Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 10, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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blightauthority.com. And go ahead and submit your ideas. We may be actually taking some of your ideas and putting them into practice. In fact this one city that we're going to be announcing, we're going to be using some of these ideas to actually put them into practice. So visit us at blightauthority.com. So I'm going to show the audience some ideas. And now these ideas were not... we're not sugg…

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cott. So to people looking at this and saying you know what is this, it's actually this is a big problem. Obviously work is a big issue in many of these urban areas, Scott. People can't even get work in the area so they're having to take buses 20, 30 miles out of an urban corridor to do it.

So the logic here, Scott, as you and I think you drew this out very nicely in great Dilbert format here, it looks beautiful, is basically a neighborhood that can provide safety, low cost, work, food. Food is huge now in the urban environment. I mean has anybody heard about what's going on in the urban farming environment now in urban areas? It's unbelievable. And then learning, obviously charter schools. So I think the idea here basically, Scott, is to start to encapsulate some of the best ideas that are going into urban America but in a safe, comfortable, low-cost environment for urban neighborhoods.

Yeah. Let me give just some examples of the things we're thinking about for the residential one. So this picture is shown as the residences forming a circle. That's sort of a security perimeter so that once you're in you're safe. And maybe you've got some video cameras or whatever you need for the added security. But in addition we imagine that each of these homes would have an exterior entrance with possibly a space with its own bathroom that you could run a business out of it or you could rent it. So that each of these homes is both a residence but it provides a source of income. By the way it was designed so the idea here is if you design from scratch to build a system or a community where you've considered all the things that people need from transportation to safety, you could imagine a charter school right in the middle. Because what changes your... Bill, what's the main thing that changes your property value?

Getting rid of the blight.

Well number one making it safe, right?

Right.

But that in terms of building something new, the school is going to be one of your biggest factors.

School, education is huge. Education and safety are huge. So if you come to my town and somebody's looking for a place to live the first question is tell me about the schools. And that becomes the base question for how much they're willing to pay to live there. And if the answer is it's the best school in the county then they're willing to pay a lot more. So you plop a charter school in the middle of a bad area and you ring it with security, you've already changed the value of that land by I don't know a hundredfold.

That's correct. You've significantly increased, depending on the neighborhood, you've significantly increased the value of it. If you can put safety in and education those are fundamental, right? And then who wants to move into a dangerous neighborhood voluntarily, right?

No. So also in the news we're hearing people talking about universal guaranteed income for some folks. And while that's obviously an impractical idea the way it's conceived, think about a future where you could design homes that are better in terms of livability than what we have now but are also way less expensive. So if you designed it from scratch using what we've learned, maybe robots are building them, maybe 3D printers, maybe they come in a kit form, but you could imagine a lot of ways that you could get to a lower cost life. At which point the universal basic income is less important because you could have a lesser job and still pay for everything you need.

So if you're thinking about how to build a residential comm

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unity from the bottom up you say how do they afford it, how do they get an income, how do they get safe, how do they get a school, that sort of thing. So you can see that the possibilities are enormous. Now Scott if I could just jump in. I've seen a lot of questions here asking you know who owns the land once you clean it. It's a great question. We frankly don't even... in terms of making sure th…

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