How to build a small town in Texas
Keep in mind this is a hypothetical scenario in response to a real question from real people, so when the author talks about the arid climate of Texas, they may know exactly where the real estate in question is while not wanting to reveal it.<p>It&#x27;s kind of a mix of general ideas floating around urbanist circles and specific suggestions for this question asked of them with specific proposed parameters. In some cases, I can kind of see the logic and see that it was just not really explained. In other cases, I think it&#x27;s basically fantasy, as a lot of such proposals tend to be.<p>Some of the talking points are rooted in the reality that water is a big issue in the world and getting worse, climate change is a big issue, there was a really major power outage in Texas not hugely long ago, some of our global problems are rooted in being too car dependent and too dependent on food imports, etc.<p>The actual situation:  Four guys have purchased real estate somewhere in Texas and want to build a town. This piece likely will fail to serve them well as a recipe for developing a town.<p>&quot;Build it and they will come&quot; has a long history of failing. <i>Planned towns</i> have a long history of failing. See Fordlandia and California City as historic examples of planned cities that failed.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fordlândia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fordlândia</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;places&#x2F;california-city-unbuilt-suburb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;places&#x2F;california-city-unbuilt-...</a><p>A notable exception to this general rule is the unincorporated community of Hershey, Pennsylvania which was built as a company town to provide homes and amenities for workers at the Hershey factory that was built there, iirc. It currently has about 14k residents.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hershey,_Pennsylvania" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hershey,_Pennsylvania</a><p>This is Texas and the author seems to not know much about the state. It has a lot of quirks that set it apart from other states.<p>You don&#x27;t need a public school system for your planned community. Texas has the most liberal homeschooling laws of any state. If I were a paid consultant working on this town, I would put together some information on online education, homeschooling, where the nearest physical college is, etc. I would target childless couples, retirees, etc and make it clear that &quot;if you have children, you should plan to homeschool and here are some resources to help support that.&quot;<p>I would target remote workers and make sure the town had excellent internet. This would be a hack to get around the fact that the real estate these four guys bought was probably not bought with an economic purpose in mind -- eg the development of a local mine. Towns tends to spring up where geography fosters economic development and the modern world can get around some of the historic constraints that forced towns into specific locales, but no one can get around the need for the town to be economically sustainable. If you want a real town to happen here, you need to answer the question of &quot;How will people support themselves?&quot; and you have three basic options: It&#x27;s a retirement community or enclave of independently wealthy jet setters bored with jet setting for some reason; you can develop a local business there that somehow is related to that physical place because of the resources that exist there; you can plan for remote workers as your hack for not defaulting to trying to attract people so rich they can live anywhere (so why would they live there?) or developing a significant business on the ground to attract workers to live in the town.<p>Even in dry West Texas, average rainfall is plenty adequate to support off-grid, self-sustaining homes if that&#x27;s your thing, eg Earth Ships, which can work with as little as 10 inches of rainfall annually.<p>This piece is correct that reducing the energy load for some of the big things, like heating and cooling, is an essential first step in designing a community that has energy independence and energy security. Passive Solar design can go a long way, even in West Texas weather, towards reducing energy needs while keeping people comfortable. You could readily borrow ideas from Middle Eastern desert cultures as well, a source of wisdom largely overlooked these days.<p>Local character is not something you need to inject. It&#x27;s something you need to allow. Historically, it was rooted in vernacular architecture and that is generally speaking local building styles made with local materials and designed to accommodate local weather.<p>Articles like this typically focus on the built environment. This article tries to tell you how to build a town and there are cities across China and in other places that are modern ghost towns because someone with money and power built the buildings and the people never showed up, or at least not in large enough numbers. It may not be completely empty, but there are multiple cities today where they built it and the people did not come.<p>A real town is a place where people live and articles of this sort almost never address the question of &quot;Why would anyone move there? Who do you want to attract and how will you get them there?&quot;<p>And you would, really, need to sit down with the four men who bought this real estate and have a serious heart-to-heart with them about what kind of people they are, what activities they like, what kind of people do they like to hang with, how do they live their lives and what kind of social connections they currently have. This is not being addressed in this piece and the author seems unlikely to address it.<p>Placemaking is not just about the physical place. It&#x27;s about the people who live there as well and the biggest challenge a planned town has is &quot;How do you get people to move there? Why would they want to?&quot; It&#x27;s a question that tends to be given short shrift while people imagine some perfect built environment that lacks all the things they find aggravating in the world today and then don&#x27;t think about the actual purpose of built environments, which is to serve the needs of the local population.<p>It was an interesting read with a lot of familiar ideas, but it&#x27;s not very grounded. This is not a recipe for these four people to start a town. It&#x27;s a thought experiment for the entertainment of the author, basically, which is fine but don&#x27;t get confused. This is not a real recipe for how to develop a real town.<p>Edit: The footnote says part 2 will address the question of People. (crosses fingers)<p>Edit 2: I will add if the place gets big enough, sure, public school is a good thing to have and may be a necessity. But this piece is essentially aimed at attracting the first 100 residents and I think for that purpose, you don&#x27;t need a school system nor any real plans to create one.