The US Must Start Building New Cities

Oz Zeren
3 min readAug 29, 2024

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Build more cities (image licensed to author)

The US is stuck in a rut.

Its economy is on the brink of recession. Qualified employment is down and replaced by non-living-wage gig economy jobs. Food prices are the highest they have been in the past 40 years. People are living out of their cars. Housing is unattainable for the average American. “Pluriemployment” to make ends meet is a thing. Even higher-paid professionals have financial insecurity.

It is unable to find a way out and its capital is cramming into AI and real estate investments. Both of which are bloated houses of cards that can come crashing down any moment. Likely even harder than the 2008 crash. Instead of taking a step back to think about the root causes of this situation and addressing them, the US is just banging its head on the door, doing the same things it did in the past over and over as if those will provide for an exit.

While the way out stares it in the face.

Build More Cities

There is a housing crunch in the US. Large metropolises are overstuffed, expensive, and unlivable. This overpopulation in megapolises makes everything worse, from infrastructure to logistics. The overpopulated metropolises have become live manifestations of dystopian cities in the sci-fi of earlier decades.

On the other side, gigantic tracts of land lay unutilized or utilized by inefficient industries that need taxpayer subsidies to stay alive. Merely the cattle industry needs over $30–40 billion dollars a year to survive while sitting on gigantic tracts of land. They even exploit public lands on top of what they hoard.

Immense, endless tracts of land that are as large as small countries are used to feed cattle by using dozens of billions of government subsidies, preventing this land from being used for anything else.

By using even a fraction of this land, the US can build gigantic cities and solve almost all its problems in one go.

Here’s what building even one single new city does:

  • It will immediately revitalize the local and national economy
  • Even the infrastructure work starting will give a lot of jobs to many people
  • Immediately realize major financial gains in many investment sectors ranging from construction to housing
  • Provide much-needed housing to the people who are suffering in overpopulated megapolises
  • Pre-solve almost all the infrastructure problems the existing cities have to suffer by the infrastructure being planned beforehand
  • Immediately create a major center of economic activity and provide jobs to all kinds of professionals across all kinds of sectors
  • Revitalize the economies of less populated states that were left behind

The US has so much land that it defies belief: Texas is as big as half of Western Europe. And as half of Western Europe is hills and mountains that are difficult to build on, solely Texas can just outbuild the entire Western Europe if it wants to.

Not to mention all the other American states that were left to rot in the middle of the two coasts that hoard all the population and economy.

Even starting the project would bring so much investment and economic activity that the states can see great economic boost just by starting these projects. And actually completing them would push their economies to the skies compared to where they are now.

It Can Be Done And It Works

Other countries do it and it works.

China built many such cities. ‘The West’ laughed at them at the start.

Now all of those cities turned into 2–3 million “low-tier” cities with massive economies.

Nobody is laughing anymore.

If China can do it, the US can also do it. The amount of usable land that the US is sitting on is so much more compared to both Europe and China. It’s just that the land is being kept away from use for the benefit of industries that act like a leech on the economy and the real estate investors who must impoverish people to squeeze them dry.

America must break these chains. It must start building again. For the benefit of its economy and its people.

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Oz Zeren
Oz Zeren

Written by Oz Zeren

Writing for a better future. I work in Tech. I like Philosophy, History, Computers, Gaming, the Internet. I’m excited about the Creator Economy, Web 3.0, DAOs.