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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

But, come on, CA has 163,707 square miles, can we just carve out a couple of those, even if it's just 100 or 200 or so (with enough economies of scale to attract serious VC money), in an area that has no NIMBYs, for build whatever you want and let builders and innovators innovate. We can take what's working and slowly apply it other areas.

There are lots of sparsely populated areas in CA where developers can effectively build whatever they want.

But they're sparsely populated areas because they're undesirable for one or more reasons: too hot, or too dry, or too plain, or too far from the rest of civilization.

And no developer wants to be left holding the bag if the investment doesn't pan out... In fact, what happened in San Bernardino County and in Clark County (around Las Vegas) are exactly the types of failures that real estate developers have nightmares over.

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> There are lots of sparsely populated areas in CA where developers can effectively build whatever they want.

Objectively wrong: every county in California requires building permits and has zoning.

I used the qualifier "effectively" because in practice the building permit requirements and zoning restrictions widely vary across the state and they are many counties where these restrictions are extremely light.

In practice, there are plenty of rural counties where building permits are a pro forma formality and all applications for permits are approved.

In practice, there are plenty of rural counties where the county will re-zone plots to satisfy developer requests because they'd rather see the land develop and bring tax-paying jobs than see the land lie fallow with its original zoning.

Even urban counties will change zoning to satisfy developer requests. Most of the new multi-unit residential construction in LA in the past few years has required zoning exemptions or zoning changes. The building I live in required both a zoning exemption and a zoning change...

that's why government can help play a role by first incentivizing companies to move out there. once jobs move there, people will follow and you won't have the problem above.

Back in the early days, the US gov would provide enormous incentives for people to populate the western part of the US, going so far as to even give away free land.

That is an overly simplistic understanding of how businesses and tax incentives work. Money isn't the solution to everything, and "jobs" is not a magical chant that solves every problem.

Land in San Bernardino and the High Desert is effectively free right now and developers still aren't flocking there...even though people already live and work in the area (San Bernadino is a ground logistics/transshipment hub for North America.)

People already work there. The problem is that nobody wants to live there.

What's wrong with San Bernardino? They've got museums, a university and their own baseball team with their own stadium and a nice downtown. It's just a bit high crime, like all cities. It can't be worse than poop town SF.

> poop town SF.

It's frankly going to be hard for me to resist calling it that from now on.

I'd have some trouble deciding between the two but I need to put on an extra layer when the temperature drops below 80F.

Most of the storefronts in downtown San Bernardino are empty. The mall has 4-5 occupants out of 30+ storefronts. Houses just a block or two from the courthouse and city hall can be purchased for $1000.

It's nicer now than it was at the bottom of the recession when it led the state in homicides and gang crimes, but it's still a long ways down from its heyday when it was a nicer city than Riverside.

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