Starting an empty town doesn’t do that. Why doesn’t everyone just stay at home with their parents and just commute into a meta verse version of the Bay Area where everyone can have a fake home?

There's already tons of cheap housing around the US. It's just that a lot of it isn't where many people most want to live.

So we give existing house owners a subsidy by creating artificial housing scarcity, and then we give companies a subsidy to fix the house owner subsidy by starting new towns?

Who pays for this? Productive young people earning income? Again?

negative density tax is the way.

unfortunately new suburbs are an unsustainable addiction in this regard. it incentivizes everyone for optimizing for cars and backyard-driven life-development.

I think it was Elon Musk who made me ponder this. Somewhere he blasted the notion that most of the Silicon Valley venture capital gets blown on housing costs. That made me ponder what other alternatives could be found and what other productive uses that money could have been spent on. It's a fascinating train of thought with big directions it could go. That's an interesting idea about encouraging the subsidization of a town, I'd like to see that experiment tried if it hasn't yet.

Who's paying for that? And why?

Kind of a different use case with needing distance and dangerous stuff being deployed but still probably a worthy bit of development history and municipal dynamics to be shared there.

We used up all the good places.

Probably very difficult to get this right.

I personally don't like living in a city, too much traffic, too many assholes and I don't trust modern police, of which cities have an abundance of.

Hopefully, if this remote working sticks and we don't go back to driving to an office everyday, it will be a net positive for a lot of problems we are facing: overcrowding of cities, skyrocketing rents, pollution, unnecessary carbon emissions, etc.

Furthermore, for people already living in, say, the Bay Area, they probably have friends and/or family there and it's not like the Bay Area is a hellhole so the default for a lot of people is to stay there, in spite of the high housing prices, rather than move to a cornfield in Iowa.

Successful towns have historically been built near some natural resource (rivers, deltas, lakes, mines, forests, etc). Jobs / corporate mini-HQs are not a natural resource.