The service industry will commute 60 miles via underground tunnel to and from the utopia. All citizen shall agree in writing to disagree on principles. Criminals, and would-be criminals, will not be allowed to enter the city. The women will be very pneumatic.
This comment is neither funny or related to the article. I was hoping the top rated comment would be something that thoughtfully engaged or critiqued the original post.
It's a satirical comment. It recreates the style of the article and mixes in some suitable rhetoric to highlight how ... well ... utopian your scheme is.
How? The city aims to be a low-cost way of living, and Hackertopia a for-profit entity with a surplus to enable donation to charities. Where does the city's revenue come from? I doubt the property taxes being levied are going to generate sufficient revenue for infrastructure, payment of civil servants (which I didn't see mention of), donations to charities and profit.
Further, if everybody that founds the city brings their own jobs, then who's going to set up the local economy? What funds the initial city development? Where does the power come from? How much are the utility bills? Who do I buy my high speed internet from?
Clearly a lot of thought has gone into this, but I highly doubt that enough thought has. It effectively claims to be the answer to everything, but nothing ever is.
Utilities (power/water/internet) would be funded like any other real estate development.
The cities revenues come from real estate taxes. I do think that most cities spend their money in a wildly inefficient manner, and if they were run as for-profit businesses they could provide all the essential services and turn a profit.
But the major upside for the investors in the city corporation would be if the city owns far more land than the initial development. If you buy ten square miles of undeveloped land for $10k an acre, then a city of 25k grows up in one square mile of it, that remaining nine square miles is far, far more valuable than the original purchase price.
I disagree with most of his ideas, but I love the beginning idea: starting a new city from the ground up.
EDIT: If we're going to make new and arbitrary rules for this place, wouldn't it be cool if there was a cap on business that only allowed for them to employ 30 people or less? Small businesses that are highly specialized working together instead of large corporations who have huge amounts of divided workforces.
Am I the only one that takes issue with the whole "democratic municipal governments can't work" stance? Corporations shouldn't be run as democracies (with their employees as voters) because the goal of a company is to profit, not to make its employees happy. But cities should have a primary goal of furthering the wellbeing of its residents, and without democratic checks, the city government can create policies that serve only its own coffers.
Imagine you're running the corporation that governs the city. Your aim is to maximize profits. You do this by under-serving and over-taxing your residents, but not so much that they're pushed to move away. Because moving, buying property, and changing jobs or schools is time-consuming, expensive, and stressful, once you've got residents, the amount of tax-hikes or service cuts people are willing to tolerate before leaving your city might actually be quite high. This sounds like a terrible place to live.
As a profit maximizing CEO, I would have to mollify your concerns, otherwise no one would move to the city and I would make no profits.
When buying property in Hackertopia, the tax rate would be fixed at the time of purchase. The property valuation (and thus the total amount of taxes) could fluctuate of course. The valuation would be set by a variation of the old two people dividing the pie trick. One party (perhaps the homeowner) would set a valuation for the house. The other party (the city) would have the option of buying back the property at that price.
The property ownership contract would also guarantee that the provision of vital services (electricity, gas, water, etc) be provided at non-extortionate prices (perhaps the contract would specify that the price could be no greater than cost plus 30%). Thus city government would be contractually banned from charging $1k a month for water as back door property tax.
Since the city is making money off of property values, it has an incentive to provide common services such as roads and parks that increase property prices.
A company that screws over its customers or makes promises it then revokes will not be a highly profitable company for long. For a city to be profitable, and to maintain high property, it must continually attract new residents. If the city gains a reputation for screwing its residents, demand for property will plummet, property prices will drop, tax revenues will fall, and profits will fall.
The more the city government thinks about long term profits rather than short term profits the better life will be for the residents. Ideally, the corporate charter would have some tweaks to make the corporation even more future oriented than most corporations. For instance, all stock in the company could be restricted stock that is nontransferable until the owner has owned it for ten years. Executives would also receive dividend paying, non-transferable stock instead of stock options or a pension.
Jane Jacobs is essential reading for anyone interested in city planning. A lot of the physical layout and design of 'hackertopia' (layouts encouraging people to interact, emphasis on multi-modal development, de-emphasis on cars) seem influenced by her work. The Death and Life of American Cities is a good place to start.
I think that the average abduction would be significantly harder without the use of an automobile, with many more opportunities for someone to see / apprehend / alert of the guy carrying a screaming / unconscious / bound child.
In the US, abductions are also very rare. I think the last average I saw was 800,000 a year. Of those, about half were family abductions. After factoring in runaways, accidents, etc., the number of abductions was down to a quarter, or something like 200,000. In a population of over 300,000,000, that's pretty rare indeed (though I admit, high enough to be concerned with in a metropolitan area).
Only 21,000 (oops, originally wrote 58,000 which was wrong) were stranger abductions (http://www.ygoy.com/index.php/child-abduction-statistics/). Only 115 were "sterotypical kidnappsings" ( child is detained overnight, transported atleast 50 miles, held for ransom or intended to be kept permanently or killed).
Thank you -- I think that's the link I was ad-hoccing numbers from, but I couldn't find it.
58,000 is indeed a much lower number than I was even putting forth, though again, as irrational a fear as I know it to be, it's still a consideration for how far my daughter is allowed to go, and the time of her curfew.
21,000 is actually higher than I thought. Very roughly, the average kid has a 0.5% chance of being abducted by a stranger by the time they are 18. That's much higher than I would expect, I personally don't know of anyone who was ever abducted by a stranger as a kid. But maybe it's happened more than I know, it's not something people will generally talk about.
21,000 stranger abductions / 74 million kids under 18 = .000289 = 0.03% chance of being abducted per year
(1-.03%) = 99.97% chance of not being abducted in a given year
.9997^14 = 99.6% chance of not being abducted in 14 straight years (from age 4 through 17, assuming kids under 4 are virtually never left alone).
Thus there is a 0.4% chance of being abducted by a stranger by age 18. Of those <1% suffer injury or death. But about half suffer some form of sexual abuse. The other half are unharmed. So the chance of having a traumatic abduction by the time a child reaches 18 is ~0.2% or 1 out of 500.
"A house can be built for as cheaply as $70k" Not in california. I looked into building a house, and was given an estimate of $300-500K just for permits!
The other bit, of course, is in building materials. I'm guessing the bust has slowed down construction significantly, but you're still likely to have to pay higher costs on things like lumber, brick, sheet rock, et al than you would have to pay in Tennessee or Wyoming.
