Of course, most of the places where they propose to build this might have difficulty ecologically sustaining such a large city...except perhaps Appalachia. How many of UO oldtimers remember our thought experiment Rivage??

 

‘Wow’: America to build $400 billion city from scratch

Plans have been unveiled for a $400 billion city for five million people that will be built from scratch and completed by 2030.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/wow-billionaire-unveils-plans-to-build-americas-first-woke-city/news-story/f42700b32accba907c87a9327fd0d474

Appalachia would increase cost due to a lot of expensive grading and blasting. Also people interested in a "woke" city might be really unhappy with the politicians they would be stuck with initially with the population at 50K.

Just off the bat, that price is way too low to support anything even remotely worthwhile for 5 million people. That's only $80,000/person. For housing, office space, retail space, roads, power lines, sewers, transportation, schools, police stations, fire stations, parks, etc. That's laughable. Maybe add a zero and you could make that work with extreme efficiencies of scale.

 

Beyond the very obvious "this won't ever happen," this is just a crappy way to solve the problem they mention. The solution is fixing our current cities. Not asking people to move to some unknown location and start anew. A city of 5 million isn't small. There aren't a lot of locations that can truly support that that don't already have a city on them. This is a wildly dumb solution for a very real problem.