How to Start Your Own Town

Video written by Ben Doyle

[chirhoiota]

Yep, that intro was terrifyingly spot-on. I have about 30 minutes that I can possibly procrastinate showering so I can bartend a big military memorial this morning. I am not a fan of memorials and I'm fairly proud that my job is to just inebriate the heck out of everyone. Pardon me while I binge as much Half As Interesting as I can for the next... 25 minutes.

[OceanAce]

Actual advantages:
-You can be a mayor or part of the city council
-You can issue municipal bonds to finance any ambitious projects that you want the town to be known for. Or to bring fiber internet into your wooded cabin.
-You can override deed restrictions so that Karen the HOA manager isn't waking you up at 7am to remind you to cut your lawn. Just make sure she doesn't become part of the city council or else...
-You can partner with metro service companies to bring their park and rides into your town so that you don't have to drive 45 minutes to get to the park and ride.

[victorschlecht]

POV: You actually wanted to learn how to start your own country. Learning how to start your own town is 'Half as Interesting'

[mihailoaleksic]

Fun fact: Here in Serbia, there is a city with population of 180 and a village with population of 8.000. Weird, but completely fine.

[verdatum]

I'm too lazy to verify, but I was told that my university incorporated as a town so that, among other reasons, it allowed them to repaint the parking space lines to be thinner so they could pack more cars in there. I don't particularly doubt this, because, as a commuter student, I was required to spend hundreds of dollars per semester for a permit. And as a freshman, the best/only parking lot that freshman were allowed to get a permit for was over a mile from any classroom.

[lbart]

Just to be clear: Disney *can* have their own law enforcement through the Reedy Creek Improvement District, but doesn't - they use the Orange & Osceola County Sheriff's offices instead. Disney Security are security guards, no more powerful than mall security guards.
See also the videos that Rob over at Midway to Main Street has done on the subject.

[kurtlindner]

00:43
Nobody expected Pileofclothesburg to rise to such power being so small, and landlocked; but its people were smart and cunning.
The whole story began when Thomas Houseshoeman discovered a large rock salt deposit near the West end of the hallway -back then Pileofclothesburg was unincorporated and people just called it a hallway. Due to current mining techniques and resources, Thomas had no way of extracting the salt himself, so he devised a plan. The mining of rock salt was most effectively done with water in that region then, they'd pour in water and insert sticks, the brine evaporated and they'd collect the salt off the walls and from the sticks. The problem was that Pileofclothesburg simply didn't have any natural access to it's own water source. Thomas began talking with Juana Robenstein about his predicament. Juana owned the Easternmost property in the unincorporated Hallway, which included a small extension of land North, covering half of Bathroomshire entrance. Thomas and Juana became business partners and negotiated an exchange of that land with the Bathroomshire council for water rights from the Sink River. The Sink was near the rock salt deposit and they built an aqueduct to bring them their needed water.
The salt from the end of the Hallway was very high quality rock salt, near pure sodium chloride, and with their extraction method it formed large flakes which were highly desirable for cooking and canning. Over time Thomas and Juana Married, and grew their business into the United Pile of Clothes Saltworks, eventually abbreviated to the PoC Saltworks for marketing purposes. The demand for their salt grew beyond their local House and soon the PoC Saltworks had dominance over all other salt production in the entire neighborhood.
After Thomas passed away in 2014 Juana threw herself into the philanthropy she and Thomas had taken up in their later years. She wanted to put the salt back into the town she'd built her salty life on. Juana Started The Sel school for Salty Children and the now famous food chain Fleur de Sole; the business supports the school, and the school supports the community.
Juana died 3 years later in 2017 and it was then that the now wealthy residents decided to honor their little hamlet's benefactors by renaming the now incorporated town of Hallway to Pileofclothesburg, after their company which brought so much to the people.

[cemreomerayna]

0:50 it is an Ukrainina dictionary and the finger is on the word табір, the word for camp. It is a common word in Eastern European languages (usually found as tabor/табор) and comes from a Turkic word "tabur", meaning fortificated military camps (made by encircling carts around the camp).

Edit: Tabur exists in Modern Turkish, but the meaning has shifted to battalion. The word has spread to Eastern Europe (and actually entered to Modern Turkish) through Hungarian, but the ultimate source of the word is disputed (it is either from Chagatai or Crimean Tatar).

[lukko]

I've made several languages and maps but I never thought of making a town. Heck, I wasted my time learning languages that I'll never really use (like Icelandic), but making a town is a whole different level of doing something for no reason. Now if you excuse me, I'm going to make a town. The only problem is making a city because I'll need an army of 5000 people. Yes, the definition of a city where I live is a settlement with more that 5000 people.

[danielbishop]

Related fact: The US currently has two unincorporated "cities" with populations over 200, 000: Paradise, NV (where most "Las Vegas" hotels/casinos are located to avoid paying city taxes) and Arlington, VA (across the Potomac from Washington, DC).

[ronanmurphy]

0:04 You hit home a bit too hard there Sam. I almost choked on my quesadilla.

[Belboz]

You should'dve also crossed out Wisconsin off your list of places to start a town. In Wisconsin, towns are what are in most states called townships.

Thus, in Wisconsin... you can't create a town because the state already has created all the towns. You can only create a village or city.

[kindandrespectfulcommenter]

Hey Sam, good job on this!! Even if a few details were a bit off, you clearly put in a lot of effort to understand a complicated topic, and I appreciate you. <3

[ZontarDow]

In Canada the process is undefined because what constitutes a town is up to the provincial government. They can create, divide, merge and separate towns at their leisure as all the responsibility of towns and any other level of government below the province exists entirely to operate on what powers the provincial government differs onto them. This is why in 2002 the cities on the Island of Montreal where merged into the City of Montreal without consultation, and in 2006 some of those cities where allowed to become independent again but all where under a new Island of Montreal Regional government made up of the mayors of each city and borough with the mayor of Montreal being the First Amongst Equals.

[benwolff]

As a guy from Ohio, I can confirm that we don’t have towns, just different levels of purgatory.

[Homer-OJ-Simpson]

3:59 the town that attempted to only sell homes to Christian is Bay View, MI. It’s in the very northern part of the lower peninsula and it’s a true story.

[kubev]

I'd love to have the opportunity to start my own town. I realize there's a very good chance it'd turn out to be a complete disaster, but I'd like to experiment with zoning to create a town in which you could legitimately walk just about anywhere you needed or wanted to go, as well as to ensure that everyone had free access to the basics on some level.

[ihavetowaitdaystochangem]

Luckily I already know how to make a town thanks to Doofemsmirtz’s “doofania” episode

[RichTiger]

In Texas, a guy named Carl opened a gas station/convenience store in a rural spot along I-35 and named it Carl's Corner. Then he applied for it to become a town, which he got. So now he gets free advertising from the State of Texas, in the form of those little green signs telling drivers how far it is to the next 3 towns.

[jaquar]

“You can cross out Ohio because, well, it’s Ohio”

Me, who lives in Ohio: Why does this make perfect sense?