alt Hacker NewsDumb question, many cities suffer from extremely high property (i.e. land) prices. I understand the NIMBY barrier. But I don't understand why it isn't more common to simply.. start a new city. Especially in countries like Australia where property prices are sky high and alternative places for setting up a new city are abundant. Maybe internet connectivity was previously a barrier, but now.. starlink.
I put this question to grok; its response:
> Unfortunately, Australia's legal, regulatory, financial, and practical systems make this extremely difficult (bordering on impossible at any meaningful scale).
Crazy that the reason we can't have an order-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of the most important thing people need (shelter) is not due to resource constraints, but man-made ones.
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You can't start a new city. I city exists for all the things you can do. Your new city will have nothing to do because nobody lives there and there are no jobs to attract anyone to move.
that is why we build suburbs - they get anound this by being right next to a place with everything you want in a city
In this hypothetical, who is the individual or group of people that you envision would take the initiative to start a new city? What is their incentive to do so?
Water. You need clean water to grow a city. There isn't much of that to spread around anymore.
You can, but it is damn difficult.
Why would you think that the same thing preventing density and new development in cities won’t stop your new city from growing before any building taller than 2 stories is built?
You might enjoy the novel A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute.
People move to where there is jobs and money. You can't build the housing first, in our society you need capitalists to invest into building businesses to make people want to move there. And because we have spent decades killing small business in favor of corporations, you need corporations to decide to build where there are no people and they have to pay a small short term premium to attract workers. Except corporations don't like doing that because it is a longer term investment and they are worried about next quarter's numbers and maximizing executive level bonuses which means short term planning.
There is no shortage of cheaper existing cities in Australia, but everyone wants to live in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth.
The existing smaller cities just slowly wither.
Existing homeowners of the capitals have little interest in real estate prices dramatically dropping - would you?
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> Crazy that the reason we can't have an order-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of the most important thing people need (shelter) is not due to resource constraints, but man-made ones.
You say that as though reduction in cost of housing is a universal desire, but it isn't.
Suppose a couple of years ago you took a $500,000 loan to buy a $700,000 house, which you'll be paying off for the next 10 years. Would you like the market value of your house to decline substantially during that time?
If there's enough of the population bought into property, it won't be politically feasible to allow the value of homes to decline.