I'm interested in building new towns. This is basically a solved problem from an actual physical point of view. We know how to build roads, sewers, buildings, etc. It's a harder problem legally, financially, and socially. This post only targets the social aspect.
Bootstrapping a town is a huge social coordination problem. Nobody wants to be the first one to move to the middle of nowhere. How do you solve this problem?
One solution is to start a religious cult. I'm not charismatic or sociopathic enough for this one.
I've thought of a bunch of other paths, but the one I find most compelling is:
This is actually remarkably similar to a country club golf course community, but with a goal of actually becoming an independent town rather than a suburb of an existing city.
To that end, you'd build a lot more walkable density rather than typical suburban sprawl-oriented development you see in the typical golf course community. And also you probably wouldn't build a golf course.
But the core is a similar idea. Golf clubs are typically a high-trust community with a shared interest, have a shared meeting space, etc.
Let's walk through each step in more detail.
There are a few that are probably targetable, but I'm going to focus on the startup / tech worker community and people in that orbit since it's the one I'm most familiar with. This plan works a lot better if the community members can largely work remote.
You want at least 100 acres because that's the minimum footprint to support a dense town of 1000 people or so. This is ignoring how difficult it will probably be to get zoning approval to actually do that in much of the country.
You want it to be within 90 minutes driving distance of a major metro because that is about the maximum most people would be willing to drive every weekend. There is no theory behind this number, just empirical observation.
Towns like Seabrook WA suffer from being 3 hours from Seattle. People who own vacation houses there aren't making trips every single weekend. Whereas I actually know Seattleites with houses on Whidbey Island that do make the 90 minute trip every weekend. And there are plenty of people with actual 1 hour daily commutes from home to office.
Ideally the land has some natural beauty or views, but that isn't strictly required. But you'll need to make up for any lack of natural beauty with extra work on developed beauty and the social scene. One thing to watch out for is noise pollution, because you'll want to position the initial development as a retreat from the chaos of the city.
You want to make something like a clubhouse. The focus is on socializing, being incredibly comfortable, relaxing, inviting, etc. You want people to want to be here.
There should be a large main "quiet work" room where it's expected that nobody is talking. Everyone has headphones on. Coworking space type setup.
Then there should be a large main "socializing" room that has whiteboards, breakout rooms, seating, etc.
The facility should probably have around 20 bedrooms. If you want to increase capacity, switch some of the bedrooms into hostel-style bunk rooms. The bedrooms are for people who want to stay the whole weekend, or perhaps a week, or eventually a multi-month residence. The bedrooms should be tiny and only for sleeping.
It should have a gym, pool, sauna, etc. Industrial sized kitchen that can support a full-time chef when you get to that scale. Large dining hall.
There are a few places that jump to mind that are getting at the vibe.
The closest is probably the Sea Ranch Lodge. Sea Ranch is a coastal community north of San Francisco. The Lodge is a hotel and meeting center there. It has small conference rooms, socialization rooms, dining, and sleeping.
Another is the Lighthaven campus in Berkeley. It hosts conferences, has lodging, a good mix of spaces, etc. I think it's more a series of houses on the same campus, so not quite exactly what I have in mind, but the vibe is good.
Your goal should be to make the lodge the default place people want to go when they don't have plans for the weekend. You want to turn it into the Schelling point for your community's social life.
If you are personally charismatic and have a lot of social capital, you maybe be able to do this without too much trouble. Barring that, you can get a pretty long with by just throwing money at the problem to get the flywheel spinning. You've probably already spent in the realm of $10-30MM buying land and building the lodge, so what is another million or two? Towns ain't cheap.
The simplest action you can take is minimize friction on getting to the place. Run a shuttle from the nearby metro area to the property. This will cost $100-200K/yr. Pick people up at their houses, etc. Like a private shared Uber.
The next thing is to host conferences with the top people in various fields. You want to start with these being pretty exclusive. Publicize what an amazing conference it was, take glamorous pictures, etc. Make people want to spend more time socializing at the lodge so they can get invited to the next one. FOMO is your friend.
An organization that does this really well in the tech-adjacent space is Palladium Magazine. The magazine itself is interesting but essentially just a well-curated, beautifully typeset collection of high-quality Substack posts. But the parties are glamorous and well-publicized! I know the schtick and still feel the FOMO.
Nobody wants to join a community that is mostly less cool or less talented than they are. So you want to start by attracting some people in the higher percentiles of cool and talent and expand from there. Don't do it because you want to be exclusive, but just out of an awareness of social dynamics.
The good news here is that coolness and talent are so high-dimensional, there are actually a lot of people who are cool or talented on some dimension. You can't throw a rock in San Francisco and not hit one of these people. Don't necessarily target existing social cachet. There are plenty of cool and talented people who are not currently high-status.
You can probably find the guy who is an expert at how Google Translate works, the structural engineer who works for the architect who builds ultra-luxury homes in the area, a first chair musician at the local orchestra — all of these people are cool and talented but probably social unknowns.
The thing about these people is they mostly love being around other cool and talented people. So you're offering to gather them all to your awesome lodge for a weekend of all-expenses-paid socializing with people they will enjoy. They can stay in the rooms, you'll provide catering, they'll get acquainted, give talks and performances, etc.
A few will become friends and stay in touch. Maybe they want to meet up again. Where more natural to hang out than back at the lodge?
Keep this up. You're building a scene centered around your venue and curated set of people. With enough work, even on non-event weekends, there will be people just coming to the lodge to hang out because it's a great place.
Now that you've gotten some buzz and established yourself as this cool lodge venue, start offering a "startup founder residency" package.
The pitch is simple: for X dollars, come live at the lodge for 3 months and build the first iteration of your startup. We'll cook all your meals to whatever fad health diet is popular at the time, get you on a fitness plan at the gym, and you'll be interacting with ambitious, cool people. We'll shuttle you back to the city when you need, but mostly you can get away from the chaos and go into monk-mode to focus on your startup.
This is the kind of thing people can't resist to post about how life-changing it is on social media, so it will help build the notoriety of the place. It'll also result in having a more permanent outpost population of people who are, by selection as startup founders, probably above-average talent and coolness.
Keep growing the community, hosting events, expanding the invite lists (e.g. via recommendations for existing members), etc. After two or three years, you should have built a really solid social scene of people who like and admire each other, and are all connected through the space you've built.
In addition to hosting conferences, retreats, the startup founder residency, you can also do things like publish a quarterly journal (cribbing Palladium et al), distribute tasteful swag (so members will recognize each other outside of the venue), and host events in the nearby metro itself.
You'll probably want to maintain a way for the community to stay connected digitally as well, but in my opinion there isn't actually a great solution to this right now. Discord is too noisy to keep up with ambiently. Email lists are clunky and stilted. The best might actually be Facebook Groups, unfortunately. Hopefully this problem is solved by the time this plan is executed.
Now there's always activity at the lodge — startup founders doing residencies, people coming on day trips to hang out, events, etc. What's the next step?
You can probably build some sort of apartment / cottages / small houses and find people who would be game to actually live there for say, 6 months. Maybe they just want to try something new. Maybe they just had a breakup and want to get out of the city for a while, focus on themselves, that kind of thing.
So you build a dozen units of longer term housing adjacent to the lodge. Optimize for making them a great experience. They obviously have access to the lodge, the shuttles back to town, etc. Shuttle their friends from the city to come visit them. You want more people to want to do the same thing.
Over the next 2 years, ideally expand this medium-term rental setup from your initial dozen to 30-50 people living on what is now becoming a proper campus.
As you develop this campus, you're still doing all the same regular events as before, but also cultivating this longer-term crowd (many of whom will be early believers from the first events!). Once you get up to 50 people or so, you'll find people willing stay for 1 year leases, people will start asking about a more permanent situation.
Once you have residents, they are gonna want commercial establishments. Communities without commercial space feel dead.
The lodge probably has a cafe already, gym, and coworking space, so that's a good start. You can expand it to include a restaurant. Lots of hotels have restaurants, this is natural.
You could also imagine expanding the lodge to include space for a few pop-up shops. Small-scale retail type activity that doesn't need much more than a booth-sized space. But pretty quickly the lodge will be at commercial capacity.
I have a lot of conviction that the first establishment you really need is a well-stocked, compact grocery store. I've been to a lot of new-urbanist developments, and if you stay longer than a weekend, you'll visit the grocery store. The quality of the grocery store is a huge vibe factor in placemaking.
Does it have laundry detergent? Olive oil? Baking soda? Ice cream? Vegetables? Pancake mix? Safety pins? If you're missing even just one thing people expect, it mentally becomes a convenience store, not a real grocery store. A glorified 7-11.
The two places that really gave me this realization are Seabrook and Roche Harbor in Washington State.
Seabrook's grocery store was what I call a "gourmet 7-11". About the same size as a 7-11 but with wine and charcuterie tier items in stock. Great for a weekend trip. Bad for longer.
Contrast with Roche Harbor whose grocery store was, realistically only about 2x larger in terms of floor space, but was a real grocery store. Your typical Kroger or Safeway can realistically be compressed by 3x or so by:
Seabrook recently upgraded their grocery store to a much more real one, though still not as good as Roche Harbor's. It has similar floor space to Roche Harbor (accomplished with two stories) but still not as much density. Sufficient for a 1 week trip but lacking essentials for real living.
Ok. I've talked enough about grocery stores. But I cannot stress how important they are at making a place feel like a real town. It is worth outright subsidizing the grocery store — the increase in value in housing parcels probably makes up for it.
Next up as you grow beyond 100 people is probably another restaurant or two. Since your residents are mainly highly-compensated tech workers, they can afford to eat out a fair amount. But since you have few restaurants, it's ideally something with a pretty expansive menu. The lodge restaurant will probably be a little nicer, so this one will probably be more casual. A diner or Italian/pizza place or something.
With the right 100 people (i.e. families in the 25-45 range), you'll probably have a dozen or more kids in the community. This means schools. You'll probably set up a Montessori school or something like it.
At various population levels, you unlock certain businesses. For example, a barber shop requires around 500 people to support the barber. But a dentist requires around 1500 people. It's entirely possible your town never gets to this level, or takes 10-20 years to get there. So while your town is 90 minutes from the major metro, it's ideally < 30 minutes from the nearest mid-size town (>5000 people) for services that you don't have the population to support yet.
I think you can bootstrap a town from an exclusive clubhouse. You can probably accelerate this process a lot with investor money, but could still bootstrap it, albeit slowly, without as much capital.
The key bottleneck to success isn't money, but community. You can have all the money in the world and fail to build a town if nobody wants to live there.
There are loads of exurban developments that take investor money, build a development, but fail to materialize a community. They become yet another exurban development bedroom community. A good example of this outside Seattle is the Issaquah Highlands.
Consider the opposite strategy of The Neighborhood SF, a social infrastructure project by Jason Benn. The Neighborhood organizes members to all seek housing in a 1 square mile neighborhood of San Francisco, often in group houses with other members. Now that they have a few hundred members, they are using that buying power to start to acquire properties. By all measures, they are succeeding and I look forward to following the project.
You could imagine a future where The Neighborhood successfully bootstraps to a ~1000 person community in SF and then they all decide to do one Big Move to a new town they build in the orbit of SF. This would probably be a lot more likely to succeed than the alternate strategy of building first and trying to build community after the fact.
The proposal in this document is a middle ground. You plant the flag with the clubhouse and build out the physical presence while expanding the community.
A few notes that don't fit in cleanly to the outline above.
There's something about uniforms that is deep in the human psyche. Uniforms don't have to be literal identical outfits. It's just some ingroup marking.
I was recently at a conference that gave out sweatshirts. On the second day, it was cold, so a lot of people wore theirs. It's remarkable the effect this had on group-feeling. Strangers feel like they are on the same team and are subtly more willing to open up to each other.
So lean into physical ingroup markings of some sort.
A portal is anything that lets you know you are entering a new space. A gate is a portal. But so is a long driveway. A ferry ride. A pathway.
Pulling off the highway, parking in a parking lot, and walking up the steps of the clubhouse is not a portal experience.
Instead, imagine you pull off the highway onto a gravel road. You slow down. Hear the sound of the gravel. You find yourself in a small lot surrounded by trees and park. There's a wood archway with a lantern. It beckons you. You walk through it onto a forest path with string lights. A short walk up a hill. As you crest the hill, you see the clubhouse. You see your friends socializing through the windows. A stone path guides you down the hill to the door.
Think of portals in all things!
Porches are underused architectural elements for community building. There's something psychologically different about going to a park and reading on a bench, versus sitting on your porch reading. The park-reader is open, exposed. The porch-reader is master of their own domain, secure. As a passerby, it's easier to strike up a conversation with the porch-reader. The porch-reader can choose to invite you into their domain, or keep a distance.
Every house needs a porch!
I don't actually mean just saunas, but rather, anything in the class of sauna, steam room, bathhouse, etc. General "social wellness" type places. These places are magical because they psychologically break down barriers between people. You're much more comfortable opening up to someone when you're relaxing in a hot tub.
Use these places to help build platonic intimacy in your community.
Deep down, humans are wired for ritual. We have a religious impulse and inclinations towards cults and tribes. You can lean into this with little ingroup rituals.
The best I have seen this done is at Roche Harbor. Every morning, they play an old-timey tune over the speaker system that indicates "ok everyone, time to go for a morning stroll". It acts as a Schelling point. In the evening, they do a flag ceremony where they lower the flag and fire a small cannon to mark the end of the day.
This type of "day bookends" ritual is probably the simplest and most effective. You can get more elaborate stuff, but start here and build naturally.