159 Comments

I love the idea of buying up city property, preferably where residents are located, and then bulldozing the homes (residents have 15 seconds to leave their habitat), processing the debris, and mining gold.

Admittedly this gold is likely to be in the form of jewelery, but some may be in the form of fillings and those are valuable too! This method is likely to be extremely profitable and I estimate that there is a large untapped amount of gold just sitting around residential neighborhoods that could easily be processed and sold at decent prices.

After mining is finished, you can just sprinkle some grass seed on the ground and wait for any surviving wildlife to rebuild their habitats, should they still live in the area.

#StripMineCities

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Not nobody, The Villages near Ocala FL ar pretty much a new private city. Haile Plantation here in Gainesville FL have many aspects on a city.

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People can build all the new cities they want. Nobody does this because real cities includes networks of people that can't be willed into being by fiat.

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Please, put down your weapon.

You now have fifteen seconds to comply.

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The real profit to be had in zoning changes is actually land value. Without any zoning, either the industrial developer or the housing developer might end up with the location, depending on which of them could make better financial use of the location, since that developer would be able to pay more for access. But an LVT is capped by the legally permitted uses of a location, so if there were a zoning regulation stating that a site could only be used for single detached housing, the maximum that the holder would have to would be the rent from that sort of use. There would be no profit to the holder or anyone else by a city upzoning that site to higher value commercial use, since the nearly entire uplift in value would be captured by the public. Furthermore, neighboring landowners have little reason to complain about zoning changes or to bribe officials, because if the zoning change makes their locations less valuable, they would pay a lower LVT in return.

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"In the last sentence you answer your own question. An ownership period that doesn't last long enough leaves you unable to fully capture the benefits."

It's not just a matter of the time period, it's the liquidity of the market. I'm saying that with sufficient liquidity, any time period can be profitable, while you're trying to make a categorical statement with a short enough time period, it is never profitable. That is absurd.

"The stock market changes nothing about this, since your stocks will never yield dividend."

That doesn't make sense. I really don't understand what point you think you're making; once again, you're just assuming your point is clear. Socks are priced at the expected value in the future. Many stocks go years without paying any dividend.

"In Robin's proposal a corporation may be forced to sell a city after 20 years, regardless of how far along they are in the process of making it profitable."

If they develop the city, then it will be profitable, as long as they have a proper buyer.

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Create an insurance for participants in crazy economic experiments such as privately run cities, but try to make sure that doesn't change the behavior of the ones carrying out the experiment, if that is possible. As it is our privatized profits, socialized losses world does not motivate people to let themselves be subjected to commercial economic experiments.

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Justify to whom? A failure could be very disutilitous indeed to those on the ground.

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The world as a whole clearly fails to coordinate to induce ideas like this to be tried somewhere. One needs a much smaller chance of an idea like this working out to justify one trial once somewhere.

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Won't that just end up working like it does with private schools: "difficult" people are kept out, but these people still need to live somewhere so they go to government run cities which become more expensive to run as a result.

Cities today drive out difficult people with minimum building codes, loitering laws, drug laws, zoning, slow growth policies, etc. Perhaps for profits would allow more building of residencies because it could lead to more profits.

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Correction, we don't even know for sure if the idea is to let the corporation sell or to let the population sell. In the latter case the corporations really have a strong incentive to stripmine if they cannot turn a bigger operating within 20 years.

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In the last sentence you answer your own question. An ownership period that doesn't last long enough leaves you unable to fully capture the benefits. The stock market changes nothing about this, since your stocks will never yield dividend. In Robin's proposal a corporation may be forced to sell a city after 20 years, regardless of how far along they are in the process of making it profitable.

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My claim wasn't that "any" difference invalidates an analogy, it's that "relevant" differences do. But without lots of detailed information you can't be sure which differences are relevant, and if you have that much information you might as well skip the analogy entirely.

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"Time enough to develop it into something that can be sold at a profit."

If there is any time frame under which it can be sold at a profit, then it can be sold at a profit at any time frame, given sufficient market liquidity. That's how the stock market works. A company can have a business plan that involves losing money in the short term, and its stock will trade according to the market's expectation of its future value, not its completed value.

"The fact that it's easier to destroy than to create is almost universal"

The issue isn't what's easier, it's what more profitable.

"cfeation can be more profitable in the long term but for that yku have to be given a long term to work with"

In an assembly line, each worker has time to do only a small part of the job, yet each of them profits. You are making wildly false claims.

"You seem to be trying very hard to not understand what every small time peddler or rainforest-burning brazilian peasant understands."

I'm having to work really hard to get you to actually discuss issues rationally, and even harder to do so politely. You are being incredibly dense and rude. You keep talking in circles, and then wondering that I ask you to clarify what your argument is.

People don't burn rainforests because of a general principle of stripmining being more profitable than development in the short run. They burn rainforests either because it's more profitable, regardless of time frame, or because they aren't able to fully capture the benefits of the long run.

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So you can think of differences, but you have no concrete argument for why these differences make a difference in a particular direction in this case. By your standard that any difference invalidates an argument by analogy no such argument is every valid, since any two things usually differ in a great many ways.

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I can propose many possible differences.

a. Cities are large, parties are small.b. It's hard to keep people out of cities, easy for parties.c. People can live easily without parties, have trouble living without some sort of city.d. Parties are short-term, cities last a long time.e. Parties are cheap, cities represent a lot of capital.

My point is not that any of these issues are necessarily very important. My point is that unless you can be quite sure there is no relevant difference, the analogy is useless. And it seems quite likely that, since these institutions are very different, such a difference does exist.

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