A bit part of it is that people like to live either in the center of things, or out at the edge with a nice green property.
That makes much of the in between land non valuable.
New York City has property worth almost a trillion dollars. That would be the economic return if someone could clone the city.
But we can't clone the city. We can only build out along the edges of existing cities. Or try to build dense in the middle and complain about regulations.
Why not grow smaller cities into New Yorks? Because the core of New York was built at a time when we built differently. Cities grow differently now thanks to cars, and it's very hard to build a new old city.
So places in the middle or on the edges of old cities are expensive. There are many places you could live for very little, but who wants to live there?
What's preventing people from making dense, mixed-zoning walkable cities with good public transit like NYC elsewhere? Why it a requirement that cities have their commercial areas mostly separate from the residential areas?
I remember a few years ago I saw a 7000 acre piece of land in eastern CA for sale. The price tag was $7M. How hard do you guys think it would be to convince a good group of people with diverse skills to go out there and start a small city? All initial people get a piece of land for very cheap or free. Later movers get smaller pieces, etc. Like a startup with equity.
I'm not really sure, I'm guessing you could get at least a small group of people to come. I'd consider it if it had a high proportion of geeks, seemed well managed, had good infrastructure (things like water rights, proximity to an airport, Amazon service, fiber to the home, good schools, etc), and wasn't too expensive.
I don't think you'd have to make it free - you could probably make a tidy profit off of getting services hooked up and then subdividing the land, and still providing people a better place to go.
That makes much of the in between land non valuable.
New York City has property worth almost a trillion dollars. That would be the economic return if someone could clone the city.
But we can't clone the city. We can only build out along the edges of existing cities. Or try to build dense in the middle and complain about regulations.
Why not grow smaller cities into New Yorks? Because the core of New York was built at a time when we built differently. Cities grow differently now thanks to cars, and it's very hard to build a new old city.
So places in the middle or on the edges of old cities are expensive. There are many places you could live for very little, but who wants to live there?