There is more than work and housing to make a vibrant city.

That seems like an exception being used to disprove someone else's rule.

Unless they already have the money to exist and live there, no one is going to move to a place they can't afford.

So the question is again - why would they move there, except this time you are asking only people that are not part of the typical job market / economy (because the number of available gainful jobs there is too low; and at the same time no one is looking to start businesses there).

It seems like these types of places are for only the upper class, especially considering that low scale gives high prices.

Or goes the other way, and makes lots and lots of suicide inducing standard units, small in size, with uniform paint jobs, and all placed together. A place where the government pays your rent.

[1] http://www.wohnungsboerse.net/mietspiegel-Berlin/2825

That is:

1. Obviously not true. 2. Obviously not a good or sustainable thing if true.

If there aren't jobs for the people in Berlin, then obviously they can't pay these great housing prices that the OP claims they can. I guess barring a case where Berlin is a vacation spot for the idle rich, but I don't think that anyone is arguing that.

If there are plenty of jobs, but housing is super-abundant, then I suppose you could make some weird case for there being a non-efficient market that's propping up housing prices despite there being no reason for that. And then landlords are, heh, making a rent, not the normal one but the economic concept, and sure, Berlin is super-overpriced for what it should be. But that's obviously nonsense too, everyone knows that Berlin is affordable.

I don't care if markets are for some reason inefficient the other direction and landlords are making less than what they ought to be -- the entire point of this ridiculous digression was the OP's claim that Campus could design an attractive model city which people would flock to despite there not being any jobs, and the point is that Campus is a landlord. They will not grow and become a giant disruptive force in the world if they are not making lots of money. If they build cities in which landlords for whatever reason make less money than they "ought to," then they will not grow and will not make many cities.

EDIT: I think this was all lost in the weeds, so let me play out the whole thing. I am not denying that Berlin is a vibrant, great, wonderful city that is also affordable and is attracting people for any reason you care to name. All I'm saying is that there are two possibilities:

1. Jobs are scarce in Berlin -> people do not have a lot of money in Berlin -> landlords do not make a lot of money in Berlin -> Campus could not make a neo-Berlin and then roll the incredible profits into making neo-neo-Berlin, because Campus is a landlord.

2. Jobs are not scarce in Berlin -> Berlin is not the counter-example that the OP thought it was.

For whatever it's worth, I think that the actual situation with Berlin is that it's still affordable but getting less so, and the OP confused the graph with the graph of the first differential.

EDIT2: In the case of Berlin, you could I suppose make the case that landlords are renting properties for low absolute rents but high profit margins, and that thus a sufficiently large landlord could use high volume to produce large absolute profits. But I don't think that could be the case for a new city. Building a city is a capital-intensive process -- even if the land is inherently cheap, building the structures and the infrastructure is just expensive, full stop.

What (may have) happened in Berlin is that somebody did the expensive city-building and then took a bath on it. Present landlords who are (hypothetically) making a good profit bought the distressed assets cheaply and now are making that profit off low absolute rents because essentially they've profited from the previous landlord's failure. Again, this is not a potential route to high absolute profits for Campus' potential future cities, as Campus will be the first landlord. They will need relatively high absolute rents in order to have substantially high absolute profits.

Basically, Campus wants to build what normally is the end result of gentrification, I'm not critical of that at all, I just wanted to point out that there has to be more to a city than the availability of jobs - there have been previous modelled cities specifically for that purpose (e.g. Eisenhüttenstadt) which turned out rather boring.

As for Berlin, it's isolated position during the cold war/much abandoned property after reunification led to rents being quite low, which attracted creative types - who probably couldn't afford to live at Campus. The vast availability unclaimed spaces after the wall came down enabled them to try all different kind of things, there was a niche for everyone. To pull that of you need a certain density - Leipzig just barely does that, but many other East German cities are rotting away and experiencing an exodus because there is not the critical mass of people. But I also think the Hobrecht-Plan plays into it by providing dense and flexible city spaces - areas where those structures are preserved are the most popular today.

To get back to the original point, the target audience of Campus will rather move to a place they find desirable and find/create jobs there than to move to a place that has no other appeal than a job.

This definitely warps the jobs-to-housing relationship, and is hard to account for in any predictions because it's not strictly logical.

Even then, it would only have potential if it filled a bunch of other checkboxes of desirable qualities people wanting for those companies might want which are not filled by established cities, like great outdoor activities nearby, proximity to large cities, extremely low property costs ...

What I'm reading / glancing over is that they want to create campusses, modeled after some SF software company headquarters. That would only work in SF, because said software companies aren't going to move out of SF anytime soon. Even then they'd stick to bigger cities where the jobs are.

So, yes building in the middle of nowhere reduces your costs. Mostly because land is cheap, but also other reasons. The thing is, those reasons are both cause an effect of the higher value of those houses. people will pay through the nose to live in a roach infested box in central London, Manhattan & San Francisco fro precisely those reasons. These places have people, jobs, vibrancy and the tangle of all these that makes it very to build on a large scale but give these places an unmistakably organic feel.

See my reply to commenter below. I for one don't believe ideas are worth nothing, and am willing to pay for ideas/information useful to me.

Ideas may be worth something, but how would the market for them work?

This includes various classes of challenge, including the Ideation Challenge:

"An InnoCentive Ideation™ Challenge is a broad question formulated to obtain access to new ideas, similar to a global brainstorm for producing a breakthrough idea or market survey which may include ideas for a new product line, a new commercial application for a current product, or even a viral marketing idea to recruit new customers. Ideation™ Challenge submissions are typically about two written pages, and Seekers receive a non-exclusive, perpetual license to use all submissions."

I realize there isn't a very efficient market for ideas, and I have difficulty understanding why. I suppose other market participants are just not like me in being interested to buy them, but I suspect a reasonable number of similar people exist. My 6-second guess about the situation is that the market for ideas is inefficient because the small percentage of people willing to buy ideas is difficult to market to and ideas are not equally useful to each person.

I have once upset an acquaintance because he felt that I stole his idea. After that incident, I have actually started to ask people not to tell me their ideas unless they are cool with me possibly using them some day. Otherwise, I just risk making enemies with very little upside.

Also, enough information can be given in advance that I'd be able to filter out ideas that I'm not interested in pursuing. General industry it's in, whether or not it's legal, etc.

I have plenty of information/ideas that would be valuable to software engineers, so I know that there exist scenarios in which information/ideas are valuable. I would've benefitted from the same information/ideas a few years back, and I suspect there's more ideas I don't have yet that would provide more gains. However, as I mentioned in another post, not many people willing to pay for information/ideas so I've had difficulty finding buyers.

I don't understand why this is getting downvoted (not that it matters much). I'm totally serious. Ask a question if something isn't clear.