It’s nice to see the area I worked in for a number of years on HN. Walking around parts of old Greenbelt, MD evokes a feeling of a neighborhood designed to efficiently address all the needs a family could have. It still holds on to that history a bit, e.g. a popular location for a bite to eat is named the New Deal Cafe.
Now a decent sized city, it’s best known as the home of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
I interned at Goddard a few years back and Greenbelt was my favorite place. In the middle of a giant, hellish urban/suburban wasteland full of cars and roads with almost no walkability was a quaint little walkable village that was designed around a small central shopping/community center. I loved it. That's how we should build everything, imo.
It would be interesting to revisit this experiment. There was recent news of the purchase of a large area of land on the outskirts of the SF Bay Area to build a "new kind of city", but the info on it is sparse: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/solano-fairfield...
The OP touches on important details to consider (the socialistic ones) -- who owns what and how do you make it so that everyone can thrive.
I imagine that trying to incorporate a new community and starting with a clean zoning code would reduce some costs, but there are still major concerns around the incentives. That private project sounds more like a company town attempt than what this piece describes.
