I've been fascinated with this topic for a few months... but it seems that one has to be really resourceful to deal with life in one of those neighborhoods.
Startups, and coders in general, need to move quickly. All the services a modern city offers come into play -- from the guy you hire to design the logo, to the superintendent who fixes the radiator, to cheap and fast burmese takeout.
Those $100 houses are much more conducive to an artist colony, where people are willing to put in more effort and deal with reduced efficiency for greater freedom, and complete control over the outcome. It might be interesting to found a "hacker's colony" along the same lines but it would have to be pretty non-commercial, or be composed of hackers who already had remote working arrangements with paying customers. I mean, if the taxis won't even go to your neighborhood, you're not going to get a lot of client meetings done.
I wonder how much it'd cost to build a giant glass dome on your block. Properly designed it seems like you could have SoCal weather in your dome year round, with some security and ability to have interesting house designs to boot.
Edit: To answer my own question with some googling, rough cost estimates of building a giant greenhouse are about $8 per square foot... (using polyethylene, not glass). So to cover a city block, with a 20 foot setback, would cost about $1 million... I guess I might have to scale back that plan a bit.
Startups, and coders in general, need to move quickly. All the services a modern city offers come into play -- from the guy you hire to design the logo, to the superintendent who fixes the radiator, to cheap and fast burmese takeout.
Those $100 houses are much more conducive to an artist colony, where people are willing to put in more effort and deal with reduced efficiency for greater freedom, and complete control over the outcome. It might be interesting to found a "hacker's colony" along the same lines but it would have to be pretty non-commercial, or be composed of hackers who already had remote working arrangements with paying customers. I mean, if the taxis won't even go to your neighborhood, you're not going to get a lot of client meetings done.