City-scale clean-tech hubs

Our solution is a practical business model to build city-scale clean-tech hubs from the ground up across the United States.

Each of these economically, socially and environmentally sustainable developments would provide entirely new jobs and housing for 500 to 2,000 Americans monthly, and by locating construction sites in all 50 states, our solution is scalable up to 1,000,000 annually.

There is no reason not to do it! Our solution is self-financing in the private capital market without requiring taxpayer subsidies, grants, donations, billionaires or changes in government policies.

Our initial concept won a previous MIT climate change contest before awards were available. Since then the business model has been flushed out and a competitive search for construction sites (similar to Amazon's HQ2 search) is ready to be announced.

Website, economic models, business plan, RFPs, job descriptions, legal agreements and more are ready for consideration by economic development jurisdictions across America.

Building the cities of the future will inspire and motivate tens of thousands of Americans to build a better future for themselves with:

• Thousands of entirely new 21st-century jobs
• Entry-level job training with pathways for career advancement
• Training and careers in clean-tech and advanced technologies
• Many opportunities to start or obtain ownership in a new businesses
• Good jobs for single parent households and those unable to work full time
• Easy access to all levels of educational advancement
• Economic and social equity and opportunity
• Improving quality of life and significantly lowering the cost of living
• Truly affordable high-quality home ownership
• Incentives that come with all jobs to accelerate mortgage qualification
• Solutions specifically designed to reduce regional homelessness
• Livability, walkability, clean air and overall health of residents
• Resiliency and sustainability
• Changing demographics and social cohesion
• Affordability and quality of life for a growing number of retirees
• Demand-side carbon emissions reductions
• Accelerating the transition to zero carbon energy sources
• Energy efficient buildings and electrification of transportation
• Outcome contracting that requires builders and contractors to use low-carbon construction materials and methodologies

Our long-term planning models shows how all this can be done, but only by building these new places from the ground up.

The best way to describe our solution is as an economically, socially and environmentally beneficial update of traditional real estate development of buying land, improving it and reselling it.

As Ray Kroc learned, success for McDonalds did not come from selling hamburgers, but from the financing of real estate.

To begin with, we separate our "preconstruction" planning services from the acquisition of land and it's development. Because these services are highly repetitive, planning for multiple sites becomes extremely cost effective, especially for legal, financial and regulatory issues

These services includes the first three years of workforce planning that comes with incentives to purchase a home at a discount, along with the use of our innovative economic planning models to insure the long-term economic success of each new community.

Then, upon successful site approval we establish an independent stewardship corporation (or land trust) to purchase the land and a highly capable master developer to take over planning and development. This allows profits from land sales, home sales and rentals to be reinvested back into the community.

And as a social enterprise, the cost of our repetitive preconstruction planning services is covered through a small one-time planning fee paid upon land purchase.

Our solution serves exactly the individuals and families targeted by this challenge.

The opportunity to participate in building the cities of the future will first be attractive to many highly skilled but under-employed Americans given the opportunity to do something interesting that comes with a higher quality of life. 

However, because these new "high opportunity" places will require relocation, they will initially be most attractive to a diverse group of younger American individuals and families whom are being left behind economically, do not already own their own home, are likely under-employed and are willing to relocate for better job, housing, educational and business opportunities.

The need for these more livable, diverse and sustainable cities of the future cannot be overstated given:

• Permanent Covid-19 job loss
• Lack of economic opportunity and affordable housing in existing cities
• Population growth by 2050 equal to 350 new American cities of 200,000
• Relocations that will be necessary because of climate change
• The need for practical at-scale solutions to reduce carbon emissions

Our initiative to build city-scale clean-tech hubs from the ground up
is separate from, and in addition to, the taxpayer subsidized
infrastructure programs needed to improve existing cities while transitioning to a low-carbon future.

Building city-scale clean-tech hubs can play an important role both regionally and nationally in accelerating the transition to the jobs, training and educational opportunities that will be needed in a low carbon future. 

As each site is approved, thousands of entirely new jobs and work-training opportunities will be created. This includes opportunities in construction, education, food services, manufacturing, healthcare, city services, recreation, entertainment and other industries. As a clean-tech hub, about 15% of all jobs are expected to be in the design, development, manufacturing, export, installation and servicing of low-carbon products, materials and clean energy.

We see a huge pent-up demand across the United States for the jobs, housing, higher quality of life and lower cost of living that these new places will make possible.

Our solution is ready to begin with the announcement of a national search for suitable construction sites to build city-scale clean-tech hubs from the ground up.

We estimate that over 200 economically-challenged small towns, rural areas, reservations, opportunity zones or areas needing rebuilding after environmental disasters will be interested in responding to our Land Acquisition RFP.

Although we will consider any location, including existing built up urban areas, these new developments will most likely be located where land cost is lower and larger constructions sites are available which gives economically challenged rural areas and towns an edge in being selected.

As potential construction sites are identified, we will hire up to eleven regional site teams to lead in the evaluation of sites, to work with regional planners, organizations, contractors, and governments to develop initial land-use plans and obtain site approval. These locally hired site team members will be made up of planning and other experts most familiar with their region's area, needs, organizations, politics and culture. Job descriptions and application process for site team members will be released at same time of the site search.

These regional site teams will be backed up and directed by centralized executive, communications, legal services, financial engineering, and human resource teams located in Portland Oregon.

With the business model design complete, and to allow for the most ethical and transparent organization possible, our initiative starts as a clean slate with no obligations to any person. This allows for hiring the most qualified professionals to initial positions.

The current team lead is willing to finance the initial release of website and competitive location search once other organizations show interest.

Given that the skills needed to design this business model are different from the more specialized skills necessary to move forward, the current team lead will not be taking an executive, fiscal, communications or decision making position.

Our business model includes establishing the most ethical, diverse, inclusive and transparent companies from the ground up.

To accomplish this as quickly as possible:

• Immediately initiate competitive location search and demand assessment to validate business model prior to finalizing organizational or hiring decisions
• Instead of cash grants, we are seeking foundations and non-profits with social, economic and environmental missions to review our business model in detail and indicate their approval of what we are doing.
• For those organization's wishing to provide additional support and advice, we recommend they assign an employee as their organization's advocate to help with final decisions as to corporate charter, employee handbook, hiring practices, other organizational issues and selection of diverse board of directors and executive teams

In any case, we think anyone interested creating opportunities for a higher quality of life in the United States will find our business model fascinating.

Our primary innovation is updating successful solutions of the past to work in the 21st century.

First, as a modern social enterprise, our focus is on optimizing outcomes on behalf of the job-seekers and their families whom will be relocating to these new places. Essentially, an organization like ours is required to give future residents a voice in their own future.

Second, our business model uses the best features of free market capitalism to make social, economic and environmentally sustainable development overwhelming competitive to traditional real estate development.

Third, our services include the proactive economic development planning necessary to lay the foundation for long-term economic success in ways much more effective than either traditional or taxpayer-subsidized real estate development are expected to provide.

Fourth, our solution is backed by science, especially the most recent data driven science important to the design and planning of 21st-century low-carbon built environments. 

Lastly, our solution provides the scale necessary to start bringing the planning, design, construction and many non-construction industries into the 21st-century with use of the latest technologies, software, low-carbon materials, best practices and management processes.

Our solution does more than just use new technologies, it provides the scale and customer base needed to actually fund, implement and use a wide range new technologies over the long term.

For example, we will be partnering with both first- and second-tier software companies to provide solutions in human resources, accounting, construction management, communications and other technologies that will be needed by these new places. In other areas, such as financial engineering, business creation, blockchain-based multi-party contract management and on-boarding services, new applications and processes are expected to be developed internally that will be provided to these new places at no additional cost as part of our preconstruction planning services. Our business model includes the time and funding necessary to implement or develop these new technologies as actually needed.

Although our social enterprise's singular focus is limited to providing preconstruction services to these new communities, our solution also has the potential to help existing cities across the United States to learn and benefit from the accelerated use of clean energy sources, low-carbon materials, methodologies, metrics and other newly developed clean-tech products.

We can provide multiple examples, and how they will be paid for, of how building these new places can improve or provide new markets for each of the technologies listed below.

Our theory of change is based on long-term outcome based planning.

We start with the inspiring grand vision and goal of building the more livable, sustainable and resilient cities of the future. 

Some examples of our outcome based planning include:

Economic and social equity. Moving to a "high-opportunity" place is the fastest way for many American individuals and families to overcome many of the structural inequities in existing cities.  See OpportunityInsights.org for information about "Moving to Opportunity".

Job creation. Building these new places at-scale will create tens of thousands of entirely new jobs and work-training opportunities.

Housing and Affordable Home Ownership. Construction starts with the building of temporary housing that will be later converted to senior housing enclaves and university campuses. Then, specially designed financial incentives will allow even entry-level workers to quickly qualify for a mortgage and obtain affordable high-quality home ownership.

Education and Healthcare. Outcome based planning, partnering with regional education and medical institutions, and the design of the built environment itself, will improve access to life-long education and healthcare resources.

Ethics, transparency, and accountability. By applying best practices in organizational structures, hiring practices and contracting processes from the very beginning, we can provide a firewall against cherry picking by corporations, political influence, and vulture capitalism.

Vibrant economic system. Proactive economic development planning, a newly established community bank, working with regional business incubators and reinvesting profits from land sales, rentals and home sales locally will maximize local economic multipliers in ways impossible by traditional developers, whether taxpayer subsidized or not.

Carbon emission reductions. These new places are to be built as regional energy-efficient clean-tech hubs which can provide a place where innovators, academics and others can congregate, live, learn, develop, manufacture and utilize the latest clean-tech technologies and methodologies.

Although our solution to build clean-tech hubs from the ground up is generational in nature, our business model is designed to complete it's mission of locating multiple construction sites and obtaining site approvals within three to five years.

We start to scale from day one with the release of a "Land Acquisition RFP" to all cities, counties and economic jurisdictions in the United States. As soon as we receive a response to the RFP and perform a preliminary site evaluation, it will then take a site team from six months to two years to perform our preconstruction planning services and begin construction. Our site selection competition include ways to accelerate local, state and federal site approvals to meet these timelines.

Once construction is started, from 500 to 2,000 Americans can be on-boarded monthly at each location. If a site is selected in all 50 states, jobs and housing for up to 1,000,000 Americans could be created annually. And up to 4,000,000 the first five years and up to 30,000,000 over 30 years. 

Our planning models indicate that building these energy efficient places from the ground up over a 30 year period to accommodate 30,000,000 Americans would reduce total carbon emissions by 3 to 5 gigatons of CO2. This is three to five percent of America's 100 gigaton CO2 budget through 2050.

Once we have completed our mission within four to five years, our social enterprise will be closed down.

The primary barrier to building these new places is the apathy of the comfortably employed, existing homeowners, individuals, businesses and organizations for anything that is not in one's immediate self interest.

What is more important, is what is NOT a barrier to our solution:

Financing these new places is not a problem!, America's open capital market can attract virtually unlimited capital by paying a competitive interest rate for a risk class. And securable land and real estate is among the lowest risk class. Given the importance of America's construction and mortgage industries, the only way our business model is likely to fail is by complete collapse the economy in the United States, which is highly unlikely.

Organizationally. We have worked out the basis for a highly successful organization and how it is to be funded. 

Legally. A well staffed legal team will make sure all legal, regulatory and contract issues are researched and resolved.

Culturally. We keep things local. Regionally hired site teams will be familiar with local needs, politics and cultural issues of their area.

Market. We see a huge pent-up demand for the jobs and housing to be offered.

NIMBYism (Not in My BackYard) and holdouts. As a competition, our location search allows us to quickly find the communities most willing to work with us.

Bad Actors. Our organization and it's business model is designed to provide a firewall against political influence, nepotism, cherry picking by corporations, vulture capitalism and other malfeasance.

Early on we realized the idea of building these new places in the United States would be quickly dismissed by corporations and non-profits primarily interested in quick profits, their own mission programs or fund raising.

Interestingly, about 120 years ago, using essentially the same business model similarly concerned with quality of life, homelessness, pollution, and inequality, it took Ebenezer Howard seven years to start construction of the first of two successful new cities in England because the bankers, social institutions and others of his day would not themselves be the primary beneficiaries.

Our business model does not expect anything for free. It is designed to fairly compensate many under-utilized city planners, design professionals, builders, corporations and organizations for their services, but only when and as actually needed.

Our business model is also designed to negotiate with social and environmental organizations in each region who have specialized expertise that can be applied to the design and planning of these new places. Especially regarding poverty, homelessness, equity and environmental issues.

The free capital market in the United States has plenty of money for securable low-risk real estate development as long as loans can be repaid. As Ebenezer Howard took years to learn, the problem with both of our business models is that the primary beneficiaries are to be the voiceless individuals and families moving to these new places, not the comfortably employed, existing homeowners, corporations, billionaires, developers and organizations typically first in line to profit from large capital projects.

Our integrated planning models already provide a wealth of economic, social and environmental metrics to be collected. And as the planning models undergo continuous improvement, additional metrics will be added.

Our preconstruction planning services includes converting these spreadsheet based planning models to system dynamics models which can be applied to machine learning techniques to provide real-time monitoring, projections and decision modeling for the benefit of each community.

After setting ethical limits as to what additonal data is to be collected and who it can be shared with, we expect to work with academics and others to improve monitoring and decision making.

We are ready to incorporate as a for-profit corporation (C-Corp) in the state of Delaware and amend it's legal form and company charter at later date if necessary.

Our business model provides the time to negotiate it's final legal
corporate form, company charter and other organizational issues with
potential stakeholders while the site competition and demand assessment is underway.

Our social enterprise could be established as a for-profit, non-profit
or beneficial hybrid. Each legal form of incorporation has benefits. Our
current recommendation is as a beneficial for-profit social enterprise
which would have the most legal flexibility.

Our business model is designed to provide a more diverse, inclusive and capable organization than normally possible through self-selected individuals or volunteers.

Important for the establishment of most ethical company possible, a paid
board of directors selected by stakeholders will be in the position to select the initial leadership team. To provide accountability, the board will also be in the position to fire and replace executives (and board directors) if they become unsuited for their position. We seek socially-oriented foundations and non-profits to become the primary stakeholders

Having a company with a clear goal and mission allows for very specific job descriptions in which having an independent and professional HR search will lead to hiring diverse teams of highly skilled individuals.

Job descriptions and application process for regional site teams will be available upon website release. Given the opportunity to be on a team to plan a city of the future in their region, we expect these positions to be highly competitive and many highly capable people to apply. The executive team in Portland is likely to be made up of those applying for regional site team positions. 

Regional site team members are being hired to perform the initial planning, legal, financial and other tasks related to obtaining site approvals of these new places, not build them. This provides a separation of responsibility and lowers cost and risk of self-serving decision making.

None. We felt that we would be wasting the time of others until the business model was fully developed. At this point the business model is ready to be released to the public.

Our business model is not so much looking for organizations to partner with, but will soon be providing opportunities for professionals, organizations, consultants, contractors to perform specific paid services as actually needed through the release of RFPs.

We do plan to partner with foundations, non-profits, academic institutions and governments in the planning of these new places, but in ways that help them with their primary missions. For instance, as part of our preconstruction planning services in each region, our site teams will bring together the expert organizations concerned with homelessness to negotiate the best way to provide jobs and housing to these undeserved individuals and families. In many ways we envision our site teams to provide the traffic control in working with many expert organizations to come up with optional solutions to many issues.

Our solution is the business model.

We will provide a one-hour online walk through of our interactive planning models to foundations, academics, non-profits and others who we think would be beneficial. Our time is limited and we may not have the time to respond to everyone that may be interested.

The current team lead is willing to fund the immediate release of website, which includes a competitive national search for construction sites and a regional demand assessment to validate the business model.

Non-financial support of our initiative by social, sustainability and environmental organizations is critical to our likely success.

In the event that we win this competition, or for less than $100,000 in an unsecured loan or grant, the success of this initiative can be improved quickly with additional videos, materials, better branding, mailing costs and paid access to several databases.

Given the publicity that a national competitive search for multiple construction sites would generate, especially if successful, we expect that a large number of organizations and corporations would want to become involved. This would allow our organization to quickly obtain the capital needed to hire staff and perform it's preconstruction planning services through private startup funding, or less expensively, through loans or impact investments from foundations or other beneficial sources.

Most important to understand, is that once a site approval is obtained, the financing needed to actually build each new place will be surprisingly easily to access through securable risk-adjusted market-rate bonds and mortgages. In our one-hour walk-through of our business model we show the how land sales, home sales and rentals provide over 200% of the income needed to make timely principle and interest payments on an fairly large initial general purpose bond. And how the remaining profits are reinvested back into the local community.

Our business model does not require raising funds through grants or donations. The money required to fund our organization and to actually build these new places can be raised in the private capital market as described above.

If we do win this contest, or if a foundation wanted to provide a small grant so we can improve our chances for success, we have identified several well regarded non-profits who we will contract with to receive any funds and perform various services without the need for us to add staff prior to a successful location search  and demand assessment.

Our business model provides sufficient time to raise operating funds as actually needed.

We will be happy to discuss timing and budget issues during our business model walk-through to organizations we think could be helpful.

Our primary purpose in applying to this challenge is to gain access to MIT's network of United States domiciled organizations interested in job creation, social and economic equity, sustainability and climate change.

The help needed by these organizations is not financial, and can be performed online within a few hours of time without any front end commitment. We simply need their moral support, which can be easily determined by them by reviewing website and other materials to be made public. For those organizations whom are interested in providing additional support or advice, we will setup a number of online workshops to refine specific materials so all concerns and viewpoints are addressed.

Our business model is designed to move very fast. We have even
identified sites ready for development that could be immediately
purchased and at-scale construction begin as early as spring of 2021.
However, given the need for six months minimum planning time, we could
lose a year of job and housing creation because of the seasonality of
construction work unless we gain this support soon. 

The hard work of developing our business model is complete and is ready to be implemented with release of our website and "Land Acquisition RFP".

However, for our RFP to be taken seriously by economically challenged cities, counties and economic development jurisdictions, we need foundations and organizations with social, economic and environmental missions to indicate their approval what we are doing after taking a close look at our business model.

For those foundations and organizations interested in the details of our business model and whom we think would be helpful, we will provide a one-hour walk-through of our interactive planning models over the phone using google sheets.

To schedule a walk-through, please send a private message to the team leader (Kent G) using this website.