When I moved to casa weka I moved out of town. I now live in a small coastal village, down a road that winds so much that you are not a local unless your car has been driven into the harbour.
Casa Pukeko was in a small city.
The city I grew up in is big. It is also unlivable, and expensive. If I had stayed there, the capital value of my home would be three or four times higher… and I would have to drive for at least a half hour to get to the sea, when I can walk there in five minutes.
Perhaps cities are monopolies. They treat their land that way.
We should treat liberal cities the way liberals treat corporate monopolies — not as growth-enhancing assets, but as trusts that concentrate wealth and power and conspire against the public good. And instead of trying to make them a little more egalitarian with looser zoning rules and more affordable housing, we should make like Teddy Roosevelt and try to break them up.
Break the big cities up. Put the bureaucrats somewhere cheap, socially disadvantaged and isolated. We have fibre. We do not need to all be in the same town.
I suggest Tapanui for the Ministry of Health, Invercargill for the Treasury, Tokoroa for Social welfare and the Auckland Islands for Woman’s Affairs and the Human Rights Commission. Emptying Wellington and turning it into a punishment station for politicians is a good thing.
And the monopolistic universities should be distributed alongside them.
UPDATE
Bike Bubba has noted that if cities are close enough that you can commute the cities will merge. He is correct. In NZ terms, this means Hamilton should not be used as it is 100 km from Auckland (and bigger than Dunedin).
So to clarify the geography.
Tapanui is two hours from Dunedin. It an hour from Invercargill. Both are in the deep south ie. closest to Antarctica.
Tokoroa is 90 minutes from Hamilton. It is a paper mill town, and the mill shut.
The Auckland Islands are a set of rocks 500 km south of New Zealand, that were used as a prison of last resort in Victorian times. They are now a bird sanctuary.
What an intriguing, interesting post!
***Break the big cities up.***
You may be interested to hear that while I don’t know of any cities literally being broken up, the small province in Canada that I come from was intentionally designed to have three small cities, each with unique assets, rather than one large city. And to this day, it’s a conservative rural province (which I mean in the best possible way).
I like this plan. And you haven’t half the excess (and empty) space that we have. Frequently complete with actual empty buildings.
Technically they’ve got that in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and sad to say, it doesn’t help much. Same thing with San Fran/San Jose/Oakland/etc.. Maybe it helps a touch in Dallas/Fort Worth, but overall, it strikes me that once you get beyond 100k or so–really once your distance to commute becomes at all significant–you’ve reached critical mass for government silliness.