then NOPE, some schemer sees a scam, and this is it, the taxpayers are being had yet again.
I think if you provide housing for 100,000 people in a state that's becoming a disaster area due to a massive housing shortage, this isn't a "scam" even if it requires a local air force base to change its noise policies.
Presumably, they could use whatever magic wand they have to cast Protection From Nimbyism somewhere where the houses would be more useful.
A hundred thousand people in California isn't that many.
How many houses do you think could be freed up in California simply by enforcing existing immigration laws? A couple of million?
Having been to Vacaville, I don't think noise will be a problem.
But wait! I can do better! I took the map of plots purchased from the NYTimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/business/economy/california-land-solano-county.html) and combined them with the Travis Air Force Base Sustainability Study (https://www.solanocounty.com/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?blobid=36198 or page 41-42 here https://oldcc.gov/sites/default/files/mis-studies/Travis%20Air%20Force%20Base.pdf), to get a map of the overlap.
See the combined map on twitter here: https://twitter.com/brinkwatertoad/status/1698887068506546393?s=20 (zoom in to see better)
My takeaway: some of the plots are in the Noise Military Compatibility Area (MCA), which is unsuitable for residential (without significant noise attenuation), but could be used for office/retail/industrial. Most of the plots are outside the Noise MCA, and are fine for residential: No change in Travis Base's Noise MCA would be needed to develop there.
You'll hear planes, but it will be like living in Vacaville.
At least in the last forty years, what the federal authorities have done about airport noise is not reduce the airport noise. It's to tell cities that they can have some assistance with residents' noise insulation improvements, _if_ they alter zoning to prevent any further construction. See for instance the Comprehensive Airport Land Use Compatibility Plan for the Environs of San Francisco International Airport:
https://ccag.ca.gov/plansreportslibrary-2/airport-land-use/
I am a Planning Commissioner in San Bruno, and I live less than a mile from the airport, in the Belle Air neighborhood, just across 101. Basically under the deal that the local cities (South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Millbrae) made with the airport some decades back, we're not supposed to let anyone add housing too close to the flight path. (The technical term is "noise contours".)
South San Francisco has recently been trying to build some apartments just at the northwest tip of the area affected. They had thought they were going to be able to reach an agreement where they told the ALUC "hey we know the airport exists, we will build to high noise insulation standards and we agree we can't sue you". But the ALUC so far seems to be saying they don't want to grant an exemption.
https://everythingsouthcity.com/2020/09/planning-commission-approves-338-units-at-former-century-plaza-on-noor-avenue/
https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/agencies-differ-on-south-city-development/article_b9be346c-14e0-11eb-917d-db7d806758f9.html
It's not exactly clear yet what's going to happen with this, because it's bringing state law (which has been changed to push for more housing) into conflict with a quasi-federal authority. If the ALUC really stands firm, I suspect they'll win in federal court, but maybe they'll change their mind. (I've talked with my Congressman about this, I'm hoping there may be some action from Congress to get airport commissions generally to lighten up on blocking housing; it's kind of a wonky issue where you might be able to get bipartisan interest. Call it "deregulation / preventing frivolous lawsuits" for the Republicans, and "dealing with the housing / homelessness crisis" for Democrats.)
If I lived about 2-3 blocks further northeast, I would've been personally affected by this issue. I'm _just_ outside the 75 dB noise contour, and it's unclear whether the state ADU-streamlining laws would apply there. (I have just broken ground on an ADU, the design of which is taking advantage of some brand new rules letting you build at a slightly smaller setback if you're within half a mile of transit.) Our city planning department is kind of unsure what they should do with ADU applications under the contour. My impression is that they are inclined to just go ahead and approve stuff, because they're more afraid of Rob Bonta and YIMBY Law than they are of the ALUC. They'd just see if the ALUC notices / complains, but so far it hasn't come up.
YIMBYs already prepped a lawsuit against San Bruno once:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/24/approaching-peak-housing-dysfunction-in-california
Ultimately the suit was dropped because the city came back and approved the project, although by the time they did we'd hit COVID, and then rising rates and construction material inflation, so the project has never broken ground. We extended their permits another couple years, earlier this year. I am skeptical it will ever happen, I think it is more likely we'll get the featureless seven-story concrete towers that were threatened under SB 35 in the immediate aftermath of the original rejection.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Bruno-rejected-plan-for-425-homes-Now-14698779.php
Yeah, but I don't think a military air force base is going to get regulated out of it, so I imagine any proposed development is going to be protested for the very reason you put forward. That does explain the concerns of Senator Dodd about 'harming the base', but I think Travis is probably a big enough local employer that any building proposed to go up near it is going to be pushed back.
If this really is intended as dormitory housing for workers commuting to SF, then the developers will expect "people won't be at home all day so they won't hear the planes". What you say about "God-forsaken out of the way places" makes the proposed "walkable leafy utopia" sound even more implausible with what will eventually be built.
The NYT has a good map of the specific parcels that Flannery Associates bought: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/business/economy/california-land-solano-county.html
It looks like it's not fully contiguous (yet!). The center (roughly the intersection of the 12 and the 113) is not particularly close to water, but the area is generally bounded by the Sacramento River in the south/east, Montezuma Slough in the west, and Lindsey Slough in the north. (I have no idea how good sloughs are as sources of water).
The area around Travis Air Force Base is in the far northwest corner of the purchased area.
In the Sacramento Delta, there is a legally mandated "X2" line, which is the point in the delta where salinity above that line must remain <2 ppt at all times. That line is upstream of Suisun bay and the marshes north of it. There are salinity control gates in various places in the sloughs in Suisun bay to prevent salt water intrusion upstream during the tidal cycle.
2-3 ppt is generally accepted as the threshold where humans can start to taste salt in water. So water in places like Montezuma Slough and others in the marshlands north of Suisun bay will often (although not always) be noticeably salty (although not necessarily dangerous)
Looking up sloughs, they're wetlands? So probably a ton of environmental protections in place, I wouldn't imagine you'd get permission to use them as reservoirs, and if you did, the point DangerouslyUnstable makes about the salinity means you're going to need one hell of a water treatment plant to make the water potable.
"Sloughs are ecologically important as they are a part of an endangered environment; wetlands. They act as a buffer from land to sea and act as an active part of the estuary system where freshwater flows from creeks and runoff from the land mix with salty ocean water transported by tides. Restoration is a big effort in California wetlands to restore slough and ridge landscapes. Examples of restoration projects on slough landscapes include The Elkhorn Slough Tidal Wetland Project, Dutch Slough Tidal Restoration Project, and the McDaniel Slough wetland enhancement project."
If they're planning on getting water from the river, that's going to be another headache, given California's general problems with water supplies.
In the NY Times map, you can see that a large portion of the purchased parcels are directly adjacent to the Sacramento River, the largest river in California and a source of fresh water well above the X2 line. Physical access to fresh water is no problem. In California, the more relevant question is do you have political and legal access to water. The Sacramento River is highly regulated and subscribed. But they are north of the Delta - that's better than being to the south. It means they could potentially participate in the north-of-delta water markets, making a deal with a State Water contractor for a portion of their annual allocation.
I am reminded of all the canal projects in England in the 18th century. Some of them were reasonable (and got built), but a lot of them looked OK until you looked at a topographical map and said "This canal route of 20 miles is going to need a hundred locks because it's going up a mountain and back down again."
> I suppose if Tom Monaghan can do it with Ave Maria City, there's no reason tech very rich people can't do it in California:
Sure there is.; the vastly different legal and cultural environments around development in Florida as opposed to California. Among other things, Florida's state legislature is in the long habit of creating special local government districts (pretty much starting with Disney World), and did so in Ave Maria's case.
It depends how bad the housing need is, and how unsuitable for other use the land is, to get exemptions. It looks like scrubland, so use for manufacturing/office/residential would be "not using it for anything otherwise" (unless sheep are grazing it).
I agree there will be lots of obstacles in the way re: legal environment, but this is probably as good a test of YIMBYism as you're going to get in California; 'we want to build in the desert and make it blossom like the rose'.
Commercial forestry: this is the year that all of Canada and most of the Mediterranean caught fire, releasing gigatonnes of really nasty particles into the air, and a stack of CO2. Being against the Ents is like being against motherhood and apple pie, but at some stage it has to sink in that trees are part of the problem, not of the solution. Other vegetation does as good a job of carbon capture, some of it burns less, all of it burns less intensely.
Is this one too many zeroes, or from rural Missouri am I misunderstanding what a "town" is: a few "~100,000 person towns scattered across the county." 100,000 is big city where I am from.
Fairfield, Vacaville, and Vallejo are all 100,000+ and I don't think of them as real cities; other people in the area can correct me if I'm being unfair.
"Fairfield, Vacaville, and Vallejo are all 100,000+ and I don't think of them as real cities; other people in the area can correct me if I'm being unfair."
How do you think of Palo Alto (pop. 66,000) and Mountain View (pop. 81,000) and Berkeley (pop. 117,000)? That provides context for size (if not for 'sophistication').
I think of them as hard to analyze because they're part of a larger urban agglomeration.
Okay :-) How about Charleston, South Carolina (pop. 150,000)?
I'm wondering if you think of 'real city' as 'real metropolitan area' and have a lower limit of 500,000+.
I've never been to Charleston but I would have instinctively classified it as a city, probably partly because it's the biggest one in its area. I do notice Wikipedia says the Charleston urban area is 600,000 people.
I am not going to be able to specify a perfect bright line between city and town, but if you haven't been to Vacaville, I urge you to look at its Google Maps pictures: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Vacaville,+CA/@38.3565773,-121.9877444,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipOQcfpfpPgDsjtN0ernCjBS10FrwYye_m06jDbJ!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOQcfpfpPgDsjtN0ernCjBS10FrwYye_m06jDbJ%3Dw114-h86-k-no!7i1600!8i1200!4m7!3m6!1s0x808517cf9f7df407:0xe4aac8df639b631c!8m2!3d38.3565773!4d-121.9877444!10e5!16zL20vMGdqOV8?entry=ttu
I've been to Vacaville :-) And Los Banos.
"Biggest one in the area" is useful. Now we can focus on what we/you mean by "area" :-)
NOTE: I don't have a problem with city vs town. The PRIZM cluster (marketing) folks have the concept of "Second City Elite" which implies 2nd 'level' of city. I suspect that it is dependent on how far away the next 1st city is. And it implies that Salt Lake City (pop. 200,000) might be a 1st city because it dominates Utah while Fremont (pop. 250,000) isn't because it is dwarfed by San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
A place with a mayor, city government, FD, PD, etc. Probably a city planning department.
I mean if you get down to 500 person towns where the whole town government is 4-5 people not all of whom are even full time, sure maybe not a city. But a city isn't skyscrapers, its an administrative entity. Were there no cities before 1900 in your mind?
Palo Alto and Mountain View are more like suburbs of a larger conglomeration than real cities.
This is just a crazy definition of "city". Anything over a few thousand is for sure a "city". And legally they are almost all cities.
When there used to be more "hamlet/village/town/city" classifications in some states, the thresholds were often like 50/200/500/2000 or something like that.
Most states have collapsed that all down to just cities and towns, or even only just cities and unincorporated.
I think population or density numbers are not that useful for deciding if something is a city or not. I think the city is the economic center of its region, where people do most of their trade with other economic regions. 100k towns around San Francisco are not going to be the center of anything. If someone wants to start a business, they're going to San Francisco to do it because that's where all the people and ideas and resources come together. (Silicon Valley is not exactly a city, but it has a very powerful convergence point for people and ideas: Stanford University.)
I think a lot of "real city" comes from "I've heard about it."
I've heard of many of these places, so they end up in my mind as "cities" (unless they've been described as small).
I live in a place called Mississauga. You've probably never heard of it, but it's just under a million people, in a sprawling built up area that has has something like 8 million people in it.
The reason you've likely not heard of it is because it's not in California, so no films are actually set there. When there are movies made, it's pretending to be someplace else.
I think a reasonable HIGH LEVEL model of what they are trying to accomplish is Celebration, Florida.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
in *theory* I might want to live in a place like this. In practice ... well, it depends on the actual city/town.
One of the classic New Urbanist developments, aka nostalgia streetcar suburbanism. Which is better than standard-issue sprawl, to be fair, but can't really be the basis for a core city of any significant size.
> Building progress: last I heard Duna Residences were supposed to be ready Q2 2023, but a recent video shows them still under construction.
Yeah, they're delayed a bit, but deliveries are happening over the next 4 months (they're doing it in phases as they get them finished), starting with the commercial units this month and finishing with the top floor in December.
"who has already demonstrated willingness to spend 11-figure sums on horrible places that it will ruin his life to own"
How'd it ruin his life? It got him bad press in the NYT, that's for sure.
Anton Bakov, a Russian monarchist, had various schemes of trying to buy land for his own country which always fell through for one reason or another:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Bakov
I see those pics and all I think of is...where do you park your car?
I assume the project is done in the spirit of YIMBYism, which hates cars and wants to make things as hard as possible for them. This is both trendy and economically useful because it means higher density. Probably there will be some compromise with reality but I don't know where it will be. Even if YIMBYism is practical in big cities (which remains to be seen) it might be harder in Solano County where there's nothing for dozens of miles except whatever these people build themselves.
One model might be a dense walkable center with good buses; a free (or cheap) shuttle to either SF, the nearest BART station at Pittsburgh/Bay Point, or both; and maybe the same level of grudging acceptance of cars as SF or NYC. See the neighborhood of Cul-de-Sac in Arizona for a model that's been shared widely around the YIMBY community and is probably on their minds.
Assume that the location on Google Maps called "Montezuma Hills" is about the center of the Flannery land purchases. Well, it's 30.6 miles by road to the Pittsburg BART station due to first having to drive 9 miles toward Sacramento to cross the Sacramento River at Rio Vista. This city would really need another bridge or tunnel to open up a more direct route across the Sacramento River.
BART goes all the way to Antioch out past Pittsburg, so the shuttle to BART would be less than 31 miles, but still a big number. In summary, the reason this place has virtually nobody living on it is that it is way out in the boonies.
> Even if YIMBYism is practical in big cities (which remains to be seen)
Do you mean politically or from an engineering/planning perspective? The latter has been done successfully in many cities around the world, it's not anything new outside of a narrow post-1950s American context. The former is probably harder but should be doable in this model (especially if you're mostly selling specifically to people who like it), but I guess isn't experimentally proven.
YIMBYism doesn't hate cars, it just doesn't want cars to receive special subsidies. YIMBYism is fine with market rate parking, just not free parking.
You can't fool me, I've seen https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/ and https://twitter.com/anticarsls
I feel like the whole movement has a weird tension between multiple groups:
1. Utopian dreamers who want everyone to give up their cars, walk home from the supermarket in the rain carrying 20 kg of reusable canvas bags, and at least strongly consider eating cricket slurry for at least two meals a day.
2. Normal home-buying people who want ordinary suburbs, but nicer. They'd like to be able to walk everywhere in theory, as long as they can still drive there nine times out of ten in practice.
3. Property developers who DGAF and just want to cram as many houses onto a piece of land as they're legally allowed and sell them for as much money as possible.
I think the biggest YIMBY group is none of those, but rather people who just want housing to be affordable as a result of increased supply.
(Off topic, but nearly every political movement has a weird tension between multiple groups. For example libertarians and Christians in the Republican party)
This is FOR SURE not the core of the YIMBY movement. The core of the movement is upper middle class and middle class urban planning people, many of whom are childless, who like big city dense living and want to pretend that everyone likes it (or worse yet just don't even consider their fellow citizens preferences).
The random dude who wants a cheaper house isn't like "damn those planning regulations and lack of more budlings. They don't make the connection.
/r/fuckcars obviously hates cars, but who says they are YIMBY? I imagine YIMBYs are overrepresented there, but so are many other demographics such as Democrats, young people, queer people, etc. YIMBYism doesn't require hating cars any more than being a Democrat requires hating cars.
> I assume the project is done in the spirit of YIMBYism, which hates cars and wants to make things as hard as possible for them.
Well, unless you suggest actually placing restrictions on suburban sprawl.
New York isn't "grudging acceptance of cars" - 10% of the land surface is given over to the free storage of cars! They heavily subsidize cars, which is the only reason there are so many cars in such a densely populated area.
You stick a service alley in the back, perhaps with access to a garage. Look up "New Urbanism" and then Google Maps of some of the examples. In theory these places are designed to be transit-oriented and walkable, and I'm sure they succeed to various degrees, but realistically if you put a city in that location people are going to want to have cars, and they are going to park those cars somewhere.
Over my dead body. I will never stop going on weekend trips and longer road trips. I will never "own nothing and be happy" and no IoT drone crap will cross my property lines.
I will not live in a pod, I will not eat bugs, I will not own nothing, I will not surrender my privacy. FAFO.
Aggressively formulated, but true. Nobody forced people to have cars, they‘re just damn practical in an individual-liberty-loving society.
The whole "new urbanism" movement really fails in that it ignores people's actual real life preferences. I mean the most efficient and environmental solution is we all live in coffin apartments and work from those same apartments and are fed nutrient paste. You could fit the whole global population in like the city limits in Denver in one giant skyscraper. No transportation or outside time needed!
Except people don't want that, not even the most extreme YIMBYS.
So where do you draw the line between that and everyone living on big 40 acre farms? Well that is the beauty of markets, you let the people make the decisions and value what they value.
Instead you have a bunch of childless young urban professionals, living like childless YPPUIES and then demanding everyone else must live like that.
You don't need to. All that matters is that a substantial fraction of people are happy to adopt the new ways. You can be just like the people who still own horses and/or don't have cell phones.
"Come back in a decade or two and people probably won’t own cars."
My _existing_ cars will probably last a decade (quite possibly two - though then they might probably outlast _me_). I don't think I'm that unusual. Tens of millions of existing vehicles will probably still be in use in a decade.
There's no plausible scenario where cars are gone in the US within ten or even twenty years. Some dense cities can survive with most of the population not using them, but most of the US is far too rural to sustain public transport necessary to completely forego cars. What your suggestion will sound like to most people is the COVID lockdowns forever - which they will not support or accept.
They're not talking about people foregoing cars for public transit - they're talking about people foregoing *ownership* of cars for easy access to self-driving cars. It's like how people have given up landlines and cable subscriptions in favor of cell phones and streaming video.
Are there any googleable New Urbanism designs that you'd recommend as examples to aspire towards?
Looking at a couple of examples, Prospect New Town in Colorado looks reasonably pleasant but not fundamentally different to a lot of other new suburban developments. Mountain House California looks similar but worse, a bunch of little two-storey houses, not much greenery, and almost zero shops.
Most of the projects have been fairly small, nowhere near 100k people. One of the biggest is Central Park (formerly Stapleton) in Denver. But that basically looks like typical parking lot urban sprawl in the commercial areas, with houses packed in tightly with no front yards in the residential areas.
You can have something nice and pretty and tiny like Seaside, Florida. But that's 1000 people. With enough money I guess you can scale it up, but the complexity is much, much greater.
If you want 100k people, you obviously need a large number of jobs, and if those jobs aren't in your planned community, the residents need transportation out of your community. And if those neighboring communities don't have good transit, your residents are going to need cars, even if you've laid out a beautiful, walkable city with a good transit system. And if they have cars, they probably don't care if your city's transit service is good or not. So it seems to me (although I'm no expert) that you really need to have some major sources of good jobs as a key part of your city; otherwise you've only managed to build a bedroom community.
I personally played a lot of sports on my front lawn from age 5 to 12 before outgrowing it, but I don't see kids playing in their front yards much anymore. So, getting rid of front lawns seems like the easiest gain in density.
I don't think Seaside scales, and the clue is in the name. Seaside only works because it occupies a stretch of beautiful warm sunny Florida beach; if you put it in the middle of a field somewhere then you couldn't sell the houses for millions; if you couldn't sell the houses for millions then you couldn't pump so much money into making the development look nice, and if you can't pump so much money into making the development look nice then it's just another crappy suburb in a field somewhere.
You can only build as many Seasides as you have unoccupied sections of warm-climate beachfront land.
I agree generally, but wonder if you could create such a development if you could get a group of high-value residents to all agree to live in the same place? That would presumably make the schools great, crime low, etc. Having a beach would obviously help, but maybe being close enough to SF might do the trick?
Seems difficult to pull off, but maybe possible?
I think the Mueller development in Austin, TX is a good example, a master-planned exploitation of a 700-acre site that magically opened up mid-city when the municipal airport was relocated. There is a section of big-box sprawl at the West end, but also many areas of high-density residential and mixed-use.
https://muelleraustin.com
In the late 1990s, I looked at a sort of New Urbanist/Old Villageist development in the Chicago suburbs much like the top picture, with houses arranged around a village green. There was an alley behind the houses for cars but your kids could visit the neighboring few dozen houses without crossing traffic, which was definitely appealing. I recall the asking price being about 40% more than conventional Chicago suburbs, which seemed reasonable for what you'd get but also tough to manage.
What's wrong with giving people front yards, if they're going to be building from scratch? That would allow people to park their car in front of their house, off the street, so the footpath is still walkable (for pedestrians, people pushing buggies and kids on bikes).
https://www.daft.ie/property-for-sale/ireland/terraced-houses
I walk the dog around my suburban neighborhood and I seldom see kids playing in their front yards anymore. Instead, they are more likely to put cones in the street and play in their low-traffic street. The athletic family with three kids behind me has created a child paradise, but they have made their front yard ornamental rather than a lawn; instead, the five of them are out playing sports on the asphalt of the culdesac with various devices for slowing traffic. I don't get it, but they are obviously great parents, so that what great parents do these days.
I think we value privacy at our homes more than we used to? Not sure why though. I agree that front lawns seem to be used far less than they used to be. Back lawns (less visible to the street) seem to be used some still.
In Vauban (a development I'm familiar with in Germany) there is a large multi story car park within easy walking distance of the houses, along with a tram service and good bike infrastructure. You don't need a car to live there but you can have one and park it in the multi story car park. There are also a lot of zipcar like services. It's definitely slightly inconvenient for doing car like things, but it is surprisingly nice to walk and cycle (and unicycle) around an environment designed for it.
That style of house often has garage access in the back. There's a pretty front door visitors walk up to (parking on the street) but the owners drive in from the rear. I used to own a house in a development just like that. Here's the redfin link for my old house - photos #8 and #9 show the back alley with garage access:
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Mountain-View/105-Pacchetti-Way-94040/home/12172124
Those look a lot like parts of London; I live in Terraced housing, my tiny front garden is directly onto a park (so it doesn't matter that I don't have much outdoor space; just enough to let the dog out and relax in private if needed, but the park has a huge play area for my kid and is great for walking the dog). There's a dead-end road in the back, and I have a one-car garage that faces onto that; there's also some on-street parking on that low-traffic road. Public transit is excellent, though, so I don't actually own a car, it's just for visitors. There are lots of small shops and restaurants on the bottom floor of c. 3-story houses.
It's by and large a great place to live!
> So once 10,000 people live in their town, what’s to stop those people from becoming NIMBYs and voting against further growth?
Part of it would probably also be which people you have. Palo Alto nimbys are mostly people who moved to Palo Alto because they like having one-story houses with big yards and lots of roads. Presumably the sort of people who move into smaller high-density apartments in an area advertised as high-density would be more okay with keeping that level of density?
(Or even if they eventually change their minds and start objecting, this takes time and within a decade or two you've already probably built or at least zoned for a lot of the density you want).
I wrote my PhD thesis on this topic and yes: at least in some case studies I looked at, people who move to a place based on marketing for a walkable community are more willing to accept density than people who moved to the burbs with the goal of not being downtown. This is based on interviews and newspaper articles, mind, not quantitative surveys.
Is your PhD thesis online? I'd like to see it.
Here you go. It's an analysis of four attempts to transform suburban communities into downtowns, focused on political, institutional, and economic barriers (and how to overcome them). The Uptown Core has the clearest example of residents fighting for the walkable community they were sold. They fought a car dealership, and are open to density, unlike their suburban peers, who often oppose any density. If you like, I can also send some more quantitative studies on this subject.
https://dalspace.library.dal.ca//handle/10222/82562
Relatedly, I also find many examples, in all four retrofits, of suburban residents supporting or opposing change. Many accept that density will cut traffic, for example, while others believe it is the cause of traffic. I found it interesting and somewhat surprising that walkability can be extremely popular among suburbanites. In Surrey, the Mayor got a 72% approval rating for attracting sense walkable growth, in an almost entirely car dependent suburb. I know you don't like podcasts but I discuss this all on the most recent Strong Towns podcast.
That's certainly been my experience living in Chicago's South Loop, where I've gotten a lot of firsthand knowledge of my neighbors' preferences by being on an HOA board the last 7 years.
I think it will depend significantly on how quickly the area urbanizes and becomes fully walkable. If the area is mostly car-centered for lack of size for 5-10 years, those people will have to adapt and may be less likely to want the density. If there's continual construction and the place becomes walkable quickly, that's less likely.
> The specific utopian city is going to look like this
The street scene looks fairly retro, like some children's book from the 1950s. Maybe that is deliberate, to look reassuringly familiar to potential investors and buyers. But, among other things, where are the solar panels on the roofs, and the flat roofs to park all the hydrogen powered flying cars?
With a couple of hundred square miles at their disposal, the land footprint is sufficient to build a giant ziggurat, or "pyramid", with sides maybe a couple of miles wide at the base and with say fifty ascending terraces each bounded by an outer wall tall enough to ensure privacy for residents round the outside by preventing them being overlooked by the levels above (Or one could design terrace outer glass walls that are transparent when looked through fairly horizontally, but opaque when looked at with a downward or upward slant). I assume most residents would value privacy when out and about on their terrace gardens.
Shopping malls, public areas, lower value private accomodation, and hydroponic growing areas with artificial UV light, could occupy the interior, and it could be truncated at the top to allow a large park. There could also be a large water storage area near the top, to supply the inhabitants, water the plants, and for emergency use in fires, and to stabilize the temperature throughout. Also, the whole thing could rotate on giant bearings, so that all residents round the outside would get their fair share of sunshine, and to help equalize the temperature.
Given a few weeks I'm sure I could plan the whole thing down to the last detail! :-P
This could almost be a SimCity 2000 reference, but I have to admit that I remembered the much more depressing Night Land world first.
I'm not familiar with either of those. But I think with careful design a proposal similar to what I sketched would be better to live in, and more flexible for amenities, than giant vertical glass box skyscrapers.
I still think the arcologies of SimCity were pretty cool, even if I wouldn’t want to live in one.
What’s Night Land? Seems like a vaguely familiar reference.
"Awake in the Night Land": stories by author John C Wright. (the last humans at the end of time inhabit a towering Ziggurat).
Originally “The Night Land” by William Hope Hodgson, a much older book. Wright wrote in the same world.
Either way it’s a very dark and depressing place. Said Ziggurat is surrounded by enormous monsters slowly closing in on it to destroy it, held at bay by the “Earth Current”, the only power source available because the sun has stopped producing light.
I think it's unlikely to work. The Surgeon General has determined that ziggurats are hazardous to your health.
That's a terrible pun, thanks! 😁
"With a couple of hundred square miles at their disposal, the land footprint is sufficient to build a giant ziggurat, or "pyramid", with sides maybe a couple of miles wide at the base and with say fifty ascending terraces each bounded by an outer wall tall enough to ensure privacy for residents round the outside by preventing them being overlooked by the levels above".
The Last Redoubt from "The Night Land" by William Hope Hodgson! 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land
"The Sun has gone out and the Earth is lit only by the glow of residual vulcanism. The last few millions of the human race are gathered together in the Last Redoubt, a gigantic metal pyramid, nearly eight miles high, which is under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark."
On the water question for the California Forever city, would desalination be a viable approach? Assuming they have access to the Bay, and assuming copious solar power and lots of money to spend on desalination equipment, would it be plausible to provide enough water for a city of say 100k people? I seem to recall reading that this is being done in various places in the Middle East (?)
(I expect there would be environmental lawsuits. I'm mostly just curious about the technological feasibility.)
Yes, given enough money, anything not explicitly prohibited by the laws of physics is possible.
As a pure technical/engineering matter, sure.
As an economic matter, recent large reverse osmosis desalinated water projects run around $1.00 a cubic meter (assuming an amortized electrical cost from your panels near the CA industrial electricity rate of 10.49¢/kWh), or roughly $1,200 per acre-foot (the usual unit for measuring irrigation water in California). That's well above what farmers in California pay for irrigation water on average, though during droughts the market price for a badly-needed little bit of extra can spike into that range.
As an environmental matter, there's the issues both of intake and discharge on the sea; sucking in water can disrupt sea life, as can dumping high-saline brine (a byproduct of producing fresh water with reverse osmosis tech).
$1 per cubic metre, or 0.1 cents per litre, sounds perfectly fine for household usage. Typical personal usage is 100,000 litres per person per year, and I pay a lot more than a hundred bucks for my water bill already.
Most municipal water costs most places are a matter of treatment and distribution under conditions that maintain safe potability, which is almost everywhere huge compared to the price of getting irrigation-quality water to the municipal system in the first place.
I don't happen to know how the acquisition versus local-to-the-municipality costs in California break down, but when the price billed to residential customers is around 0.4¢/liter (rates from $10.19 to $11.47 per hundred cubic feet in San Francisco, from $7.833 to $12.86 per hundred cubic feet in Los Angeles), an added 0.1¢/liter would definitely be noticed by the people on the lower income levels.
Of course, California even during the recent extended drought didn't have so much a shortage of water as a bunch of rival interests having intense political and legal battles over allocating the water, mostly outside the view of the public because it's the sort of complicated mess few newspaper readers could follow even if it was reported accurately.
Wealthy northern San Diego County opened a desalination plan a few years ago. One thing to keep in mind about them is they are really loud.
Desalination for household use is perfectly feasible, it's when you start looking at what is required for agriculture that the economics start looking impractical. In the case of California, anyone paying desalination prices for water might be understandably miffed that farmers were getting it for dollars per acre-foot.
"As an environmental matter, there's the issues both of intake and discharge on the sea; sucking in water can disrupt sea life, as can dumping high-saline brine (a byproduct of producing fresh water with reverse osmosis tech)."
Well, nearly every action has _some_ negative externality. Is there some comparison of the impact of the desalinization intakes and discharges as compared to some other ways of supplying the water? Naively, with 97% of the water on Earth being in the oceans, I'd expect that desalinating seawater would be one of the human actions with the least impact per person-year.
As a matter of impact on the oceans as a whole, desalination plants aren't a big issue. Worst-case, you need to be a bit careful about specific siting to avoid specific endangered littoral species.
As a matter of dealing with California law and politics, California environmentalist organizations are going to yell and kick. (Of course, they're going to do that anyway, but it's yet another bit of friction to doing anything.)
Many Thanks! Yes, my impression was that stretching the discharge pipe out to dilute the brine in a large body of seawater was sufficient to avoid real damage to endangered sea life.
"California environmentalist organizations are going to yell and kick." Ouch, yes. While it wasn't the main reason my late wife and I moved out of California when I retired, many of the heavy handed bans and regulations that they imposed were both infuriating and frightening. At one point they were pushing for household water use restrictions so severe that just taking a long shower would have been penalized (or possibly prohibited?).
They're next to a weird corner of the Bay which is an estuary - mostly freshwater in some seasons, mostly saltwater in others. I think it's pretty environmentally protected and would be surprised if they didn't just get their water from whatever source the rest of the region is already using.
If the project bought up a bunch of farmland, can’t they just use the water not going to those farms?
Yeah, presumably all of those farms already had fairly substantial water rights that should be more than sufficient to support residential development, which tends to be significantly less water-intensive than agriculture. Residential water obviously requires more extensive treatment than irrigation water, but the actual supply shouldn't be a problem.
Here in Malta, most tap water is produced through desalination, for a population of half a million at about half the per-capita GDP of the US.
WRT the 2.7 billion: the most important thing to understand about large piles of wealth is that they always have a huge imaginary component, money that can't be withdrawn without crashing the value of the rest of it. So loans are taken out against the assets instead of just spending the money. This is also the reason for the weird behavior you see from the wealthy. There can be 100 fold difference in how liquidity constrained two billionaires with the same nominal wealth are. If you nominally had a billion dollars but could only do anything with 10 million you'd feel pretty poor compared to your buddies.
I pointed this out in another thread, but the PR campaign for this city (in preparation for the eventual referendum) has been going on for a long time, and you've probably been part of it in one way or another.
Marc Andreessen has been writing articles like this https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/ since 2020, and slowly buying up land since 2017 (while also campaigning against densification in actual Atherton where he actually lives).
Patrick Collisson has been donating millions to "California YIMBY" groups since 2018, and slowly buying up land since 2017. Reid Hoffmann too.
And that's just the above-water portion of the submarine. How many articles have you read in the last six years about how there's a housing crisis in Northern California and how someone somewhere desperately needs to just build a whole lot of new housing? How much of that conversation is downstream of this project?
That's not to dismiss all the arguments in favour of it. To the extent it's a good idea, it's still a good idea. But it's a bit disturbing when you realise that a giant conversation you've been part of has all been engineered behind the scenes.
I think it's more likely that a lot of billionaires who believe strongly in YIMBYism have invested in a YIMBY project.
Patrick Collison for example is a big donor to Progress Studies, which isn't directly related to this new project, but it makes sense that someone who supports Progress Studies would support YIMBYism too.
It's Time To Build barely mentions housing at all.
Reid Hoffman's support for YIMBYism should be viewed in conjunction with his support for a lot of other anti-homelessness measures that don't personally benefit him.
I think it's hard to live in SF and not think something is wrong with the way we're currently doing cities.
There are plenty of cities that aren’t San Francisco, and yet you choose to live there despite having a work-from-home job.
I’m just really confused by all the YIMBY San Francisco hate. The revealed preference is that all of you guys actually *love* SF and the Bay Area. You could move to Dallas or Houston whenever you want, but you don’t.
I don't live in San Francisco.
Dallas and Houston have horrible climate and the geography of the bay area is incomparably more beautiful.
One reason YIMBY complaints are about the bay area is that it is objectively one of the most pleasant places to live in North America and NIMBYism keeps it from being much more affordable.
NIMBYism doesn't just keep it from being affordable - it keeps it restricted to only a few million people, when a few million more people could easily reap these benefits as well.
Has it occurred to you that if you suddenly added 500,000 units it would just suck people from the rest of the country to this amazing climate and economy and you would be right back where you are but with less green space and more crowding?
There is some upper limit to that, but the equilibrium is pretty natural.
SF has a +++++ geography and a ++++ economy compared to most of the country. That is going to lead to it being very expensive in any model, because as soon as you lower the cost more people come.
A) yes this extremely obvious point that everyone brings up all the time has in fact occurred to me.
B) The idea of adding "500,000" units or anything like that is soviet central planning bullshit. The correct move is not to add any specific quota that some guy thinks is correct, it's to allow the market to actually provide housing instead of blocking it.
C) I think before you posit that bay area housing is some sort of magical thing that ignores the laws of supply and demand, you should at least be OPEN to the idea that removing enormous government restrictions on construction will bring the price down. It will be the case that even with no government interference bay area houses will be more expensive than houses in rural North Dakota, but that doesn't mean they need to be 10x or more the price.
D) Why do you think green space is what needs to be sacrificed to increase density? The bay area is full of 1 and 2 story buildings that could all be 3-4 story buildings which would double the density of those neighborhoods without sacrificing any park land, before we even talk about going above 4 stories. In addition, there are hundreds of un-built empty lots that are full of trash and are not in fact green space.
>this extremely obvious point that everyone brings up all the time has in fact occurred to me.
Well you do have to contend with the equilibrium, supply/demand, etc. And the mushiness of things like this.
>to allow the market to actually provide housing instead of blocking it.
I am not remotely against this depending on the implementation.
> think before you posit that bay area housing is some sort of magical thing that ignores the laws of supply and demand
I am not proposing that at all, I am proposing the reverse. That there is a very high level of demand to live there, and so that increases in supply will not change the price much. it might reduce it a bit, but wildly less than guessed.
>he bay area is full of 1 and 2 story buildings that could all be 3-4 story buildings which would double the density of those neighborhoods without sacrificing any park land, before we even talk about going above 4 stories.
Well it depends on what the current residents want at least a bit eh?
I am actually all for building more housing, but I think a lot of the YIMBY polices aren't very good (for example upzoning SF neighborhoods against their will so developers can buy people out and change the character of the neighborhood instead of using vacant land etc.)
I know there's a housing crisis in northern California because I live there and I know what rent I pay for what quality of dwelling and I know what it costs to buy a house here. I am in favor of building more housing in northern California and I'm glad these billionaires agree and are putting some of their billions of dollars towards that aim. I suppose that if I were an incumbent homeowner I might object to building more housing near me because of the negative externalities associated with it, but 1) this project's aim is precisely to do greenfield development in an area relatively far from existing housing, and 2) I can't afford to buy the housing necessary for me to become an incumbent homeowner at current prices anyway.
Whoa, building a city and only inviting people to come live there once it’s built up is a brilliant way to avoid the vetocracy!
Hard part is all the upfront costs you have to soak before you're able to collect rent on it.
Not so hard if you’re a billionaire teaming up with other billionaires.
No, still extremely difficult. We're talking sums of money that far exceed the combined wealth of the people involved - not even considering how much of their wealth is actually liquid enough to tie up in this way.
Houses sitting vacant also tend to have lots of problems over time - insects or other animals, unfixed water damage, mold. The longer they sit before allowing people to buy and move in, the more value potentially (likely) lost. There's a significant tension between letting people buy the housing as soon as its ready, and waiting as long as possible in order to finish building.
Vandalism is a huge problem too, or if you want to avoid that then you have expensive security costs.
I'm the author of the last link about Christiania Freetown, happy to answer any questions here or on the post comments! That post was mostly from the lens of evaluating how "free" Freetown really is and contrasting it the rest of Denmark, an opposite sort of freedom.
I appreciate the link, Scott :)
A belated update from our friends in The Black Hammer Party bodes poorly for the prospects of Hammer City. Apparently their leaders were arrested and are facing charges for “kidnapping, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, conspiracy to commit a felony, and taking part in street gang activity,” and one of them for sexual assault.
Wildly, they also are under fire from the Justice Department for spreading Russian propaganda in exchange for payments from a Russian influencer, who has since been arrested by the FBI and was allegedly bankrolling Hammer City.
https://www.axios.com/local/tampa-bay/2022/08/22/gazi-kodzo-black-hammer
I don't know man. I'm no socialist, but don't the Hondurans have the right to do what they want with their country? If some Chinese company had bought up the land around San Francisco and was doing stuff we didn't like we'd be pissed.
(A Japanese company would of course distract the nerds with anime so there wouldn't be a problem.)
The Hondurans previously made some commitments as how they would behave. I personally am ok with their being consequences for trying to reveres those commitments. No one forced them to make the original commitments. In the absence of some evidence of corruption or some other reason why we should think the original decision wasn't valid, then stick to the rules that you set.
It was the previous government made the deal. The new government has decided it wants to scrap it.
Governments generally take the power to change what the last lot did, otherwise the Biden Administration could not have rolled back or undone things the Trump Administration did.
I agree if you sign a contract, there should be consequences for breaking it, but it's up to the lawyers to decide if it was Honduras who made the deal with Prospera, or only the former government of Honduras.
And certain actions are made difficult-to-impossible for even the government, which it sounds like the previous government did.
As for "who made the deal": again, absent extraordinary circumstances like a revolution, it seems pretty damaging to international order for them to just say "wasn't us, that was the other guy". Doing want to pay your debts? Hold an election.
Now look, I'm a big believer in national sovereignty, they _can_ so whatever they want, but in so much as they want to participate in intentional organizations, trade, and relations, those relations require certain norms that sounds like they are at least potentially violating. That comes with consequences.
What if the Honduran president guy who made the deal has since been extradited to the US for drug and arms dealing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Orlando_Hern%C3%A1ndez
That would probably make me look pretty closely into his dealings while president, but unless evidence that those actions were, themselves, corrupt or in some other way fraudulent, no that's not disqualifying. Not to mention the fact that my understanding is that the original rules required a _lot_ more than just his buy in. If the president can unilaterally pass things that require a constitutional amendment to overturn, then there are some bigger issues.
Debts are one extreme. On the other extreme you could imagine a government making a deal with some foreign entity that says that from now on that foreign entity will rule the country. Should such a deal be upheld? It's not even different in principle from charter cities, the only difference is that usually in a charter city a country gives up sovereignity only over a small portion of its territory.
Well, at that point overturning it becomes a revolution, which luckily enough I explicitly mentioned in my exceptions!
They outlined a completely peaceful, democratic (if difficult) method of revoking the charters. They want to go back on it _without_ following those rules. This deal as signed doesn't seem (to me) to be exploitative enough that I'm going to feel bad when they suffer consequences in the international arena. Again, they do (and _should_) have the right to overturn them however they want. But engaging with other states and the international relations more broadly requires adhering to norms and standards. Those norms and standards don't and shouldn't over-rule national sovreighnity, but it does mean that when you break them, the international order is going to impose consequences.
I do not see an issue with that. Some things are worth those consequences! And in many cases, if you argue your case succesfully (as they are apparently choosing not to do), you can avoid those consequenes. But in the cases where you can't, you either have to decide if it's worth it or not.
My (relatively uninformed and therefore weakly held) belief is that in this case, the deal was made fairly and openly, was not obviously unjust or corrupt, and is being walked back in contravention of the rules as they were established, and therefore, repurcussions are fair and to expected. The value being sought? Sounds high and I have no idea if it's fair or reasonable. Sounds like something they might want to argue about in court.
There's two separate questions. One is whether foreigners should be able to tell Hondurans what to do with Honduras - the answer is no.
The second is whether Hondurans should be able to tell future Hondurans what to do with Honduras - the answer to that is a lot more complicated, but seems to be generally yes.
Why? I can't see any justification for that. The people at year t pass a law, the people at t+30 have no power to repeal it? Even if a clear majority of them now oppose it, and those people were children or not-yet-naturalised immigrants at the time of the previous vote, and so never get to decide the laws of their own country? How is that compatible with anything resembling democracy?
(And it's infinitely worse if there *wasn't* a popular vote. It seems that under international law in some cases, a government can be elected in a country on a platform of *not* signing a treaty or trade agreement, break their promise while in office and sign it, be voted out in a landslide at the next election...and the subsequent government is not able, under "international law" to revoke the treaty! This is the most tyrannical situation imaginable, and just another reason why "international law" is a cruel joke).
In the case of Honduras, if there was a popular vote (majority or supermajority) to amend the constitution, then of course repealing that would require another popular vote (with the same margin requirements) in the other direction, I presume. If that *does* happen, then the repeal is perfectly democratic and the businesses don't have a leg to stand on. They should ask themselves what they did that turned the people of the country against them, and next time *not do that*.
I'm all for the West promoting democracy, and pressuring, sanctioning and even deposing, if necessary, a dictatorial regime. I am *not* in favour of using such methods to *prevent* democratic decisions by a sovereign country.
So let's separate things out a bit. You can absolutely repeal a law. That doesn't mean you can avoid the consequences of having had that law in the first place.
For example, debt. The U.S. government took out a lot of debt in 2020. We can repeal the laws authorizing the spending, and we can even default on the debt. Can we vote to avoid the consequences of default? Can we hold a vote and say that all governments and companies around the world have to act as though we never issued the debt?
Contracts are ways we limit our own freedoms, and generally contracts make it easier for things to get done. If could decide, democratically, to just renege on any contract without consequences, what do you think the result would be?
Debt is different, I think, along with things like declaring war, because those things directly impose on other countries. And there are lots of important distinctions here that I think matter a lot and I can't cover and separately justify them all. But as a start:
1. If country A (i.e. its government) borrows money from country A's own banks, then absolutely they can later void the debt with no compensation. Just like they can nationalise the banks, or tax them at 100%, without compensation. That's just an inevitable consequence of national sovereignty. Bearing in mind (with the failure to bear this in mind being at the root of my philosophical objections to libertarianism) that all workable notions of private property rely on law and government force to back them up, who owns what is *always* a matter of government fiat (hypothetical anarcho-capitalism notwithstanding I suppose). The only recourse to the situation above is entrenched restrictions in the national constitution, together with avoiding leaving your citizens in such a desperate state that they would have the desire to do that sort of thing in the first place.
2. If country A borrows from country B, say 1 billions dollars in 2020, then in 2023 decides it won't pay back the debt...well I think that's roughly equivalent to country A invading a part of country B in 2020 and seizing 1 billion dollars of resources, and then in 2023 (under a new government) saying it regrets the invasion, but won't return the conquered province. Technically, both acts are within the scope of national sovereignty, but they are acts of aggression against the material integrity of another sovereign country, and country B (or the "international community" if there is such a thing) are justified in taking all necessary measures (including military force) to restore what was stolen. Country B is entitled to the value of a billion dollars *in 2020*, which in 2023 will include appropriate interest. If country A agreed a single trade with country B, received the imports first, and then refused to give up the exports, that would be similar, and an even more blatant instance of theft.
3. Finally, what we seem to be dealing with here, if country A made an agreement with country B to trade such-and-such for such-and-such *every year indefinitely*, or to allow free trade indefinitely, or to allow country B's businesses to operate in such-like way on its territory indefinitely, and then decided in 2023 to simply *cease* following that practice...no more yearly trades will be made, tarrifs will be imposed *from now on*, the foreign business are *no longer* permitted to operate...without forcibly seizing any of country B's property, or refusing to pay for something they've already received...I don't see how they've tangibly harmed Country B in any way. Expecting that an arrangement will continue, and the arrangement not continuing, is not a tangible harm; you didn't have a *right* for the trades to continue, only for the trades you've already made to be paid for. Countries are soveriegn, and that means always being able to change their mind and have the final say on what's legal.
Contracts between individuals, where individuals can place legal restrictions on their future behaviour, can only happen because individuals are *not* sovereign (despite what some citizens may claim); they are *citizens* of a country with a set of laws and a process (hopefully democratic) for changing those laws. Until there's a world government with world police that can reliably enforce its will, the idea of legally-binding contracts between countries is incoherent.
Is a contract to allow someone to do something a debt (obligation) to them? I see the Prospera situation as the government incurring a debt to Prospera - they obligated themselves to Prospera (autonomy) in order to obtain something from Prospera (investment dollars). Taking away the autonomy now would be like stealing the investment dollars, in a sense.
No, not unless Honduras is revoking the previous profits of the investment. Refusing to allow continued profit is not stealing anything. I can't countenance the idea that you have a "right" to force someone to keep doing the thing they said they'd do, anymore than the "right" to not be discriminated against by a private entity. Rights are freedom from force, not entitlements to have force used to compel others to give you something.
Contract laws and discrimination laws are not rights, they are public policy decisions by the government to legally compel something on the grounds that it serves the public interest. This means that (a) in a domestic contest they must always give way to actual negative rights like freedom of speech (in a free country anyway) and (b) there can be no such laws between states, as states are sovereign and there is no higher authority to legislate them.
I'll elaborate in my reply to Zach.
I'm not really sure you can distinguish between debts and expectations. Take a lottery ticket. I'm the government of Honduras, and you, a foreign government, have purchased a lottery ticket for $5. Am I obligated to give you the jackpot if you have the winning ticket? Or can I simply change the rules after you win - after all, you gave me $5, and I gave you the ticket. Do have an interest in the lottery rules staying the same, and doesn't that conflict with my sovereign right to change the rules?
Regardless, let's also ask the follow up question - why do we want this state of affairs? With regular people's contracts, expectation damages are the norm. And these expectation damages work great! They prevent people from just dropping contracts willy-nilly and yet they don't overly punish people from breaking contracts. Seems like a great system - why would we want to only have reliance damages in an international law system?
Finally, what do you think the effects of this system will be on Honduras? If international businesses cannot have expectation interests in their contracts with Honduras, do you think they'll want to invest in Honduras?
"why would we want to only have reliance damages in an international law system?"
Mostly because there's no international law system, which is basically my entire point.
Let's back up a bit. Despite my use of "should" language, what I'm largely emphasising is not how things should be, but how things are. It's just a basic *fact* that independent countries can do anything they want (and can get away with). Absolutely anything, with no reliable way to restrict it. The only method for actually restricting another country's behaviour is war, and that's not reliable: either side might win. The waging of war is itself, of course, among the things sovereign countries can do, in whatever form and for whatever reason they choose.
Now, ideally we'd like to prevent wars as much as possible and so have various rules that hold, as a general practice, between countries. We should remember that these are not real rules but guidelines. Norms that are in everyone's interest to adhere to. The moment we start pretending they are anything more than that, we're engaging in deception and increasing the risk of war: we might start making demands of other countries that are not in their interests to follow, appealing to "international law" as if that's the final word, and one day those countries are going to wake up and realise they can actually do whatever they want. And then war is just around the corner.
So assuming we want to avoid war, we need to be transparent that these are mere guidelines. We also need, I think, to keep these guidelines as minimal as we can. Unlike disputes between citizens within a country (or between subordinate authorities within a country) there's no overriding legal process by which one side can get their way and the other just has to accept it. If you push a sovereign country too far, they might just decide to stop cooperating. Or even declare war themselves.
(If you *don't* care about avoiding war, then of course you just stick with the simple and accurate rule "countries can do whatever they can get away with".)
So, minimal "rules" that we acknowledge are really guidelines. What should these be? It's debateable, but I think these are somewhat workable: you should be a democracy if possible, you can't invade another democracy except in self-defence, you must pay for the goods you receive from other countries (of which paying back debt is an instance, as is your lottery ticket: the buyer of the ticket is literally paying for a chance of receiving a jackpot, conditional on their ticket being drawn). All of these are *reasonably* easy obligations for a well-functioning populace to meet, and are clearly (the vast majority of the time) in their own long-term interests to meet. They also don't contradict each other.
Once you start imposing more obligations, especially longer-term, more subjective ones, e.g. respecting minorities (beyond giving them votes and not committing violence against them), or following through with investments and trade deals you've made (beyond paying for what you've directly received)...you're essentially restricting their ability to be a full democracy (as I described above) and to make their own decisions about their national interest. It's also not clear who even decides these things; an international court or body of some kind, but is this body itself democratically constituted? Do authoritarian states have equal say in its construction as democratic ones? Does a nation of 500,000 people have an equal say as a nation of 100 million? And most importantly, is it clearly in the country's own interest to follow these rules (at least most of the time)? If not, there's no reason for them not to defect from the rules. And that weakens the whole system of international "rules".
And there's *also* the issue of empowering private businesses, not other states, to make claims against a state, which I find extremely disturbing. These are *clearly* not democratic instiutions, and it's not clear if they "represent" a particular state or not. If they do, that state should be the one making the claim, to keep things transparent. If they don't, then you're creating non-sovereign non-states with claimed rights against sovereign states, which are both unenforceable and (at least on face value) unjustifiable. And that again makes the international "rules" neither minimal, nor transparent, nor clearly in the interests of each state.
And so in light of all that, to answer your last question. Businesses can of course decline to invest in Honduras in the future, that's a matter of their own freedom. If, on the other hand, many countries conspire to punish Honduras for a previous decision that doesn't effect them directly, to consistently deny trade deals or loans to them, or even use more direct international pressure...well, that's something those countries have a right to do, being sovereign, but let's remember that Honduras also had the sovereign right to defy them, and to interpret that pressure as an aggressive act and respond agressively themselves. The more the pressure goes beyond minimal norms clearly consistent with democratic governance and clearly related to the tangible interests of other states, the less respect it will get and the more likely the norms will break down, in this case or another case, and descend into a war-adjacent situation. We can't hide behind fake "international law" to tell sovereign democracies what to do, and think that will be a sustainable situation.
I mean you can with enoguh guns. Its all just real politk.
Realpolitik is a very cumbersome way to talk about international relations and doesn't line up with what the decisionmakers themselves say about their jobs.
For example, take the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty or INF. Signed by Reagan and Gorbachev, it banned ground based ballistic missiles. After the treaty was signed, the U.S. destroyed 846 missiles that were banned by the treaty and the Soviets destroyed 1,846 missiles that were banned by the treaty.
If you asked me why, I'd say "Because the missiles were banned by the treaty." If you asked the government, they'd say "Because the missiles were banned by the treaty."
If you asked a proponent of realpolitik, I have a feeling it'd be a lot longer and a lot more complex and lot more abstract. Maybe it'd bring up power politics and vital national interests and such. If you subscribe to realpolitik, maybe you can take a crack at it.
Why did the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. destroy the weapons that were banned under the INF Treaty?
> Solano County has a so-called “Orderly Growth Measure” saying that new building should happen in existing cities and not on empty land.
It's insane that these are legal. This is just an enforcing an oligopoly on cities, when the whole point of federated government is that you can move to a different place if you want. Hospitals have the same bullshit, where you have to get a "certificate of need" because apparently we're just overflowing with a surplus of health care right now, it's so darn cheap.
Scott, I don't know if you'll ever see this. But... how the hell did you ever write that thing about tacitus and stillness.
"The timer read 4:33, which is the length of John Cage’s famous silent musical piece. 4:33 makes 273 seconds total. -273 is absolute zero in Celsius. John Cage’s piece is perfect silence; absolute zero is perfect stillness. In the year 273 AD, the two consuls of Rome were named Tacitus and Placidianus; “Tacitus” is Latin for “silence” and Placidianus is Latin for “stillness”. 273 is also the gematria of the Greek word eremon, which means “silent” or “still”. None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence."
What was your process?
I often look at other's writing and think "This is something I could do if I just polished things enough." But this passage is, frankly, beyond my current abilities.
This has nothing to do with any talent I might or might not have - the underlying territory is just spooky.
Yes yes. I'm sure Einstein said something similar about QM.
This article made me think of a Youtube video I saw recently about The Villages, a "master-planned age-restricted (55+) community" where a developer bought up 34 square miles, built thousands of houses, sold them to people, and charges them a $189 amenity fee.
It's not quite like a model city in that it a. doesn't appear to have a real ideological bent and b. actually exists, is financially solvent, and has residents. However, it is encouraging to me that the only obvious differences between it and the Solano build are that it is in Florida (laxer regulations?) and that it was never billed as a technoutopia. It seems like starting up a city from scratch can be done, and done profitably.
I think model city builders in general should be spending more time looking at successful new cities and adapting a model to match them, rather than starting with an ideology and trying to build a city to fit it.
https://www.thevillages.com/
There is an ideology of sorts, it's segregation. People want to live near people who are like them, but age segregation is the only form of segregation that's currently legal in the US.
Sam Kriss wrote a really nasty piece on them:
https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-17/shadow-on-the-sun
The piece mostly served to make me really dislike Sam Kriss, but people tell me he's a good writer.
"The piece mostly served to make me really dislike Sam Kriss"
I see what you mean. I'm not sure who he begrudges more, the realtor that showed him around the place or retirees. At least Kriss smokes. Perhaps he won't wind up retiring.
I'd previously only heard of The Villages as that one retirement community where four Trump supporters illegally double-voted. Learning that it has 140k people puts a different spin on things - I was imagining a much smaller place. It sounds like it has a pretty clear conservative ideological bent though.
The residents of it have a conservative bent because they are old and rich, so demographically red, but it doesn't seem to have been founded with any ideological goals aside from "build nice things and sell them to people and charge them money for services profitably"
If I were the cynical sort, I might point out that raves are an *excellent* venue for charlatans to recruit dumb money to nonsensical causes...
"But you would think scammers would be extra careful not to invest their own money in scams!"
You would think! And you would be wrong!
David W. Mauer's "The Big Con" is a history and dissection of classic confidence games, as practiced in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. It was the source book for "The Sting" (every twist and hidden curve in that movie is described and classified, with historical examples, in Mauer's book), and it still explains such things as the "Nigerian prince" scam today.
And one of the things the book makes clear is that confidence men ALWAYS feed on would-be crooks. They, in fact, are the marks that the con man's pitch was honed to seduce: "If you help me out with this plot to cheat that fellow over there, you and me is gonna get rich!" And so it was always the slightly crooked, just-clever-enough man with money that the con men targeted. And their BEST victims, the ones who fell most easily for the patter, and sometimes came back to the same scam again and again, were the would-be crooks convinced they were too smart to be taken in by a scam. Disarmed by a vain over-appreciation of their own shrewdness, they sometimes wouldn't realize they had been rooked even after it was all over. "How can I have been cheated?" they would bluster. "I'm too smart to be conned!"
Nor were the con men themselves immune. Even the most talented of the breed, Mauer writes, were frequently broke, and most ended up in poverty, because they were inveterate gamblers who tended to quickly lose their scores at crooked games of chance. Even when they were raking in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a scam, many of the best confidence men were still living hand to mouth, scrambling to set up new cons on the heels of the old, because they were hemorrhaging money at the tracks and gaming tables. (Again, "The Sting" borrows from Mauer's research: early in the film, Redford's character blows a big payday on a single spin of an obviously rigged roulette wheel.)
"But you would think scammers would be extra careful not to invest their own money in scams!"
Maybe some are. But it's a dangerous bet to make.
And the movie closes by making Redford's character self-aware on this point:
https://clip.cafe/the-sting-1973/youre-not-gonna-stick-around-your-share/
There's multiple lawsuits in Honduras, not just from Prospera but from multiple corporations. Prospera is demanding that the government not proceed with disestablishing them. They said it could be billions of dollars if they lose all of their investment or if the disestablishment proceeds. But they are seeking to block the disestablishment, not to get paid. The logic behind the $11 billion is they're calculating over the original 50 year agreement.
Meanwhile several other companies which have suffered similarly have collectively asked for about half a billion with more on the way. But these are mostly normal companies. The largest is a Mexican firm, JLL Capital, which is suing for $380 million. Previously some Scandinavian firms sued for even more.
If you ignore the World Bank then you get suspended from the World Bank which makes getting loans and international aid harder. Honduras has paid in the past. As Honduras receives between $500 million and $1 billion in aid each year it's doubtful they could do without. But perhaps the left wing governments of the US and so on will ignore it? Not entirely sure.
The Public's Radio article has a map in it that gives a better idea of the location. It looks like most of the land is closer to Rio Vista and does include a good stretch of riverfront. The land close to Travis is probably intended as industrial park rather than residential.
https://content-prod-ripr.thepublicsradio.org/ap-articles/35f91416dd7d84ecb03ed08199d87dd5/07bbb1a9bacf47b39d14e26eae47d958.jpg
I wonder if there is a bigger plan here, because a 10x upside is not that impressive by VC standards.
Thanks!
Looking at the aerial imagery, a lot of it seems to be currently a wind farm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiloh_wind_power_plant
So the land is actually revenue generating. I wonder how long those leases are for.
It's pretty hot and windy out there. That's not necessarily a bad combination, but it's a lot different from Berkeley's climate.
> a 10x upside is not that impressive by VC standards.
Right, but the downside risk is much lower here than a typical VC investment; in the worst case scenario you sell the un-rezoned farmland off for roughly what you paid for it (after an expensive PR campaign).
This seems like a very important point which none of the media coverage shows any awareness of.
They would still take a big hit on it, since they likely overpaid and there were those issues with farmers raising the prices on them. Also, finding buyers willing to even pay what it was worth in farmland. That said, the typical loss for a VC tech investment is probably closer to 100%, so I'd say you're right overall.
And to think that the smart people used to envision a moratorium on pavement.
Yesterday I heard something about how rufous hummingbird numbers are down 50% since 1970 and the explanation gave equal weight to cats and habitat loss. When did we decide to, collectively, act dumb?
I don't understand your comment.
All this is, is a do-over. Like all the ones before it - but presented as a bold venture! The "concert venue" is much of a piece. I don't know Cali so will analogize to my state: it's e.g. the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion of The Woodlands (which is now, to ignorant urbanists, synonymous with mindless sprawl but was once a "visionary" development ("Life Form" homes) and conceived itself as a way of accommodating oneself to the need to live in or about the metropolis); which itself was the more modest, hopefully-civilizing Tuesday Music Club auditorium of an earlier day.
Again, don't know your state or what I'm looking at in the photo you describe as "hot, dry, without a lot going on". Former scrubland or range land, former ag land now in the hands of speculators - dunno, but what I do know is that Collison et al assign no value to it. Ironically. What they assign value to is pavement. Sure, the pavement disappointed them with its [crime, filth, traffic, annoying NIMBYs? - whatever] but their big vision is more of it.
Whatever role that land is playing - raw or more probably, heavily disturbed as in the vast majority of my state - it will never get a do-over whether for food or wildlife. (Yeah, yeah, we've been wringing more food out of less land for a number of decades and this trend must continue forever until we're all growing our own food in a trash can!) Nor will the land which this play will put pressure on, the next valley over. This only goes one way. Nothing could be more tediously mundane than such a project.
There was at one time a different strand of visionary thinking, is all I meant, didn't mean to disturb the pleasant peace of the blog: thinking that is virtually gone now - but very much what you would have been exposed to *if you were my age*, growing up in a wholly un-reflective, stolidly un-intellectual family - and had ventured into the library or the bookstore, withal whatever little you could get out of the daily newspaper, in search of ideas much as your followers come to the internet or to you for same. The death of environmentalism is a curious thing but I don't think anyone will ever anatomize it, so thoroughly has it passed away. I mean, it didn't even merit mention in your piece, beyond the usual invocation of Boomer-derived legal, regulatory hurdles that must (and will be) overcome.
Which reminds me that Dave Foreman used to complain the environmental movement had passed from being the concern of "English majors" (he might also have said, gardening club ladies) to lawyers (and MBAs). Maybe it's an example of an idea that dies with the people who had it. That would I suppose make it a suspect idea in some quarters. Beware the fate of your own ideas.
Let me tell you about a do-over for nature, the exception that proves my rule? You decide. People I know worked for years to restore their ranch, its blasted rangeland was covered with exotic, useless-for-wildlife-or-for-water-holding grass. They made it a lovely place with much native grass and forbs. They even won an award from the state for being such good land stewards.
No sooner had they done so, than the state - yes, that would be the same state that gives the awards - decided to flood their land. New reservoir to serve sprawl not yet there, to encourage and subsidize it. 'Cuz what that county evidently needs is a second bass-fishing lake for bubba. Even the county sheriff testified against the need for this, on the grounds that "my deputies spend all their time policing bad behavior on the fake lake we already have".
Well, you might think, something so evidently stupid and wasteful probably won't happen. No, it very probably will; and if it doesn't, it will not be because of anybody from your generation. It will be because of literally 3 or four old Boomers who have the energy, tenacity, intelligence (this is not a game for timid or stupid people) - and values - to fight a dam, sometimes for decades.
I would be shocked in Proposition 13 related tax shenanigans are not underlying a major part of the Solano "new city" development. Having valuations increase is great - but having to pay almost no taxes on it is a major force multiplier. As I have noted before: people who bought property in Pacific Heights in the late 70s and early 80s now pay annual property tax that is less than 1 month's rent for a 1 bedroom in SF - and there are many ways to make this intergenerational.
This is recreating the land bits of feudalism.
How would this work?
My understanding is that Prop 13 locks your property tax at the price when you bought your house. Nobody can buy houses in New City until they've already gotten most of the way to making it a real town. I wouldn't expect the price to go up much after that, except to the same degree that all houses in California go up.
Proposition 13 applies to all real estate - land included and empty land specifically as well.
Solano land in the middle of nowhere has low value per square foot, but Solano land with a city built on top of it is a completely different matter. Whether it is an outright rental situation, a China setup where houses are owned by people but the underlying land is owned by the founders (the state in China), a "city tax" type setup where all residents get charged "rent" for the investment needed to put in roads, sewage, water, electricity; or some other wrinkle - there are many many ways by which the original investment can be multiplied *and* generate income but without the taxes that regular people cannot avoid. Note it can be more than one of the above simultaneously or something as banal as a "super HOA" setup.
Whatever the specific mechanism - the general dynamic is exactly like Dr. Michael Hudson describes property values next to a brand new subway station: they skyrocket. Thia example is a city building a subway but the "new city" takes this further - build the whole city to start with.
It’s interesting how much a radical departure this is seen as - founding a city.
But starting a city from scratch is common in the history of the US. A few bleary eyed pioneers cross a mountain, find a nice river, pitch tent and call it Sheldonville.
It was probably not even reported that much in the national media. On the founding of SLC, the NYT reported:
“Religious pioneer Brigham Young has created a new city, called Salt Lake City, on the shores of what I assume is a salt lake in the Utah territory, or out west somewhere if that hasn’t been incorporated yet. That’s right, it’s named after an attribute of a local lake. Hopefully the city planning is more innovative than the naming department. That’s the umpteenth city to be founded this month, barely even news. Don’t know why I’m writing this, I’d prefer to be a theatre critic”
Civilisations grow old, don’t they.
They do.
They also run out of people to displace. Don't forget someone was probably living in Sheldonville first, or it was at least someone's hunting grounds.
I couldn't find the actual founding, but here's a NYT article from 1868, 21 years after founding:
https://www.nytimes.com/1863/12/06/archives/from-great-salt-lake-city.html
Starts off talking about gold supplies. There is indeed some big city smarminess, with them complaining about the newspaper quality:
"Passing to another subject, the talk is that a newspaper will soon be published here under "Gentile" auspices. Somehow or other, the newspapers of Salt Lake are not very successful as candidates for popularity. The Deseret News, under its last retiring editor, was too blunt in delivering its views -- too outspoken. Under the new regime, the weekly bill of fare is not generally considered particularly attractive nor appetizing. Not that I would convey the idea that the Mormon public is in anywise surfeited with literary luxuries. Without descending to minutiae, the following presentation will give a good view of said weekly bill of fare: "Telegraphic," "Salt Lake Sermon," "Dig at the Merchants," "Eulogy on Salt Lake Theatricals," "Local Letter or Essay," "Bit of Horticulture," "Advertisements," "Large clippings from outside papers to fill up the big chinks, ad infinitum."
Which the above pattern, any tyro could "make up" the News from week to week. There is some variety, with very few variations. Conducted on this principle, it would be scarcely fair to presume upon preeminent success for the paper."
Oh, and then there's this bit:
"An able, enterprising newspaper of the right sort would be a success at Salt Lake, but a rabid sheet, descending to cliqueism, would have some staunch friends, and a legion of bitter and powerful enemies."
And there is in fact a theater review:
"At the theatre Mr. and Mrs. IRWIN have appeared twice in "The Lady of Lyons" and once in "Ingomar." They are very well received, being considerably in advance of the local stars. The lady takes the palm. Both have entered into an engagement for a term."
And gun control editorializing:
"A warning against intrusting firearms to children has just occurred in this city, in the accidental death of a youth, named LAMB, who went on the mountains with his gun, and was brought home mortally wounded by a premature discharge of its contents."
I suppose city slickers and country folk are eternal.
Though some things do change. Heck, Salt Lake City was probably more tolerant than New York City of (certain forms of) polyamory at this point. ;)
Polygamy, only. Not really that progressive.
That was the "certain forms of" joke.
Actual polyamory people get very angry if you compare polygamy to polyamory, since one is far-right and patriarchal and one is far-left and feminist.
I've been in poly situations but I never got that attached to ideology or felt the need to defend the lifestyle. Worked for me at the time but I'm not sure it scales.
I find these left/right symmetries amusing--apart from the obvious genocidal nazism/communism example, you have dislike of displaying women's bodies in media from feminists and social conservatives, attempts to restrict freedom of speech by wokes and conservatives, and I'm sure some social conservative will be by to point out a bunch of ways libertarians sound like communists (atheism comes to mind).
"starting a city from scratch is common in the history of the US."
Sure. As is, the great majority of those attempts coming to nothing.
E.g. a bunch of speculators in the 1830s succeeded in getting Chicago started as a city, and it ended up being one of the all-time great boom cities. Meanwhile though the southern rim of Lake Michigan is dotted with other attempts by speculators during that same period which ended up just being places where some sucker money ended up as dust. Hardly anybody remembers those of course.
It was common in the 18th and 19th century, when the previous residents of the land were either killed by disease, or easy to expropriate because they weren't part of our nation.
But in the 20th century, new cities (in the sense of whole new urban areas, rather than just existing urban areas sprouting new suburbs around them) have only a bit more common in the United States as in Europe. Basically Miami, Las Vegas, and maybe Phoenix, compared to Milton Keynes in England.
Yes I agree about the problems about the previous occupants of the land - it seems all very performative though unless the land is handed back.
Anyway my point is that setting up new cities isn’t that radical an idea.
It's not that it's a radical idea - it's that it's a very difficult-to-implement one unless there's a lot of good land that for some reason has inhabitants that are either gone, or easy to remove.
"When Elon Musk buys a company, its value goes up"
Erm. I mean it's private now, so it's not like there's a market, but does anyone really think there would be a buyer for not-Twitter at $44B today? I mean how much has the value of the company gone down _just_ because of the loss of intangible value (what accountants call "goodwill") from scrapping a well-liked brand in favor of something that is only liked by crypto-scammers and right-wing trolls?
I don't mean to entirely condemn the man, he clearly is brilliant in some ways, and has been instrumental in making Tesla and SpaceX successful, which is of immense value to tall of humanity. (Worth remembering though that while he finagled the title "founder" at Tesla as part of a bargain for rescuing the company when it went through a crunch ahead of the Model S release, he really wasn't -- Eberhard and Tarpenning were the actual founders, before he came in as an investor. It was honestly a heroic thing to do, he put up virtually everything he'd made off of PayPal, and if the DoE loan hadn't come through he stood to end up reduced to being merely well-off instead of unfathomably rich, back to trying to make a fortune from scratch, like a zillion other smart strivers.)
But in any case, it's not like he has a magic touch. He's pretty much been feeding $44B into an immense bonfire in SoMa. I still think Yishan's take on the Twitter acquisition is one of the smarter things published about it.
https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440
I think this attempt is a great example of why/how Georgist LVTs would mess up incentives. Were a LVT to be put in place, positive spillovers from joint development of an area would be impossible, preventing such groups from coming together to develop land.
You can still recover the value you've added to the land. You'll be taxed on the unimproved value of the land.
You're right that you won't be able to just hold an unimproved parcel and make money because your neighbors are improving their land. But that makes some sense, no?
If you want to make money from land, improve the land. Don't just buy land and speculate that something else will cause its value to go up.
I think Bldysabba has a stronger point here.
*Right now*, these investors have spent $800 million just getting the land. They might not have much money left, and they might outsource building the buildings to some developer who pays the costs and reaps the profit, and hope to profit entirely off their land ownership.
There's no way they could do something like this if their $800 million in buying the land was completely useless, and just an admission ticket to the real game of building the buildings.
I think the counterargument would be that in a Georgist system, random agricultural land wouldn't cost $800 million dollars.
'*Right now*, these investors have spent $800 million just getting the land. They might not have much money left, and they might outsource building the buildings to some developer who pays the costs and reaps the profit, and hope to profit entirely off their land ownership.
There's no way they could do something like this if their $800 million in buying the land was completely useless, and just an admission ticket to the real game of building the buildings.'
Yeah. There's a lot of economically costly activity that goes into successful area development that Georgism completely ignores - mainly co-ordination and search costs. All that activity depends on 'unimproved' land prices performing their basic economic functions of signalling and incentivisation in the right direction, and this includes the very important component of signaling the value of spillover effects! How are we supposed to judge whether 'improvements' made to land have agglomeration effects or not? And how much of these effects come from the fact that you have made a building on the land that you own or from the fact that some group has bought up land parcels and is encouraging people to come and take up residential and office space?
Georgist LVTs break both of these functions of land prices (signaling and incentives) when it comes to spillovers, and Georgists think of this as a feature. In the very narrow case of speculators squatting on land this might be true if you take a very short run perspective (and even then I don't buy it - where are the massive unused land parcels people are speculating with in our cities?), but by and large LVTs mess with incentives and spillovers along a very important dimension of urbanisation (agglomeration effects), and I see practically no recognition of this fact amongst Georgists.
I'm having a hard time understanding, so let's just go topic by topic.
I'm not seeing why Georgist LTVs would interfere with co-ordination or search costs any more than property taxes currently interfere with those. You could look up a property on Zillow, same as before, and get some idea of what your annual tax cost would be. I'm not sure why it'd be harder to co-ordinate or search for land in a Georgist system. Now--to be sure--it might be more expensive to buy that land, but that's true with high property taxes or taxes on real estate sales, etc. Taxes make stuff more expensive, that's definitional.
To the spillover effects, my understanding is that these are externalities. Meaning they're not being priced in by the owner because they flow to third parties. So if I build a university on my parcel, then (perhaps) all my neighbors' property values go up. But I'm not going to recoup that value. So I struggle to see how a Georgist tax would mess with spillover effects - individual market actors aren't currently making decisions based on spillover effects, and they still wouldn't after an LTV. So if I was going to build a university under the current system, why wouldn't I under a Georgist system?
(The same analysis applies to agglomeration effects, which I also understand to be externalities.)
To your point about massive unused land parcels, I concede that we don't see this. But we do see massive underused land parcels. In fact, Prop 13 all but guarantees that people do not put their property to its most economically valuable use. New construction can trigger a reassessment.
Finally, let's just note that LTVs would be exchanged for currently-existing taxes. I'd love to hear an economist defend California's income tax, for example, and say that it is less distortionary or economically damaging than an LTV.
'I'm not seeing why Georgist LTVs would interfere with co-ordination or search costs any more than property taxes currently interfere with those.'
Because current property taxes don't mess with prices and Georgist LVTs do. Under a perfectly administered Georgist LVT(big assumption, but I'm happy to grant it for discussion), the price for building something in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of an agglomeration would be equivalent. This is clearly absurd! Doing things around agglomerations is very valuable and prices need to signal that to incentivise valuable activity appropriately, so that we can get more of it.
'To the spillover effects, my understanding is that these are externalities. Meaning they're not being priced in by the owner because they flow to third parties'
Yes, in a narrow model spillovers are externalities. But narrow models are only useful to an extent. Spillovers are a huge part of how coordination, search and development happen for land. How does a developer decide where to build residential apartments? Wherever office buildings are coming up. How do office buildings decide where to come up? Wherever there is economic opportunity. How does it get decided where economic opportunity is? Nobody knows! So everyone involved in the chain above has to search, co-ordinate and then, importantly, take a big risk! Capturing the value of agglomeration spillovers is how the coordination, search and risk is worthwhile. LVTs would send that spillover value to the state, removing an extremely important signal/incentive.
I'm still not understanding. Why would a perfectly administered LVT cause the price of building anything to change? If you want to build in an economically valuable area, then you have to outbid the other people who also want to build there. That causes the value of the land to go up. An LVT just means you pay the government based on the unimproved value of your land - it doesn't have anything to do with the price of building anything on the land. So if it cost 250k to build a house in our world, it'd probably cost 250k in Georgist mirror world to build a house. The difference is in the amount of the tax bill you get at the end of the year. Now sure that'll affect land prices, but lots of things affect land prices. Those don't prevent signaling - they are signaling.
To spillovers, from what I'm seeing online, they're defined as even more distant than externalities. So it's even more unlikely that anyone out there is saying "I better build this apartment building so that someone else can improve their parcel two miles away." They want to build an apartment building because they think they can make money - LVT does not change that incentive at all. It just changes the conditions under which they can make money.
They lose the ability to make money by simply holding land and hoping other people improve their parcels. They gain an even greater ability to make money through their own actions, like improving the property themselves. Of course, that ability is still going to require searching and co-ordinating and taking big risks, as it does now. The only difference is that if your risk pays off, the money your neighbors would get is now going to go to the government.
Can you seriously tell me you wouldn't build an office building if you knew it would raise your neighbor's taxes? What economic theory predicts such behavior?
'But we do see massive underused land parcels. In fact, Prop 13 all but guarantees that people do not put their property to its most economically valuable use. New construction can trigger a reassessment'
I'm not American, but my understanding from what you're writing is that some current law disincentivises construction. There are likely many better tweaks than LVTs to fix this problem!
That there are problems with existing systems doesn't automatically mean a new system, or even a system that would remove the problem you can see with the current system, is better. Beware unintended consequences. The cure can be worse than the disease and LVTs almost certainly would be.
I'm wary of every change and I'm wary of the status quo. Of course, being super wary of everything is indistinguishable from being completely risk neutral.
Is there some reason to be especially wary of LVTs? Like take the places in America that have implemented LVTs. Are they uniquely bad off?
"To the spillover effects, my understanding is that these are externalities. Meaning they're not being priced in by the owner because they flow to third parties. So if I build a university on my parcel, then (perhaps) all my neighbors' property values go up. But I'm not going to recoup that value."
The spillover effect of the university on home values is a (positive) externality if the land under the university and the neighboring homes are owned by different people, and the builder of the university typically can't capture it.
But if the same developer initially owns all the land, and builds both the homes and the university, and only sells them off afterwards, then it can capture the effect of the university on the value of the homes when it sells them—except if the presence of the university massively increases the LVT the homeowners will have to pay.
Similar considerations also apply if the university and the homes are built by different developers, but they all coordinate about what they are going to build, so e.g. the builder of the university can get the builder of the homes to pay it in exchange for increasing the homes' value by building the university.
Hahaha, a great point! It's like the anti-tragedy of the commons. Somehow putting in a single owner makes everything worse.
I think you could make a quick workaround by just holding the LVT flat for both the developer and the first buyer. Then when that first buyer either sells or dies, the LVT goes up to reflect the unimproved value (including the university, etc.).
Nifty problem though - it's like the opposite of most economics problems. Very fun!
Actually the argument against LVT is even stronger if it's the same developer building the whole city, or at least a group of developers who can coordinate, see my other comments in this thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-9423/comment/39668215 https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-9423/comment/39668874
Your interests in Georgism and model cities are in conflict.
AFAIUI with Doucet-style LVT, the increase in the land value of one parcel resulting from improvements to nearby parcels would be taxed away. So if a developer builds a city, it could capture less than the entire value it creates. If the cost of building the city is less then its value, but more than the value the developer can capture, it doesn't get built, even though it would be worth building.
For instance, it's difficult to recover the cost of infrastructure like city roads or parks directly by owning them, since it's inconvenient to charge usage fees for them. The main way the developer could recover their cost is that they increase the price it can sell homes for—which the LVT would tax away.
Well, IIRC Doucet didn't make it clear how the LVT would be assessed when one owner owns a large tract of land: is it taxed based on what it would be worth if the entire land were undeveloped, or is it divided into normal-sized parcels, with each taxed based on the value it would have if it were undeveloped, but the rest of the land were developed as in reality. In the former case, the developer could capture the value improvements to some land create for residents of nearby land as long as it keeps ownership of the entire city, only renting homes and buildings out to residents; but the increase in land values would still be taxed away as soon as it divides the city up into parcels and sells them to different owners.
Heh, funny. I had the exact opposite thought. That the reason why the whole project to build a new city is so complicated now, is how broken are the current incentives and how the situation would be improved with LVT.
Non-Georgist capitalism leads to land values capturing most of the economic gains and desincentivise development. As a result, any project to build new city requires a lot of initial investments just to buy the land, and you have to do it in secret because people would not want to sell the land that is expected to rise in value - and rightly so as selling such land cheap would mean that they will not gain their fair share of trade. And don't forget about overcomming all the ridiculous bureaucratic attempts to patch the broken system.
On the other hand, under Georgist system, when you know that people are going to develop the land around you, you are either motivated to develop your land yourself to the similar level or to sell it as soon as possible. And you are not going to be worse of for doing so. As the gains of development will be partually distributed via UBI. Entry level for the developper is much lower and the previous land owner isn't screwed either. Everyone wins.
'Non-Georgist capitalism leads to land values capturing most of the economic gains and desincentivise development'
Citation please
Both points were explored in the review on Progress and Poverty.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
I've read it. It does a really poor job of backing up your statement.
Then it should be very easy to actually come with a counterargument and show what's wrong about the statement.
It is, but I shouldn't have to do the job of knocking down bullshit claims. I'll do it anyway because it actually is quite easy.
Contrary to Georgist claims, progress has actually made a LOT of difference to poverty and living conditions over the past 200 or so years. Read this - https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions
And, relative to when progress got started, there are substantially more valuable asset classes around, like stocks. And in fact, the richest people are all shareholders of valuable companies, not landlords! Land values are capturing a smaller share of the economic pie than they ever were (and not too high a share anyway, you're free to look up what percentage of assets are land, I think in the US it's something like 20%).
I am an international lawyer, expert in investment arbitration, and write for the main news source in that field; hopefully I can clarify a few points here.
The first thing to understand is that all investment arbitrations involve independent, one-off tribunals, whose arbitrators are appointed by the parties. For a tribunal to rule, it needs jurisdiction, typically under an investment treaty (here, the multilateral CAFTA-DR, but most cases take place under bilateral investment treaties, or BITs). These treaties basically says: "investment disputes can be arbitrated".
In this context, some tribunals are overseen by an administering institution, which provides some logistical services, a set of procedural Rules, and appoint arbitrators when a party does not participate - that's what ICSID is. But the final decision (the award) is not rendered by ICSID (let alone the World Bank): it's rendered by the BIT tribunal, under the ICSID Rules.
Now, ICSID is a very special administering institution: not only is it associated with the World Bank, but it has been set up by its own multilateral treaty, the ICSID Convention. A tribunal administered by ICSID needs to have jurisdiction not only under the investment treaty, but also under the ICSID Convention. Respondent states ALWAYS argue that the tribunal lacks jurisdiction under either treaty, to toss the case out before it reaches the merits, and there are many arguments that can be made in this respect. A good third of investment arbitrations fail for lack of jurisdiction. (This being said, the article linked above is right that the arguments made by Honduras so far are non-starters.)
As for why the 100x in penalties, I regret to say that international lawyers have not waited for the developments of behavioural science to discover anchoring. You typically ask for an enormous amount (as "lost profits"), with the hope of securing a big pay-out. "Lost Profits" is indeed a basis for compensation, if you can prove it, but most tribunals in the jurisprudence tends to be very sceptical of big amounts, and would tend either to award the investor its sunk costs, or to land on something more reasonable given the parties' submissions - but that's again why you want to anchor them high.
As for enforcement, the ICSID Convention notably provides that ICSID awards should be recognised as judgments of the highest jurisdictions in every state party to the treaty (in exchange, ICSID provides a dedicated, high-quality challenge mechanism to ICSID awards). That's how the investors will hope to collect on whatever award they obtain. Although the respondent state will typically find a reason to ignore their ICSID obligations to enforce, the play is to find non-immune sovereign assets in friendlier jurisdictions. Enforcement lawyers can be very creative.
Final note: other arbitral Rules and institutions exist, and investment treaties typically provide options, so denunciating the ICSID Convention is often done more for domestic headlines than anything else. (Rejoining it, as Ecuador recently did, is done for international headlines, as in "we are open for business".) As the article notes, the ongoing arbitrations would not be impacted by the denunciation.
Now, given all that, what to do of the Prospera case ? In my view, and having not seen anything else beyond what's publicly available, it's a typical investment dispute, could fare relatively well (they have good lawyers), but they won't get 11 billion USD (though that depends a lot on the arbitrators).
Thank you!
(1) Thanks for sharing this! (2) Regarding sovereign assets abroad -- how many of those are really available for a typical Banana Republic? Presumably any liquid accounts could be easily repatriated in advance of any judgment barring some injunction issued during the pendency of proceedings, and for a country like Honduras, barring a stray presidential plane or two, what do they even own abroad, let alone of a value commensurate to hundreds of millions to billions of dollars (depending on the award amount)?
That can definitely be an issue ! For instance, the ex-Yukos shareholders that won a 50+ billion award against Russia in 2014 have barely collected anything, I think, as proceedings remain pending throughout the world. But the hope is always that the state will settle or pay up the award, instead of engaging in a long enforcement battle.
What you describe about banana republics is true, but is counter-balanced by a few factors:
(i) these states typically have a hand in many private sector entities, which themselves might have assets abroad (e.g., Venezuela creditors are trying to enforce against PdVSA and its assets in the US);
(ii) they often possess luxury assets for their corrupt, ruling elites, and these can be targeted, be it only as a harassment method. For instance, presidential planes do not have a great value, but work wonder as a reputation blow that could lead states into settlements;
(iii) All states partake in international activities that involve cash flows, be it by holding Central Bank deposits (now increasingly immune), airport control and traffic fees, receipts from international trade, etc.; and
(iv) low-state capacity states may simply fail to repatriate or reorganise their assets in time.
None of that means you'll be able to collect fully on the award, and this is why there is a secondary market for those as well, with sometimes substantial discounts.
Thanks again! Enforcing judgment against a partially owned state entity certainly seems like a can of worms. When I was young I always used to wonder why owning "part of the company" wouldn't entitle me to, like, just take a desk chair if I held stock in it. Sounds like in the case of (partially) state-owned enterprises, maybe sometimes that actually *is* how it works?
Unless you work for the state government in Sacramento, all the jobs are to the southwest. But there's a big river/estuary between there and the jobs, with a limited number of bridges inconveniently located for this planned metropolis. If you could build a bridge to the end of the BART line in Antioch, you could get commutes down to something reasonable, but this looks pretty nightmarish for commuters otherwise.
'But in fact, they’re talking a lot about “walkable, liveable, sustainable communities”, all of which are code words for “dense”.'
This tells me that urbanists (of whom I am one) have completely failed to communicate what we're advocating for. None of these three things require density (although walkability *does* correlate with it, it just doesn't necessitate it), but apparently when people hear us say these things their brains just interpret it as mostly noise rounded off to "mumble, mumble, skyscrapers". As if traffic calming, mixed zoning, and greenery somehow required you to build fifty story buildings first.
I've had this reaction before when reading Scott's ribbing of urbanists in his Bay Area House Party posts – somehow the impression is apparently that people like me want to pave everything over, throw up a bunch of concrete cubes, and call it a day, which is almost diametrically opposite of what I'd actually want. I have some guesses about how this came to be, but the overarching lesson is that we screwed up, in many people's case.
Can you explain walkability without density? I'm not claiming that it has to be literal skyscrapers or that they have to be concrete cubes, but I would be surprised if you had an argument that walkability was compatible with Fairfield style exurban sprawl.
I'm expecting their plan looks a lot like the top picture - row houses without big lawns. That's still dense compared to anything else in the area.
Mixed zoning, mostly, and streets where people feel comfortable walking/cycling (so traffic calming and shade, basically). Your average American car-dependent suburbia is a miserable place outside the car because there's nowhere to go in the vicinity and the trips themselves are unpleasant. If you have destinations within a 10-15 minute walkshed (shops, bars, parks...) you don't need a car on a daily basis (you might still use one but it's not necessary to survive).
Edit: Of course if you push density low enough something like a car becomes more and more necessary. As an extreme example, if you live in a house in the middle of a desert then yeah, you won't be able to do shopping on foot. But people (especially those from car dependent environments) vastly overestimate the density necessary. Also, walkability doesn't necessary mean you don't use a car — it can just mean that you have the option not to use it, at least some of the time.
I live in the suburban San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, but only about a 15 minute walk from Ventura Boulevard, the main locus of upscale urbanity. I got by without a personal car for a year recently, but that's because my wife had a car and she does the shopping. I can't imagine shopping at Costco without a car. On the other hand, now that Costco delivers, not having a car is slightly less awful than it was before 2020.
But, keep this in mind, I was reasonably content being restricted to walking around my pleasant, mildly interesting neighborhood for a year only because I'm now old and don't care very much anymore about getting out and about and seeing new sights. If I were still young, pedestrianism would have been intolerable.
Also I'm still young enough to walk 3 to 4 mph, so I'm in a fairly narrow age range in which I don't really care much about visiting new places but I can still get to old places at an efficient pace on foot.
Yeah, but that brings in some assumptions. The point is that with the kind of development I'm thinking of there is not really such a thing as a 'shopping trip'. When you've got small shops everywhere getting groceries ceases to be a thing you do, it's just happens when you're on your way from work or what have you. The "let's go get groceries for the whole week" is not something I've ever done. I don't drive and have never felt the need to. And the 'being restricted to walking around my pleasant, mildly interesting neighborhood' thing is again the artefact of living somewhere where walkability is exception rather than the rule — if a walkable place is an island surrounded by car centric development, then of course it's not feasible.
This is a bit of an aside, and I hate to sound like I'm America bashing here (really not my goal), but in my experience what Americans consider "walkable neighbourhood" really isn't great. I live in a middle sized city (400k, thereabouts), get everywhere by bike (occasionally public transport), am not old (late twenties), and I can guarantee you that I'd never trade that for what I've seen in North America. And, it bears repeating, this is not about banning cars. This is about creating an environment where they're not an absolute requirement for survival. I don't want to prevent anyone from driving, I just don't want to be forced to. In very many (most?) places in North America if you want to buy a bottle of milk or something it requires getting into a car, driving, braving a massive shopping centre etc. But I have literally 5 shops within a 5 minute walk. I have a safe, pleasant, direct cycling route to almost anywhere within the city. This isn't hard to do, there are countries where it's the norm.
> When you've got small shops everywhere getting groceries ceases to be a thing you do
That is not true in my experience. I just prefer ordering a bunch of groceries at once.
Plenty of young people love walkable urbanism. The key is living in a city that has excellent amenities easily accessible by public transit. Back in Boston I could access several world class museums and the symphony by public transit.
I’d also say a metro system counts as walkability - London (UK) feels extremely walkable while being large and only having a low % of residential capacity in high-rise buildings
Sure, good public transit helps (and in large cities is a must). That's a major reason NYC, despite having made some horrendous decisions regarding urban planning, is actually OK walkability-wise. But as I said, my main point is that density and walkability are largely orthogonal, and it's certainly false that "walkable, liveable, sustainable" are just code words for "dense".
I'm not sure - walkability seems to me that it really *does* require density (since you need enough residences within the 15 minute walkshed of each business and enough businesses within the 15 minute walkshed of each residence) but density *doesn't* require skyscrapers.
Well, it all depends on what you mean by density. I feel like people reading Scott's original remark — that all of these things are just code for "density" — get the wrong idea, and that was my original and fundamental objection. Some baseline level of density might be required for what I'm envisioning, but it's less than you might think, and, more importantly, what I'm advocating for is largely orthogonal to people/km squared. I've visited NYC recently, and I can tell you, that place has density coming out of its ears, and still disappointingly little in terms of what I'd call good urbanism.
"How would ICSID collect against Honduras if they lost? I don’t know, but I assume the global financial order has some way to make your life worse if you defy it."
Yes, it has, and much worse. Something similar happened to Argentina. In 2001, Argentina defaulted. Esentially they said that they can only pay back part of their debt (about 30%), and that they won't pay back the rest.
Most creditors accepted that in two rounds in 2005 and 2010. But a small number of hedge funds and vulture funds refused. Argentina's opinion (both government and Argentine courts iirc) was that they don't have to pay back, and that they could ignore foreign court decisions on this.
The creditors first tried to seize all kind of abroad Argentian properties. Famously including a training vessel of the Argentine navy, the presidential airplane, and their bank deposits in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. This only partially succeeded (some things were frozen for some time, but not confiscated).
When this wasn't enough and the creditors were backed up by some courts, Argentina was essentially excluded from the international financial markets. Rating agencies like Fitch and S&P declared Argentine to be partially defaulting. Argentina could no longer borrow international money. Argentina's shares were excluded from indices like the MSCI index.
Finally, Argentina gave up in 2016 and the creditors won. The impact on Argentina was pretty dramatic. The Argentine Peso dropped by a factor of 100(!!!) in the last 15 years and local markets crashed. The interest rate increased to 60%. In total, the 20 years until this was settled turned Argentina from one of the most successful South American countries to a zombie kept alive (barely) only by the IMF. This is not *only* the result of having lost to the creditors, after all Argentina had to default in the first place. But the crisis would not have been nearly so hard without them.
> In total, the 20 years until this was settled turned Argentina from one of the most successful South American countries [...]
If they were so successful, why did they have to default on their debt? Or was their supposed "success" just a facade kept up by taking on more credit than reasonable?
> But the crisis would not have been nearly so hard without [the creditors].
I find it somewhat ironic when debtors blame creditors for all their problems only when they have to pay back the credit, but not when they voluntarily take on the debt.
"If they were so successful, why did they have to default on their debt? Or was their supposed "success" just a facade kept up by taking on more credit than reasonable?"
The decline started much earlier, already in the 30 years before that. In the early 60s, Argentina was still wealthier than lots of European countries (like Italy, Spain, ...) But that decline in the 70s-90s was not comparable to the deep fall after 2000.
"I find it somewhat ironic when debtors blame creditors for all their problems only when they have to pay back the credit, but not when they voluntarily take on the debt."
This is a sentence that superficially sounds good, but it becomes a lot more complicated when you start thinking about it. If a country owes a debt to a private company, this obliges the country to make an effort to pay back the debt. But how far does this obligation go? Should the country be forced to raise taxes? Probably yes, see Greece. Cut food programs, even if citizens are starving? What if even this does not suffice, sell their own people to slavery? At some point, the answer must change from Yes to No, and it is not so clear where this point is.
Formally, it is the question of when exactly a country can declare bankruptcy. In extreme cases, of course a country should be able to do this. But the issue is that there are no rules for countries. When a company declares bankruptcy, it is simply dissolved. But you can't dissolve a country, nor its people. In most countries, there are also rules for bankruptcy of individual people. If I declare bankruptcy, I have to give most of my income to my creditors for some years, but I don't have to sell my kidney, and I may keep enough money to buy food. But for countries there are no rules, so it is up to negotiations for what should happen.
Specifically for the case of Argentina, I think Argentina should have won. In the negotiations, a vast majority of creditors agreed to the bargain, and only a very small minority rejected, and essentially they held veto power over the deal as a whole. I think a good rule should make it possible to squeeze them out in such a case, and this was also (conveniently, but not easily dismissed) the standpoint of Argentina. There is a similar rule in the stock market: when a company buys another one, and a small fraction of shareholders refuse, then they can be forced to sell.
The more succinct argument for Argentina-as-debtor is that undertaking default risk is the basically the entire service provided by creditors that justifies a risk premium. Being a creditor is *not supposed to be a risk-free proposal* in general[1]. The fact that Argentina had a default risk (and that you don't liquidate countries in the way that you liquidate companies) was supposed to be accounted for the interest rate premium. That's just how debt works!
[1] U.S. Treasuries get weird, but this isn't a U.S. context.
Taking credit risk doesn't mean you just roll over and accept that debt will never be paid, or else nobody would ever repay and nobody would ever lend. Debtors need to make an effort to repay, and it's perfectly reasonable for Creditors to exhaust every possible option for repayment.
Also perhaps they could have simply not tried to take the Falklands and avoided incurring some of that debt.
The risk that nobody would ever lend to Argentina again (which is indeed basically the situation it presently faces) is meant to be the disincentive for default, though. We basically *do* expect (unsecured) creditors to just roll over and accept that debt will never be paid - that’s what bankruptcy exists to facilitate occurring in an orderly manner. Unsecured creditors typically just take it on the chin in practice.
The disposition of assets of the bankrupt’s estate in partial settlement of debts is obviously something we expect creditors to seek satisfaction for, but countries don’t liquidate like corporations do, and everyone knew this going in (and could and should have priced that into risk premia) Given that apparently the lion’s share of creditors agreed to the restructuring agreement, the success by the minority debtholders is obviously “legal,” but arguably has little or no compelling economic rationale as far as furthering the goals of the general system of debt and credit (particularly given thar Argentina remains a garbage credit risk with high interest rates and inflation anyway). It’s at least arguably a sui generis free lunch.
Mind you, with respect to your last paragraph, none of this is meant to imply that Argentina is or has been competently governed—just that sovereign default is meant to be its own punishment and bankruptcy exists.
> The decline started much earlier, already in the 30 years before that. [...]
That sounds like it would actually support my hypothesis that Argentina's economic decline was merely _postponed_ by an unsustainable amount of debt, instead of being _caused_ by greedy creditors.
> Should the country be forced to [...] cut food programs, even if citizens are starving?
Oh no, certainly not! And that's not the point I was trying to make. Rather that it's quite audacious to complain about investors not being willing to give anymore loans to a country that has recently refused to pay back loans.
Ah yes, of course. It's natural that a country that has defaulted has trouble getting new loans. That's the natural consequence of defaulting.
"the 20 years until this was settled turned Argentina" -- hmm.
This paper is probably worth the read:
https://latinaer.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40503-019-0076-2
Or for a lot more detail on the history, this book:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-political-economy-of-argentina-in-the-twentieth-century/8586B13E42D851AF4605C77A4804622E
Thanks!
> Argentina's opinion (both government and Argentine courts iirc)
This also runs into the issue that the bonds had a clause saying they were governed by New York law, which is why the New York courts felt justified in ruling. But if the bonds didn't say this, then lenders would have been less likely to lend to them.
> Prospera announces another $36 million in recent investment, which I take as evidence that VCs with good lawyers and research departments also think its case is very strong.
I'm skeptical that they researched it all that much since it's a hit-driven business where one winner pays for a lot of losers. So it seems like odds of winning the lawsuit don't need to be all that great to invest? But sure, it's a vote for them having a chance.
Never mind the detail, stuff like this is what has got to happen if we want people to have any sort of basic quality of life. The internet seems to think California (pop 40m/housing deficit 3.5m) has an even worse crisis than the UK (65m/4m). Why the state is not doing it via eminent domain is the real question.
Are the crises in california and the uk, or the Bay Area and SE England?
UK pretty much all of England. Cal I wouldn't like to say, except obviously most of it is no more habitable than highland Scotland.
>Although her concerns seem misplaced
Why?
Jan Sramek is a good salesman:
"California Forever was founded in 2017 by our CEO, Jan Sramek. After moving to California a decade ago, Jan spent time in Solano County during fishing trips on the California Delta and fell in love with the area. Having previously lived in many of the world’s most walkable, livable, and sustainable towns and cities, Jan became interested in fusing what he learned about those livable communities with those old plans for eastern Solano. He became committed to a vision for the future of Solano County. Jan and his wife Naytri recently purchased their first-ever home in Solano, and they are excited to live here with their toddler daughter, her soon-to-arrive little brother, and golden retriever Bruce."
https://californiaforever.com/
Sramek is a Czech. Americans with 3 digit IQs admire Czechia. Prague is one of the few cities in Central Europe to not get flattened in WWII, so it offers lessons in Austro-Hungarian Empire city planning that are worth paying attention to.
He sounds like he'd be a good neighbor. He has two kids, a wife, and a golden retriever, not a pit bull.
"Americans with 3 digit IQs admire Czechia."
Czechia does produce excellent beer, guns and porn.
Not to mention the Bohemian lifestyle...
Just on the Saudi Arabia loan - it's something that companies do all the time, probably for some combination of (1) cash flow reasons; (2) maximising leverage; and (3) the pricing works out.
Pricing: If Saudi Arabia's existing investments give it a return of 6% a year, and the interest it owes on the loan is 4% a year, then it can pay off the interest using its investment returns and keep an additional 2% of profit. It wouldn't want to liquidate its existing investments and lose out on those returns.
I moved from Almaden Valley in the SF Bay Area (2 cars, 90 minutes to work, 2 miles to nearest shops, 4 miles to the nearest pub & Costco) to Bristol, England (0 cars, walk to work, grocery 100 yards away, 100s of pubs and restaurants within a mile).
This is not just a city vs suburbia thing. It's about designing a place where you can accomplish most things without getting in your car. As soon have the city planners have decided that most people will drive to get their groceries, all the other decisions about parking, walking, zoning are decided for them and sprawl is inevitable.
Nailed it. “A place where you can accomplish most things without getting in your car” is the definition of walkability.
Gotta say, I did not realize that "conspiracy" was a cognizable cause of action against land-sale holdouts. It sounds facially like a demand that zero-sum surplus allocation go to the buyer rather than the seller, and thus basically like Flannery are clearly the bad guys here engaging in a pure SLAPP lawsuit -- sue these guys under antitrust or go home.
When rich people speculate on land - it's smart investment. When poor people do the same - it's illegal conspiracy.
https://zuzalu.city/ is another one -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAeMr3Xyb08&
That rendering is just a bunch of single-family homes it looks like. Even as rowhouses that's not sufficient for walkable dense urbanism. What I want to know is: what is the plan for density that doesn't just involve a bunch of hideously ugly five-over-ones? That is the real innovation US urbanists so desperately need.
I've spent too much of my life around both praxis and milady people... I can promise you they have nothing smart to say or anything good planned
I'm interested in hearing your story.
What do you want to know? Milady people just like partying, Praxis people just like the sheen of being intellectuals + leveraging VC money to seem more legitimate, neither does anything with their niche fandoms beyond using them for clout in lower manhattan. I know funnier more specific things about how Praxis people operate, and some people who "work" there, but hesitant to doxx that much.
What *is* Milady - I know it's NFTs, but how come people talk as if it's a whole subculture? Have you heard rumors about Praxis being competent, or is it just pretentious parties as far as you know?
Milady is a subculture insofar as there is a twitter "aesthetic" people adopt when they make it their PFP, and in nyc (and elsewhere) they throw parties, "milady raves," that are popular to attend. It is mainly a branch of people in their 20s in NYC culture, but as most NFTs don't come out of any subculture at all I think it just makes the Milady thing stick out more.
I've never heard any talk of Praxis making any actual concrete progress on "building a city" and am around those people and their friends a lot. I've heard of them throwing parties (and some social issues) but that's it. They could have something up their sleeve that I don't know about, but I assume they would be talking about it if they did.
The part about "as most NFTs don't come out of any subculture at all I think it just makes the Milady thing stick out more" is definitely true. I don't hold many NFTs but I bought a Milady when a cancel thread about the creator Remilia started circulating (one which it turned out was intentionally amplified by Remilia), since I realized it actually had an antifragile culture (between the gabber raves and the Touhou-named creator) as opposed to just being grifters who are weirdly obsessed with bringing the concept of copyright to the blockchain like most NFTs.
From what I know of Milady culture, I'd say identifying with the culture is completely orthogonal to ability to make a city, which means most of the weight of handling the logistics would be on the Praxis end (which I'm unfamiliar with). What you say about Praxis doesn't particularly inspire confidence there though, but it probably does make for a good party/meetup space.
I think this post gives somewhat of an explanation: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/im-cute-im-punk-rock
I've spoken to the Praxis people and it doesn't seem mysterious to me.
It's fundamentally a real estate development. "Let's build a new town in your country, bring lots of foreign investment and high-human-capital expats, and maybe you'll give us some kind of limited business-friendly perks or help us fast-track things somewhat." That's it.
The "innovation" is that they've done some community building and are trying to get "preorders" from people making a (not legally binding) commitment to move there, and they think that this can be used to get more favorable financing.
They are still in the process of working out agreements with host countries (i.e. they've had any meetings but nothing has been secured to the point they're ready to announce it).
I think this is the kind of thing where it's not obviously dumb that well-known VCs invested a few million dollars...but also maybe a <20% chance that it gets as far as Prospera (a real place with buildings where at least some people actually live full time).
"I think everyone is hoping Honduras realizes that cancelling a flourishing economic zone that’s bringing lots of investment into the country at no cost to them - just isn’t worth taking an $11 billion loss, cancelling international treaties, and scaring off future investment. But who knows how these people think?"
Never underestimate the willingness of socialists to destroy prosperity on purely ideological grounds.
This is irrelevant, inflammatory, and weirdly confrontational for someone who hasn't expressed an opinion on this subject, on top of a history of this person doing comments like this. Ban.
Also questionably reading comprehension - how could my comment _possibly_ be interpreted as being pro-socialism?
>Local congressman John Garamendi noticed the weird land purchases, saw they were close to a military base, and spent years raising the alarm that it must be some sort of Communist Chinese conspiracy.
Adding this to my scrapbook of "capitalists seeing other capitalists doing Very Capitalist Things and calling it communism". (But seriously, the irony is tangible)
Hey Scott, Trey Goff from Próspera here: just FYI Gabriel published some more updated pictures of Duna this morning, here https://x.com/gabrielhdm/status/1699052860833509670
This is NOT the Bay Area. Why do people keep saying that.
What isn't the Bay Area? If you mean the city, I don't think I said it was, but I'm not sure it isn't - I think the city limits literally touch the North Bay.
Yea I've actually changed my mind on this in just the last hour. In a very real sense it BECOMES the Bay Area by such high profile conspicuously Bay Area People moving there.
I thought the Bay Area is usually defined as the nine counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Claria, Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Napa, Sonoma, Marin.
> I think everyone is hoping Honduras realizes that cancelling a flourishing economic zone that’s bringing lots of investment into the country at no cost to them - just isn’t worth taking an $11 billion loss, cancelling international treaties, and scaring off future investment. But who knows how these people think?
It should be fairly obvious why a lot of people think that company towns are bad.
The problem is that Honduras is telling everyone around the world and within the country that property rights and contract enforcement are not reliable at all. Don't you see how this may come back to bite them?
You are saying in Prospera, the company owns all the stores and forces the employees to buy things there at very high prices, and the employees are trapped and can't leave?
On Neom wanting loans - I have a guess. Part of why Aramco IPOed was to create proper financial records - not because selling a few percent of Aramco meaningfully diversified the holdings of the Saudi royal family. By being a publicly traded company, there were forcing mechanisms to get the company to do proper financial reporting.
A question for our host, you are generally pro SEZ have you considered doing a analysis/review of one of the ones that have been flagged as highly problematic?
To give you an example of one that is infamous is the Golden Triangle SEZ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_Special_Economic_Zone
To start with its within Laos and on the border of Laos and Thailand. It is 3,000 hectares on a 99 year lease and is owned by triad head Zhao Wei who is under US sanctions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Wei_(gangster)
There are multiple casinos on in the SEZ and it is a locus for wildlife trafficking. There is a tiger farm in the SEZ, where tigers are produced for food and medicine.
Due to covid many of the businesses in the Golden triangle SEZ pivoted away from casinos to being Fraud Factories. Fraud factories are a name for scam call centres, where often the workers are human trafficked in and are basically slaves. There are apparently significant numbers of people being held, with 700 Malaysians being reported as for ransom in the SEZ.
https://thediplomat.com/2022/10/report-claims-700-malaysians-held-for-ransom-in-lao-sez/
https://thediplomat.com/2022/03/golden-triangle-gambling-zone-the-worlds-worst-sez-group-says/
https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/insights/golden-triangle-special-economic-zone-laos-worst/?cf-view
To link the above with the Honduras SEZ, the current Laotian government is in bed with the Golden Triangle SEZ like the prior government. If a new government comes in ala Honduras (potentially after that president is extradited to the US for drugs and arms trafficking as was the Honduran president who promoted the SEZ), what would the host want the outcome to be?
Forgot to include the Honduran president link, but it's notable that the Honduran who signed off on the SEZ will likely end up in a US prison. Link to the two Honduran presidents prior to the one who wants to cancel the deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porfirio_Lobo_Sosa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Orlando_Hern%C3%A1ndez
I've so far focused on cities in particular rather than SEZs, of which there are zillions. I should probably learn more about SEZs but they're not nearly as interesting.
"One strategy is something like: buy some land somewhere. Build some houses and streets. Convince digital nomads to move there on the grounds that you are very cool and visionary. Do some cool and visionary seeming things, or at least throw some really good raves. Other digital nomads get jealous and move there too. Sell parcels of land to these people, get rich, pay back your investors. And then who knows, maybe create a new civilization that redefines what it means to be human"
No idea what you think a digital nomad is. I'm a digital nomad. We're poor people who left the west because we couldn't afford to live in it. Digital nomads can't afford to live in Cali and don't want to.
This is a very strange and nonsensical thing for you to say.
many digital nomads have plenty of money
Praxis is planning to set up somewhere in the Mediterranean, not in California.
To add to the list at the bottom, China has been actively building Xiong'an New Area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiong%27an,
a major urban area in the southwest of Beijing that, once completed, is supposed to host most of the government agencies that currently reside in Beijing. Their ambition, apparently, is to build the Washington DC of China.
"Their ambition, apparently, is to build the Washington DC of China."
Do they not know the reputation of the real one? On the other hand, having the bureaucrats all in one place would make it easier to lock them all up if they misbehave. Hmmm, swings and roundabouts?
That reminds me of Indonesia moving its capital to Borneo. Does anyone know how that's going?
"But you would think scammers would be extra careful not to invest their own money in scams!" - this is the opposite of what I'd think, scammers are notorious for getting scammed themselves
This makes me think of an elegant way to implement land value tax on undeveloped land: the owner has to annually publicly declare a price at which anyone can buy them out, and they're taxed a few percent of that declared price. This obviates the need to infer land prices for tax purposes on very illiquid/sparse markets where there might not be enough data to model the prices, and makes it much easier for developers to acquire large contiguous lots of land from holdouts who would otherwise conspire to raise prices to the stratosphere.
Turns out this idea already exists!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harberger_Tax
Thanks!
Beyabu won't look like that. They have decided against building in the swamp.
Link to more information?
I got this from talking to Trey a year ago. He said that the costs of building on the river would have been prohibitive, and the decision was made to move the residences to a different place. Confusingly, the old designs are still featured on the beyabu website, but only as decoration - the more detailed renders show houses standing on a hill, looking quite different from the old circular design.
https://www.beyabu.hn/
See also the real-time configuration tool demo featuring new designs.
https://youtu.be/roKMH2R4_mU?si=b7teF0IzWkxvbO-R
My understanding is that "charter city" in California merely means that the city's bylaws are written to order, instead of following the standard package the state sets up. It still has to be democratic and legal. There are corrupt cities in California, and there are industrial cities that bribe and manipulate their tiny populations to vote how the industrialists want, but those are 1) small and 2) mostly in Los Angeles County. A big city like this one would have little room for the developers to dictate the charter, which the state would have to approve.
"What’s the strategy that both involves both" - "both" twice is, of course, ironic, given the meaning of the word, but still probably wrong?
> The government’s other option is to have the Supreme Court declare ZEDEs unconstitutional. This would be a bold strategy, since they were passed through constitutional amendment and it seems like the constitution should be constitutional by definition.
You would be surprised then by the idea of an unconstitutional constitutional amendment. To my knowledge, this has been most notably used in India, but also Germany and Italy, Taiwan, and notably, Honduras. In Honduras it was even stronger, in that it wasn't that a constitutional *amendment* was ruled unconstitutional, but rather a clause *from the original text of the constitution*. (This was in 2015, overruling part of the 1982 constitution.)
I have no idea how likely this is to succeed, but it's hardly unprecedented.
That Angel video is really great though. I’d almost invest just based on that video alone. But have they not seen Wild Wild Country? That’s prob their future.