My grand idea is creating an intentional community with some glamping areas for cashflow, a community garden, shared tools and worker space with 3d printers, recreational vehicles, brooms, rakes, etc...things you really don't need to 'own', and cut back on too much consumerism. The idea being if you had 2 city blocks and everyone was related or at least friendly and built a huge garage to share items they maybe use infrequently, how much space would that free up for more people to live, or to work on a hobby or something?
My idea is build a homestead, in an area where zoning and building codes allow, maybe use some earth-friendly building methods like earth bag homes, there's an awesome youtube channel called My Little Homestead where they basically built free standing buildings as 'rooms' for each of their kids and it's basically like their own studio apartment. Each one cost < 10k, and is something you can live in any time of year.
If you could build like 50 of these things, you could maybe house 50-100+ people and maybe just charge like 300/person 100 per child, and build bigger buildings as needed for larger families, etc. Rinse and repeat across the USA and bring rent and home prices down because you'd flood the market with cheap homes anyone can afford. The glamping section might have 5-10 spots each bringing in 50-200 per night throughout the year.
The community would be gated, and protected well, and work best probably for those who could work online or from home, or willing to commute as it'll probably be in a rural area.
They might not even be places you'd want to stay in forever, but great starter homes to live in while you save up money for something bigger or build up some investments or passive income sources.
Alternate to earth bags, we also could use tiny-homes which are roughly 50k per pop, possibly less if we manufacture them from kits.
I just have no idea how or where to begin to launch something like this, or if the brilliance is just in my own head, or if people/communities would actually find it valuable.
But I think ultimately you’d be building a trailer park for the more troubled parts of society and that might cause it to be less idyllic than you envisage.
I’ve previously done some marketing work for an apartment building that focuses on mixing previously homeless in with other tenants plus support services on site.
Ic.org is a good place to visit to see what exists and you could emulate, it was started from a community called Twin Oaks that has quite a radical approach :-) I learnt about it from a book called "Is it Utopia yet" picked up in of all places Nuremberg... honestly agricultural land is cheap (2k a hectare) in non productive places and vegetable gardening or just plain planting stuff for lols like from "plants from a future" (pfaf.org) interspersed with a couple of weed plants should cover expenses... strawbale housing, adobe or trailer parks are much cheaper options at least initially... Gas made from compost, shit or wood chippings is a great alternative... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compost_heater
The shared garage idea seems hopelessly naive to me. What is stopping someone from stealing the items? Who maintains the items? What happens if the items break either via negligence or normal wear and tear? It is a classic tragedy of the commons problem.
I live in a low-income neighborhood and we literally can't have anything nice. Neighbor gets a BBQ and puts it in the courtyard literally chained down. Someone gets some bolt cutters and steals it. The courtyard regularly gets trash dumped in it and if you clean it up people will immediately just dump more. I stopped trying to clean it up when people started just tossing entire garbage bags of trash out there. Our shared laundry space got vandalized by bored kids now there is only one functional washer and dryer. These are usually full of clothes (some people leave their laundry in them for days) so you have to drive to a laundromat if you want any chance of getting laundry done on your day off.