zlacker

I never understand why likeminded people don’t just start a city? “Wild country” was an example of this, but they were bound together by a quasi religion.

There’s so much unincorporated land in the USA. So many opportunities to prove things work or don’t work. Why move into a place somebody else built?

>>ed2551+(OP)
> I never understand why likeminded people don’t just start a city?

Mostly, probably, because starting a city has a process defined in state law (or, out of the US, law of some other higher level of government) which is different than “a bunch of people just buy up land and decide to declare it a city”, e.g., California’s LAFCO process.

>>ed2551+(OP)
When you ran away from home, why did you go to your Grandma's house?

Because you were a child.

>>ed2551+(OP)
Unincorporated but not unowned and there's a huge amount of infrastructure and money required to setup even a small town ex nihilo in some randomly selected part of the country.

>>rtkwe+wd
Building infrastructure is something easily solved by capitalist. Can it not also be solved by likeminded people with alternative economic principles?

>>ed2551+(OP)
> Why move into a place somebody else built?

In all seriousness, because if you dropped these same people in the woods with construction tools and resources, they’d produce nothing of value; all eaten by bears within weeks.

IOW, your question answers itself.

>>ed2551+(OP)
This was the old model of the United States when we had a frontier. The frontier, land owned by the natives, was deemed available for the violent taking by the settler-colonials. Whenever sufficient ferment began to develop in the US proper, they would push for a new wave of expansionism which would act as a pressure release valve.

I don't understand unincorporated land, but clearly someone "owns" it or the government wants it for some reason and the former era of free expansion and manifest destiny is over. Now we must reckon with the damage and reparations owed to Native Americans.

>>ed2551+gf
Because beyond doing it by hand and setting up a city sized septic system the equipment for stuff like processing waste and preparing water is extremely expensive and the only sources want lots of money for them. It's doable just very delicate and requires permission and buy-in from actors in the existing system.