Will We Get Fordlandia, Jonestown, or Galt’s Gulch Out of This?

Oooh, we got another one.

Schitthead's Creek.

Like every other libertarian commune, no one will want to be the farmer, or the blacksmith, and they'll start to starve, and they'll catch members sneaking off to the gas station for burritos and Twinkies, and the whole thing will end in screaming hair pulling.

"empty" land

Wonder how many big, established trees they're going to cut down, just to maybe get around to putting five hundred of one kind of fruit tree up eventually.

This will be an interesting experiment. I suspect it will fall short of a Randite Paradise, however, if they have a workable public transportation system that might keep things from going completely to hell. It may also end up something like Disney's Celebration community which started as the ultimate planned community but turned out to be so restrictive that living there seems to be stifling.

If it’s around Travis as the article says, maybe a dozen, probably fewer? It’s been farmland for decades and scrubland or swamp (before the big water projects) for centuries. You can just answer this with Google Maps satellite view.

It sounds to me like it is the opposite of a Galt's Gulch that they have planned. Rather than a libertopia, it sounds like they are planning to do a liberal model city with solar power and public transit for all.

Sidewalk Labs Quayside project comes to mind.

O, Brave new world...

A city designed and built by and for the "best and brightest". Good luck to them. I really mean that. It would be great if the tech bros can do a better job of designing, building and (wait for it) ... governing a city. But remember when Trump actually admitted "who knew?" health care issues were so complicated. Maybe they'll succeed. But I wouldn't bet on it.

That sounds more like modern feminists.

Yeah, who can forget that infamous Free Town Project in New Hampshire? That was feminists, right?

But but but… tech bros… MY PRECONCEPTIONS!

Indeed, it sounds like the strawman cartoon of feminists in UA's head, but it's the libertarians that actually behave this way.

Has there ever been a successful price-fixing suit over land? I’d imagine not.

Fordlandia?

So Ontario just decided to go whole hog and own it huh? Or I guess I should say ‘eh?’

I may be biased here because I happened to have been tutored by Reid Hoffman...sadly not in the art of becoming worth a bajillion dollars, but still.

But anyway, unless he has changed from when I knew him or unless my knowing him and reading the occasional whine from the Right about him (I think Trump had complained that he was responsible for E. Jean Carroll suing him, in which case, bravo!), I don't think Libertopia is what he is going for here.

This is America, so I'd wager that at least one case has been successful. If I can remember, when I talk to my mom next, I'll ask her, as I know that she was involved with some of the lawsuits to stop Epstein's buddy Wexner from buying up my hometown and destroying it.

That doesn’t sound like price-fixing though.

If you look through just American history, you'll find innumerable cases, literally from Jamestown on, where you have a bunch of wealthy people who have ideas for some kind of utopian city or commune, and they always fall apart after a while. In some cases, it's because you've got a bunch of fumbling idiots who are prepared to do all the "executive" type jobs involved with running a community, but nobody wants to do the scutwork that actually enables a society to function (trash disposal, etc.). In other cases, it's because their ideology is self-destructive and they just don't realize it. Like the Shakers, who had a number of successful communes for decades, but they all died out after a while because the Shakers didn't think you should fuck. No fucking, no kids, no society after a while. Or, they wind up imploding like lots of HOAs do because of petty tyrants on the board.

The odds of this succeeding are pretty slim, I'm afraid. It doesn't mean some good ideas won't come out of it, but I'm going to be really surprised if this gets any farther than a sign saying, "Coming soon! Uptopian Estates!" (or whatever they're calling this money pit).

You want me to go into the details as to how they made it look like it was an ordinary person buying up the land and not a large corporation? How they conned people, such as my mother, into signing documents that appeared to say you'd consider selling your property for X amount of dollars, but when you went to make the sale, it turns out that what the document actually meant was that you'd only sell your property for X amount of dollars and backing out of the deal would cost you a huge chunk of change? Because I can do that. I might even be able to get my mom to provide me with some of the documentation she has on it. I'll warn you, though, that not only will it take a while to do this, but you'll wind up with posts that are such massive walls of text that the server shits itself rather than loading them.

I'm not kidding. The people of the town fought Wexner and his cronies for decades, and some of them are still fighting, even though most of what long-term residents of the town could recognize has long been replaced by golf courses, Starbucks, and McMansions that nobody lives in, they're just tax dodges for the ultra-wealthy.

Sounds like a whole bunch of shady and maybe illegal stuff, but not price fixing, no. And no, you post quite many enough walls of text that are at best tangentially related to the topic. I need no further instances.

na.. modern feminists are the pink haired girls/femmes that are replacing you in trades-and generally better trained/certified if any of the ticket holding welder women I know are an indication.

Does it really matter (outside of the technicalities of the law, of course) if it isn't price fixing, but looks and acts like it?

For the purpose of determining if there’s ever been a successful price fixing suit over land, the technicality is all that matters.

And again, this is lawsuit happy America, so I'm sure that there's probably been at least one. And no, I'm not going to worry about if the judgement was the right one or not.

Oh, and this was the first hit on Google for "Real estate price fixing lawsuit."

So, it looks like one was successful enough to get an injunction issued. Don't know if it was upheld or anything else, but if someone wants to run down the details, they've got something to go on.

The lawyers for the defendants don’t think it’s ever happened: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litig...-settle-510-mln-antitrust-lawsuit-2023-08-07/

Obviously not the most reliable source, but the fact that this suit ranks so highly when searching “real estate price fixing suit -agent -broker” and location turned off is some indication it’s actually novel.

That was about commissions prices, not land prices.

That's a different kind of price fixing than what I'm talking about, though.

That's landowners getting together to inflate their property prices. I'm talking about companies buying up land agreeing to limit how much they pay people who want to sell their land.

But honestly, without access to whatever the database is that's the repository for lawsuits in this country, I'm not sure if we'd be able to get a definitive answer on the subject. News coverage of such things doesn't seem to be all that great, IME.

And I don’t care about the kind you’re talking about because it has no bearing on whether the lawsuit which is part of the topic of this thread will succeed.

Which isn’t relevant to this thread.

I think we can come to an educated surmise. Disney used shell companies to quietly buy up land for Disney World. Why would they need to do that if they could just sue people who banded together to drive up prices if they tried to do it publicly? Granted, that was decades ago now, but would it still be taught if it wasn’t relevant?