Comment by metalman

It's not particularly difficult to start a new city.

The government simply asks large companies to open offices/factories in the new city in exchange for tax breaks/subsidies. Or give funding to a university to open a satellite campus. All you need is a promise for like 20k people to initially move. Then the government builds roads and utility networks. Private developers will also build housing if given the right financial incentive.

The 20k people will automatically lead to the same number moving in due to cheap housing, or for creating every day businesses, hospitals, schools etc. Within a couple of years you can setup up a feedback loop where the population is growing at 5-10% every year. There is no need to force anyone to do anything. Financial incentives are enough.

Starting a city is easy, growing it into a real city is the hard part. If you look at the fastest growing cities of the last decades, they had economic freedom or booming industries, nothing that requires authoritarianism.

The western approach would almost certainly be a public-private partnership; we do that with all meaningful infra projects, where multiple industry consortia put together proposals and then one is selected to move forward. For example, for the ION Light Rail in Waterloo Region (~$1B), the winning consortium was composed of engineering and construction firms/consultants, a operations company that would run the system, plus a financier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandLinq

That said, for a project the scale of building a city, I can imagine it might actually be faster and more efficient for the government to just plan and build everything itself and then sell it off to private entities later.

Honestly, if you build transit, developers will build.

I wouldn't call it "building a city", but if you look at Northern Virginia today, you'll find that vertical districts are popping up along the Silver Line metro that now extends past Dulles airport.

At the end of the metro, there is literally a "town center" residential area on one side with buildings around 5 stories tall. On the other side of the tracks is literally fields, but the roads have been laid out like Sim City with empty plots and developers are now beginning to construct buildings starting from the outside perimeter first, working their way toward the metro station.

Throughout the DC suburbs, you will find densely populated areas with relatively tall vertical buildings (15-20 stories) that simply were not there 20 years ago. Reston is a good example. I've watched 4-6 buildings (over 10 stories) get built in Reston alone. They mostly started when the the metro line was finished.

City of Irvine corp and California Forever corp are two examples. But billionaires in the US are constrained by everyone else. The power of democracy is strength in numbers and we have them now though we didn’t fifty years ago.

Quick note that several cities were built from scratch in the UK in the 20th century. E.g. Milton Keynes. (City using the American definition, not the cathedral thing).

They have been underbuilding compared to their population trends as we see their prices continue to skyrocket

Hrmm. What data source can I see to demonstrate this? I looked at a chart I have referenced before that shows nationwide USA housing starts over the last 20 years ranging from 2 to 8 per 1000 people. Then I searched for one for Canada and found one suggesting 1-2 per 1000 since 2005. And, evidently, the situation in Canada as developed/deteriorated to the extent there's a whole subreddit for the canadian housing crisis?

> Canada saw fast growth of cities back then.

It still does—Vancouver and Calgary have both almost doubled in population over the past 30 years [0] [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Vancouver#Demographics

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Calgary#Civic_...

> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.

I would like to pushback on this assumption. I made that point because you mentioned Canada and its rapid immigration rise in the last 5 years. Western countries, namely Canada can do a lot to build more to ease the pressures on its housing demand.

Vast amounts of land is available to build amazing cities. There are specialist architect firms that can plan the most beautiful, walkable, livable, affordable cities very close to major hubs and metros currently.

In the 50s/60s/70s these very Western countries, spent a lot and built all kinds of infrastructure which led to meaningful increases in quality of life and perhaps created the most prosperous generation in these countries.

Even now when any government in the West wants to really do something, they don't really care about anything and it gets done, the money magically appears, the votes are found no matter how unpopular it may be. But for some reason building infrastructure, housing, mass transit has been completely forgotten.

The real bottlenecks are governance, bureaucracy, and NIMBYism. Like a few comments above pointed out, its keeping boomers happy with their high property values at the expense of the young.

Some things just don't make sense to me as an outsider. A few examples I read recently.

[1] It will take three decades to turn an 18-mile stretch of the A66 road in northern England into a dual carriageway. [2] It will take 20+ years just to add another runway at Heathrow London and cost $64 Billion Dollars! [3] While Dubai is building a brand new whole airport for $35 Billion, I think the worlds largest when its finished.

Nearly all of the political problems in Canada, UK, Australia and much of the US (NYC,SF, etc.) will completely go away if they had the "Build, Baby Build" attitude. Just build housing like there is no tomorrow.

There is no such thing as an "oversupply" of a basic human need, livable shelter.

I can assure you, knowing how Asian countries like China approach governance, Chinese cities will have no major issues in 50+ years. Any outstanding issues will will resolved well before they start to become a problem with various 5-10 year plans. The same for Malaysia, Singapore etc.

[1] https://archive.md/PcOZV

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-chooses-heathrow-airport...

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/29/dubais-ruler-ann...

> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.

This is generally true, but Indonesia is neither