Sounds like a great test case for public intervention to shake up a bad market equilibrium: acquire large areas of land and build new cities and neighborhoods unencumbered by land use and zoning bylaws.
The places where cities make sense are generally the places where they already are. You could hypothetically build the trappings of a new city in North Dakota or West Texas, but who is going to move to a place which is just a bunch of empty buildings surrounded by farmland? You can already buy a house in such places for less than it costs for one in a major city but there is a reason that people don't.
Whereas if you would just rezone the areas with high demand to allow new construction to actually happen there then you don't need the government to raise and spend a ton of money, all you need them to do is to stop prohibiting the thing people would otherwise be doing.
I wonder, could you manufacture that? It seems to be happening in e.g. the middle east where they conjure up a city in the middle of the desert and just... create demand for a city there.
Take SF, which has a lot of tech jobs that aren't tied to any geographical location. Build a new city, offices, a university, loads of housing and make that the tech / internet capital of the world.
Could you manufacture that for like a trillion dollars? Maybe, but there are better things to spend a trillion dollars on. That's the entire Medicare budget.
Could you manufacture that for like a billion dollars? No.
That’s the Medicare budget for one year. Cities have a useful life span measured in multiple centuries.
(I also think it’s impractical to pull off, with Las Vegas being perhaps the most recent long-term conjuring of a city from “not much”, but comparing a multi-century stream of value to an annual consumption budget line seems like a strange way to make your case.)
You'd have to spend that amount of money in one year (or thereabouts) in order to make it work. It's also not really creating much new value so much as moving it around.
All the 'large areas of land' that people want to live in already have dense cities. This sort of ideas have been tried again and again, and it falls apart because people just don't want to move there.
Would you be enthusiastic about relocating if this was forty minutes away from Vegas in the desert?
UK has the feature that you can bootstrap new towns because from the new town you are probably within 1000s of jobs in neigbouring towns. I used to joke to myself you could get a C# job in commuting distance (car may be needed) from anywhere in the UK even in the sticks. (Before remote working boom)
> All the 'large areas of land' that people want to live in already have dense cities.
If by people you mean 18th century farmers or 19th century merchants, sure. I guess you could make some semblance of an argument for countries like Belgium or Japan, but it's downright ridiculous to claim United States, one of the most sparsely populated developed nations, already has all the large cities it can support.
Increasing population merely to EU average would create housing for hundreds of millions.
> United States, one of the most sparsely populated developed nations, already has all the large cities it can support.
That was not my argument, please don't twist my words.
I was replying to the idea that you should be able to take empty land and turn it into good cities. The reason that would not work is empty land nowadays is in pretty unattractive places. It worked 300 years ago I assume.
Sure you can turn a suburb or town into a city, that's how cities appear after all.
It doesn't. But it could. My point is if you offer something attractive besides just housing, people will come. Imagine company towns or things like that. They work because people get jobs there.
The areas where you could easily do something that provides work for a lot of people are already occupied by large cities, near river deltas, trade routes and coastal areas good for ports.
The only recent exception is SpaceX's Starbase town. And they could do this because of a very new 'requirement', frequently launch rockets where you have a south facing coastline as close as possible to the equator.
The "requirement" might be in this case "has cheap land and nice views". I see no reason you could not build such a thing, seems just difficult to kickstart.
Company towns are built because there is e.g. a mine in the middle of nowhere and then you have to build a town to support all the mine workers. If there was actually something like a viable mine there then it would happen on its own and if there isn't then it's still just a bunch of empty buildings in the desert.
