Location Selected For $1 Billion Ghost Town 172
Hugh Pickens writes "Although a fully operation city with no people sounds like the setup for a dystopian sci-fi novel, the Boston Globe reports that the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation will develop a $1 billion scientific ghost town near Hobbs, New Mexico to help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets on existing infrastructure without interfering in everyday life. Bob Brumley, senior managing director of Pegasus Holdings, says the town will be modeled after the real city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, complete with highways, houses and commercial buildings, old and new. Unlike traditional cities, City Labs will start with its underground 'backbone' infrastructure that will allow the lab to monitor activity throughout the 17-mile site. Since nobody lives in the Center's buildings, computerized systems will mimic human behavior such as turning thermostats up and down, switching lights off and on, or flushing toilets. The Center's test facilities and supporting infrastructure may require as much as 20 square miles of open, unimproved land where the controlled environment will permit evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of smart grid applications and integration of renewable energies for residential, commercial and industrial sectors of the economy. 'It's an amusement park for the scientists,' adds Brumley."
or a haven for hobos... (Score:3, Interesting)
this one should be interesting
Re:Federal project? (Score:3, Interesting)
Our current deficit is a result of excessive military spending, insufficient taxes, and rampant tax expenditures and corporate welfare.
But hey, good idea, just because you owe money doesn't mean you cut all your expenses and starve your way to prosperity. Sometimes that doesn't pay off, like the guy who didn't replace his roof because he owed money.
Then it blew off, and since he didn't pay for insurance, he ended up losing his house.
Re:So ... people are losing their houses ... (Score:3, Interesting)
A 2 bedroom house should cost about $50-$100k ANYWHERE, and I'm being generous. If real effort were made, the house:car price ratio would routinely be 2:1 instead of 10:1.
It will never happen because there are too many incentives built into the system which require housing to be expensive.
1. The biggest and cruelest joke: Politicians who express a desire for affordable housing. Nonsense. The tax base comes from a percentage of the assessed value of the house. Affordable housing would just give them a huge fiscal headache. Much of the cost of new construction also funds an inefficient permitting and inspection beurocracy, which they would have to cut if all housing were built in factories to national standards and shipped in components (yes, you could still customize, and it would only be marginally more expensive).
2. Leverage. Almost anybody who owns a house is overweighted real estate in their portfolio. Worse yet, they are leveraged. The nice thing about leverage is that if the asset rises it magnifies your wins. The downside is that it magnifies your losses and we just saw what that does. The individual owners require rising prices. Hence, people are very upset when property values decline. Note, ownership turns the consumer calculus on its head. If your landlord offered you a rent decrease you'd be extatic. That doesn't happen; but renters can shop rents with nothing more than the inconvenience of the move; while owners have much higher transaction costs.
3. The banks. If people could save enough to buy a house for cash, or if they could make large down payments then the banks would collect a lot less interest. The banks have the ear of Congress. This brings us back to point 1--efforts to encourage "affordable housing" by subsidizing... loans. The great deceit is for the banks to convince us that afforodable CREDIT is the same thing as affordable HOUSING. This isn't hair splitting. The unlieshing of credit under low rates doesn't just pump housing, it pumps inflation in general. It's partly why you can't buy a gallon of gasoline with a silver quarter anymore.
Re:This looks like a scam (Score:5, Interesting)
The more I look at this, the worse it gets. The company isn't in Dun and Bradstreet. They have no significant completed projects. Another (real) company owns the trademark "Pegasus-Global". Resume checks on the published bios of the principals aren't looking good. There's no indication of where the financing will come from, or how the project makes money. Twenty minutes with a web browser will confirm everything above.
I've been sending notes to the AP and other press outlets. Either I'm totally wrong or the whole project collapses tomorrow.