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Comment by midhhhthrow | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of starting a new town, something that’s in great need with so many cities oberpopulating

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.

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I think the author is an urban professional dreaming about people doing what he never has in a place he's never lived.

There's nothing wrong with doing that, although if you really wanted to design a realistically successful small town, you'd start by asking "where will we put the chemical plant/oil refinery/paper mill?"

And 600 people. (Supposedly growing to 3000.) I doubt you support a school system with 600 people unless it's some communal everyone pitches in sort of thing. You're not going to support much in the way of stores--which I suppose can be built along the outside of the town. And you're not going to supply the town, get people to doctors, have emergency services, etc. without some degree of car access. The fire department isn't going to arrive by train. And I assume most people will be working remotely?

I cringe thinking about the dating pool in an isolated community of 600 people. Just one more reason this sort of experiment might accidentally push people to their cars instead of away from them.

I didn't read this as 'completely isolated community'--the author writes about a rail station. Also if it is as idyllic as described it would be swamped by tourists.

600 people is a larger social group than most humans have had for our species’ entire existence. No, app-based hookups won’t work well in this environment. So what?

That may be true, I don't really know. I tend to make my choices based on what's available to me currently, rather than the standards of the past. Even if a nice tent is better shelter than most humans have had for our species' entire existence, I'm still going to choose to live in a house.

As a queer person of color, I have enough trouble dating in larger cities.

Ok, so don’t live in a small town. Not every conceivable urban plan will work for everyone.

I don't intend to. I'm simply highlighting the point that dating in a smaller pool is a lot harder for some people in ways that may not be immediately apparent.

With 600 people paying $1,000 in taxes per month, the city would only net $7 million/year. This is less a plan and more a pipe dream.

Cities are built where there are demands for cities to be built. They grow around nexus points of travel, gold rushes, or other places that invite entrepreneurs to build them.

Entrepreneurs might create the need for the city, but there has to be some means of sustenance for the city not to become what is called a "Ghost Town".

There’s certainly demand for living in a place like this.

Then, lets look back in a year and see whether this city had been created.

7 million a year can hire a doctor, and a variety of other services.

Modern medicine isn't "a" doctor. You're going to Houston, Dallas, or Austin for more than a casual annual physical.

These days it would be a virtual visit. Anything more you would have to go to a major center.

I think if you were to create a city budget of infrastructure, emergency services, courts, and so forth you would run out of money before your list of unfunded services got completed.

Of course, people who stick-with-it can get anything done. The village I live in has a budget of $48 million, so it is possible $7 million would be enough (after taxing everyone 1k/month). Let's look back on this in a year.

Creating a K-12 for like 100-600 kids seems pretty feasible to me. If for some reason that didn’t work, I’m not going to mourn the loss of modern industrial schools.

That's 600 total population.

My town has something like K-8 with a 7K population and has a regional system with 2 other towns for high school. And that's about 60-70% of our property tax spend.

The target is 3k people. 20% in k-12 is what I roughly expect for this sort of community.

I went to a few K-12s with fewer than 400 people. They were great.

American public schools are notoriously inefficient. Spending tons of property tax revenue is not necessary, just politically challenging to undo. You might be able to pull it off in a project like this. Or just say there are no public schools and outsource education to parochial schools or something. It doesn’t really matter - education has minimal impact on life outcomes until high school/college. It would not be my first concern with this kind of experiment.

Maybe it was edited after it was posted, but it doesn’t say no AC—it said the town should be designed to function without AC in case of power outages and use as much passive cooling as possible, but that AC can be added in as needed.

So, constantly. It's Texas. 40C summers are normal. The state was sparsely populated, even by 19th century standards, until air conditioning became a common fixture. It's a necessity.

In west Texas, assuming you have access to water (by no means a guarantee), the option for water-based cooling (evaporative or indirect cooling) is present. "Swamp coolers" have a deservedly bad rap in humid climates, they're far more tolerable in dry ones.

Forms of evaporative + stored thermal mass cooling (rooftop sprinkler systems, perhaps combined with a rooftop garden and an underground irrigation + cooling mass water system) could provide the basis for an indirect cooling system that isn't reliant on electrical power, though it would still have fairly high evaporative losses.

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