A Trillion Dollar Idea
Daniel Burnham, Icon of Chicago History as the man behind the World's Columbia Exposition, city planner and father of our park system, is also famous for saying:
"Make no little plans. They have no magic to strike man's blood and probably will themselves not be realized."
It is in this tradition that I skip past my mere million and billion dollar ideas and start to think of truly lofty heights. How, one might ask, could one make these unfathomable amounts of money? Build a city.
To start a person with a bit of ambition and a lot of money might buy up a huge parcel of land. It doesn't matter where in the country this land is, History tells us that people will live almost anywhere so long as they can make good money. This new city probably won't be a California paradise or even any place where the soil is good for farming. (Why pay up expensive farm land when a desert or mountain region will do).
The next step is to build the roads and highways, airport and rail. This kind of construction alone will bring people and that is where the money starts rolling in. Electric companies will compete to buy some of your property. The instant neighbor hood folks will all want a piece of the action and so will all the major retail chains. The land value will sky rocket as people see the best designed city.
The best part is that the residents will do all the hard stuff with creating their own government and civic organizations. The original investors will be able to work out tax deals where in they deed over lands for civic use like parks and fire departments, while slowly parceling out the sales of the rest of the land so as to maximize it's value.
The crazy part is that people will thank em for it. As it stands now cities aren't really designed around the population and transportation that came after em. Streets are too narrow. Highway construction is always controversial in an existing city in that it will invariably destroy some homes and create a great deal of noise in the neighborhoods surrounding em. The same can be said about subway's and elevated trains. In a new city the public transportation could be laid out in a grid to cover the entire city in an easy to navigate grid.
This is the trillion dollar idea. L.A. could be made the second largest city in the United States in less than ten years. Now if we could only talk a few of these modern captains of industry into an idea like this instead of such small thinking as a new casino or the new fall fashion roll out.
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"Make no little plans. They have no magic to strike man's blood and probably will themselves not be realized."
It is in this tradition that I skip past my mere million and billion dollar ideas and start to think of truly lofty heights. How, one might ask, could one make these unfathomable amounts of money? Build a city.
To start a person with a bit of ambition and a lot of money might buy up a huge parcel of land. It doesn't matter where in the country this land is, History tells us that people will live almost anywhere so long as they can make good money. This new city probably won't be a California paradise or even any place where the soil is good for farming. (Why pay up expensive farm land when a desert or mountain region will do).
The next step is to build the roads and highways, airport and rail. This kind of construction alone will bring people and that is where the money starts rolling in. Electric companies will compete to buy some of your property. The instant neighbor hood folks will all want a piece of the action and so will all the major retail chains. The land value will sky rocket as people see the best designed city.
The best part is that the residents will do all the hard stuff with creating their own government and civic organizations. The original investors will be able to work out tax deals where in they deed over lands for civic use like parks and fire departments, while slowly parceling out the sales of the rest of the land so as to maximize it's value.
The crazy part is that people will thank em for it. As it stands now cities aren't really designed around the population and transportation that came after em. Streets are too narrow. Highway construction is always controversial in an existing city in that it will invariably destroy some homes and create a great deal of noise in the neighborhoods surrounding em. The same can be said about subway's and elevated trains. In a new city the public transportation could be laid out in a grid to cover the entire city in an easy to navigate grid.
This is the trillion dollar idea. L.A. could be made the second largest city in the United States in less than ten years. Now if we could only talk a few of these modern captains of industry into an idea like this instead of such small thinking as a new casino or the new fall fashion roll out.
More Laters
posted by Rich Rosenthal II at 1:30 AM
2 Comments:
Rich, have you been playing too much Real Estate Tycoon?
You pointed out the glaring problem in the entier spring break convention idea, the college students being the pains they are, so I decided city plannign would be better. It also firs more with my entier global domination thing.
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