Wealth Guru Plots Car-Lite City Between Boulder And Longmont

BOULDER, CO -- An international coalition of aspirational urban visionaries has decided to take on Boulder County planning regulations once and for all with the vision of a brand-new, car-free community located somewhere between Boulder and Longmont. Pete Adeny, a retired-at-30 Longmont resident who blogs about wealth as Mr. Money Mustache, teamed up with Tara Ross and John Giusto, two American ex-pats who now run B4Place, a property development agency based in Amsterdam, to create the vision of Cyclocroft, the one-square-mile plot that could become home to 50,000 people, Forbes reported this week.

The people of Cyclocroft will be "Happy to give up huge yards, fast roads, and seas of parking lots, because they know that these become unsustainable maintenance and public safety liabilities," explains the project post on the B4Place website. "They don’t see living closely together as a compromise, but rather an opportunity to re-gain once cherished benefits."

The community would be filled with three to nine story buildings, the visionaries explain, with a small district of high-rises that could reach up to 40 stories tall. "Using Native American, Afro-Eurasian, and Industrial-Age urbanism as seeds for the procedural plan, Cyclocroft will propagate like an echo from a nearly lost place and time," they promise.

I am pretty sure that it would set an example that would change the world.

But we'd need a HUGE chunk of money to start it in a fresh, unzoned area, in order to set new rules rather than begging existing city councils to change existing ones.
— Mr. Money Mustache (@mrmoneymustache) February 22, 2019

"I am pretty sure that it would set an example that would change the world," wrote Mr. Money Mustache himself in the days after Forbes broke his story, perhaps underestimating the regulations that govern the land between the two Boulder County communities. "But we'd need a HUGE chunk of money to start it in a fresh, unzoned area, in order to set new rules rather than begging existing city councils to change existing ones."

"Doesn't Gunbarrel already exist in the space between Boulder and Longmont?" one commenter noted.

Before you start calling your elected representatives or begin to plot sit-ins at the commissioners' offices, the final sentence tagged on after the design photos in the project's description merits your attention: "These pages explore experimental, hypothetical, forward-leaning design concepts. We mean no offense by these ideas, and we can assure you that they don’t currently exist…yet."

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