Last summer. I spent some time near Alamosa Co and Fort Meyers(lehigh acres).

 

These area has pre-built infrastucture(roads) before any development has ever started to happen. Sometimes these are 30+ years old.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Alamosa,+CO&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=37.372886,-105.57415&spn=0.120322,0.343323&om=1

The map above is a vast area of NOTHING but plants and roads. And land could be bought for $500 an acre.

 

Why doesn't Ohio do any planning like this? Is it because of too many farms?

 

 

 

Lets all invest in that town and make it a super efficient city that everyone flocks to. We'll buy up all the land and pay off someone in Entrepreneur, Business 2.0 and The Economist to make some fake article about how it's gonna be the hot new city. Then all these investors will be trying to make land grabs and they'll buy our property for 10x the price we bought it for and we'll all laugh on the way to the bank. What to you say?

This pre-built sprawl is the result of land speculation in a booming region. 

 

There was a bit of this in the Dayton area during the Roaring 20s....areas where platted, infrastructure laid in, but never built on until late 1940s and 1950s.  I posted a bit on this with those "Kettering" pix threads last fall.

 

What an odd concept. A ghost town that was never there in the first place.

^Is it hard to acquire the land after infrastructure is in place? I guess the owners sit on the goose egg until its turned into a huge development?

Avon Lake and Sheffield Lake both have areas that are similar to that.  Streets were laid out, some are now overgrown.  Some act as cut throughs.  Apparently some foundations were even layed in Sheffield Lake.

This pre-built sprawl is the result of land speculation in a booming region. 

 

There was a bit of this in the Dayton area during the Roaring 20s....areas where platted, infrastructure laid in, but never built on until late 1940s and 1950s.  I posted a bit on this with those "Kettering" pix threads last fall.

 

What was Dayton's main economy back in the 20's?  The area Alamosa i'm thinking it had something to do with the gold rush.

^

well, the place was booming with work from the auto industry, Frigidaire, NCR, and such.

 

Maybe a better example would be Chicago suburbia from that time, which must have had a hundred square miles at least of platted land, streets, infrastructure,  but nearly no houses, when the crash hit.  These ghost suburbs stayed that way until finally being built-out in the late 1950s...there was that much land available.

 

The most famous one was Skokie.

 

 

wow, thanks jeff.

Last summer. I spent some time near Alamosa Co and Fort Meyers(lehigh acres).

 

These area has prebuilt infrastucture(roads) before any development has ever started to happen. Sometimes these are 30+ years old.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Alamosa,+CO&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=37.372886,-105.57415&spn=0.120322,0.343323&om=1

The map above is a vast area of NOTHING but plants and roads. And land could be bought for $500 an acre.

 

Why doesn't Ohio do any planning like this? Is it because of too many farms?

 

Why would we want to waste more money on sprawl?

^---- That's impressive.

 

    There's a subdivision near Oxford, Ohio with all infrastructure and utilities including working streetlights without a single house. It was built in the 1990's, judging from the environment.

^Where is that?

 

Pre-built infrustructure in Ohio...just about every city's downtown street grids.

Last summer. I spent some time near Alamosa Co and Fort Meyers(lehigh acres).

 

These area has prebuilt infrastucture(roads) before any development has ever started to happen. Sometimes these are 30+ years old.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Alamosa,+CO&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=37.372886,-105.57415&spn=0.120322,0.343323&om=1

The map above is a vast area of NOTHING but plants and roads. And land could be bought for $500 an acre.

 

Why doesn't Ohio do any planning like this? Is it because of too many farms?

 

Why would we want to waste more money on sprawl?

 

It's not sprawl when WE do it...