How to build a small town in Texas

The author is half correct in saying that we've forgotten how to build towns. It's better to say, the creation of new towns have become economically obsolete. Their niche is gone. Historically, towns formed organically around sources of value, such as farmland or rivers or mines or whatever, where many people making a living in the same region benefited from being in walking proximity, which enabled commerce. That concern just doesn't exist today, due to cars.

You don't need a town with an inn when the truckers stay at motels and rest stops. You don't need a town square when people shop at the big box store on the highway and local producers are part of a complex global supply chain.

East Texas has a huge logging and tree farming industry, so if you're building in East Texas, you'll probably want to leverage the natural resources; rammed earth doesn't quite make sense there.

Also, and this is my personal opinion, I do not believe it is possible to create a successful, large town without vehicles or air conditioning here, it isn't practical, and it isn't in the culture. If you look at the history of success of Texas towns, many further West and South/South East did not become successful until the advent of the vehicle and the air conditioner. The idea of lugging groceries for even a 150m walk in this weather sounds miserable. I recommend the author looks more local to find out what makes Texas towns tick rather than global, because while there's great ideas from around the world that could be imported, you shouldn't discount the local maxima.

So far I have only made it through half of this, but it is clear this person has not ever spent any amount of time on a farm or a ranch or in any part of Texas (west or not).

Food production is smelly and dirty. You don't want to live upwind of a gin or feed lot. In west Texas you don't build high because of wind. For such an arid place they sure are banking on having access to a shit ton of water.

There is a huge aquifer that most of the places out on the High Plains of Texas pump from. It's use is contentious, but your not going to be surviving off of a 3 acre playa lake.

In West Texas? Which has no trees? "Sustainable", right.

What this guy is missing is that small towns were originally service centers for surrounding farms. When 60% of the population worked in agriculture, towns were needed as distribution points for goods and services. With under 2% of the US population working in agriculture, that function is gone. Plus, between WalMart and Amazon, distribution no longer requires a town.

https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/

How will you legally be allowed to build this car-free town?

Even in Texas you can't just build whatever you want wherever you want. Every city and most counties have minimum lot sizes, road, sewer, power, and fire code requirements that would completely defeat any effort to build a medieval european village in the US.

In terms of location, you need to be 5-7 miles away from any existing city to be outside of it's ETJ. Any closer and you're probably going to be subject to the zoning laws of that city.

In theory you could pull this off if you could get a critical mass in an unincorporated area and then incorporate a town so that the new town sets the development laws to allow this pattern of development, but you normally need anywhere from 200 to 2000 people to get that started, and until that time the county rules dictate.

One potential hack is to build the town as a condominium complex, so the entire thing is considered one apartment/condo building, even though the design is nothing like a normal apartment/condo. Another is to treat it as a trailer park, but you probably have to do a phase of development where the buildings are small pier-and-beam structures that can pass as "not permanently attached" to the land.

In short: At this point the design principles of historic and modern urbanism are generally well understood and not that interesting. The primary obstacle to these practices being brought back is that they're utterly illegal in North America, and the plausible routes around that illegality make the economics - which would already be challenging - substantially more difficult.

Let's Build A Traditional City (And Make A Profit) (2013)

https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php

...which was also discussed on the HN front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111406

There is also a sequel post:

Let's Build A Village From A Parking Lot (2015)

https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20151203.php

Great: the burning of solid fuels (coal in the past, but nowadays mostly wood at least in the US) is the source of one of the most damaging forms of pollution (particulate) these years, which is the reason that for example fireplaces and wood stoves have been banned in new construction in the Bay Area since 2005.

I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that we'll never learn all the fun, new problems that his grand plan would introduce.

Pretty amusing to leave whatever the correct word for "Anglo-American-colonial" is out of this list.

> It should look like it was founded and laid down in 1667 or 1746, not 2022.

Large parts of West Texas were not settled until after the Civil War (with gridded streets of course), making "historical authenticity" a bit of a challenge. But building a "new" horse-compatible late 19th century Texas town with wide streets and big lots would be hard enough already, so I definitely respect the gusto here.

Of course going through the process of trying to get a permit for a small home remodel will destroy any enthusiasm one would have to work with any bureaucracy made me quickly forget of the ambition. During that brief period though, I did learn about different efforts out there (some now defunct, ex Google's) of re-imaging the modern city. I do hope some desolate plots of land now become economically viable post-covid and become experimental zones for new ideas and small communities.

https://ellenbrook.com.au/

EDIT (as I feel I was overly snarky): I don't think there's anything wrong with thought experiments like this, and I've wondered to myself what a brand-new city or town might look like. I do think the no-car thing would be an incredibly hard sell in rural Texas though. The reality is that most modern towns aren't self-sufficient. Maybe there's a dentist, or maybe you have to drive to the next town over for one. Maybe there's a used sporting goods store, or maybe you have to drive an hour to one when the kids grow out of their cleats, etc. I think something like this would stand a better chance if it were right outside of a city. Maybe an old farm in what is now the suburbs - you could build a dense, walkable town that also connects to the big city via mass transit.

Utopian communities were part and parcel of 19th C America, and there was a flutter of activity around communes and intentional communities in the 1960s and 1970s. We have the infrastructure and technology nowadays to do better.

The long term success rate today would probably still be low, but the value in the exercise is in the personal growth experience for the young themselves and the prototyping of new ideas, some of which migrate to the general culture. Lots of lessons learned are available from books written about these past communities to prevent making the same mistakes.

Perhaps the risks are just too high these days for the young…

The article mentions solar panels and wifi technicians. Naturally, the town would be equipped with a kind of mesh net for local communication in cases of outages, etc.

But also, the town librarian could maintain something like community resources hosted on the mesh network. Design documents, etc.

Of course, the town would provide a Pleroma or Matrix server to all residents too :)

I can think of several examples in Texas, the mueller neighborhood in austin. Steiner ranch outside of austin ( built on an old ranch ) . The woodlands outside of Houston built up in the 80s and 90s by an oil baron

Are there any legal requirements from the State of Texas which need to be followed?

It'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's basically fantasy, as a lot of such proposals tend to be.

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.

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.

"Build it and they will come" has a long history of failing. Planned towns have a long history of failing. See Fordlandia and California City as historic examples of planned cities that failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/california-city-unbuilt-...

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey,_Pennsylvania

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.

You don'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 "if you have children, you should plan to homeschool and here are some resources to help support that."

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 "How will people support themselves?" and you have three basic options: It'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.

Even in dry West Texas, average rainfall is plenty adequate to support off-grid, self-sustaining homes if that's your thing, eg Earth Ships, which can work with as little as 10 inches of rainfall annually.

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.

Local character is not something you need to inject. It'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.

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.

A real town is a place where people live and articles of this sort almost never address the question of "Why would anyone move there? Who do you want to attract and how will you get them there?"

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.

Placemaking is not just about the physical place. It's about the people who live there as well and the biggest challenge a planned town has is "How do you get people to move there? Why would they want to?" It'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't think about the actual purpose of built environments, which is to serve the needs of the local population.

It was an interesting read with a lot of familiar ideas, but it's not very grounded. This is not a recipe for these four people to start a town. It's a thought experiment for the entertainment of the author, basically, which is fine but don't get confused. This is not a real recipe for how to develop a real town.

Edit: The footnote says part 2 will address the question of People. (crosses fingers)

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't need a school system nor any real plans to create one.

Lubbock and it's surrounding communities built up during the latter half of the 19th Century, with the small communities forming as the farmers and ranchers needed them.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llano_Estacado

But for me it was the "soundscape" comments.

- caption quote: "imagine the fresh air, the invigorating call of roosters in the morning"

Rooster calls are not so much invigorating as annoying.

- "The loudest noise you will hear on a typical day will be children playing or a conversation between neighbors in the street. And so it should be."

Did stereos, consoles, movies just cease to exist too? Are we going to be crammed in next to our neighbours hearing everything they do through their "airflow enhanced" houses?

- "Keep the lots small, and all buildings aligned right to the edge of the lot facing the street, leaving backyards and courtyards, common or private, and walled gardens on unused space"

Apparently so. This town is for someone else, not me.

Why no AC? He says they can’t produce enough power. But all it takes is one powerwall and 4K or 8k solar panel per house.

In Texas. Everything sounded somewhat reasonable up to this’d topography non withstanding. Why not make sure to build near caves to store ice from the winter.

And then it gets into batkeeping and eating pidgeons. When does a modern sustainable town end and a medieval fantasy begin.

There's a history of "intentional communities". Many are thought of as utopian communities, and as largely (though not entirely) failed, though this misses some notable successes lurcking in plain view. There are a number of successful intentional community models.

The first is religious communities which have sustained themselves. In the US, notably Menonite, Amish, and Mormon communities, though there are numerous others. In the case of the Mormons, the community is the size of a state (and strongly influences most of its neighbours).

The second is the college town. For the past century colleges and universities, even comparably small ones, have proved robust self-perpetuating instutions, as both demand for an educated population and funding for education (and research, and sport) have been generous. That tide may be shifting, along with a potential trend to decentralised or remote education, though I suspect it's got life in it yet.

Several commercial motivations have proved workable at least in instances, notably tourist, retirement, vacation, and (as noted, viz Marfa, TX), art colonies. Odds may be longer here, though opportunities also more numerous. The key problem is that fads and fashions are fickle. Retirement populations, as with college students, tend to move on after a few years, if to different prospects. Many of the advantages of a student population: youth, health, vitality, openness to experience, credulity, are lacking in the older set.

Government projects are another option, with some outposts (Los Alamos National Laboratory and its impact on Santa Fe, NM, Macdonald Observatory and Ft. Davis, TX, Cape Canaveral and the Florida coast) having a profound local impact.

Otherwise, a town is generally reliant on what's at hand for economic initiative. In what I presume is West Texas, that's some highway travel, a current boomlette of oil and gas activity, cattle ranching, a few notable cultural outposts, and some degree of border activity. There's also wind and solar development in the area (there's a notable solar technician training centre across the stateline near Clovis, NM), as well as possible other activity I'm unaware.

But lacking that, "build it and they will come" seems rather unlikely. The remaining possibility is that the vision Wrath Of Gnon espouses will appeal to the specific niche they hope to attract, in which case there is limited likelihood of success.

That said: expressing the plan in terms of goal, economic basis, architecture, and design principles would help. The economic base element is conspicuously missing.

Regulatory, governance, and conflict-resolution elements should also be explored.

Also, Texas is a big place. It spans multiple climate zones. The author seems to be describing West Texas but other parts of the state are completely different.

My advice * It's hot! (And often very very humid depending on local. ) You need AC. * The worst part of Texas towns are 4 lane highways bisecting most of them. Avoid that... * But you still have to plan to allow people to use cars. That has to be incorporated into the design. As does pedestrian and cycling life. All need to be facilitated to some degree. * Sidewalks, please. I've lived in FL, OR and now TX in the past 5 years. Far to many residential streets in all these places completely lack sidewalks. It makes taking an evening stroll with the family stressful when you are sharing the space with cars. * Parks. Can't have enough of them.