Article – How to found a new town

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Thought for the day: “A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them – they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
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It’s a trope of virtually every post apocalyptic story: The townies come together to battle an outside force of bad guys. Its in virtually every. Single. Story.

So, if youre going to rally the townies, you’d want those townies to be like-minded individuals who are all on the same page. What are the odds of that? Well, you can stack the odds by stocking the town: start your own town:

But if you don’t love the way the towns and cities in your neck of the woods operate, you might be able to haul off and start your own. In fact, the United States is pretty much the only place on the planet where this is still generally possible to do, because we have a lot of what’s known as “unincorporated land,” or land that isn’t part of an established town or city (communities that spring up when people build homes on this land are called, unsurprisingly, unincorporated communities). It’s not necessarily an easy process, really, but if you want to establish your own brand-new town, you can probably pull it off.

Montana is a little tricky. The joke used to be that all you needed to b a town here was a bar and a Napa dealership. In actuality, it appears you need 300 like-minded voters and some sort of postal presence (which ,as I read, can be a Mailbox etc or UPS store that offers mailboxes).

Just to carry the mental exercise further, if you were to make your own town, I wonder if you could then create your own police force, automatically deputize every citizen, and thereby give them legal access to affordable post-dealer LE-only machineguns and heavier weapons. You know, a couple MAG58’s at the town entrance, MP5’s for everybody, maybe a quad-50 on a city gun truck for quick deployment.

If you start your own town, let me know. I could use a little pied-à-terre in such a place.

23 thoughts on “Article – How to found a new town”

  2. If you haven’t heard of it, Slab City in California is an example except it is occupied by people down on their luck, homeless, druggies or a combination. It is unincorporated and is in an area that was formally a World War Two Marine Corp. Base. Police make a drive through only occaisionally but that’s pretty much it. Other than the residents it sounds like what you’re talking about. But yes, a citizenry of a few hundred like minded and driven patriots could be a formidable force.

    • Slab City isn’t a city in any way, shape, or form. It’s a camp of refugees and losers mutually associating, as a 21st century hobo camp. Their cohesion in tough times would be roughly that of jello.

      Not what was discussed in the OP.

      They exist primarily because Imperial County takes a laissez faire attitude to the encampment, and hasn’t been vexed by it enough to simply bulldoze it all.

      {Read up about L.A. County and “desert rats” if you want to see what it looks like when TPTB do take an interest in you.}

      They are Seattle’s CHAZ, except with the wit to set up where no one GsAF, and bright enough not to hire a PR firm to advertise their own existence. They’re already on the radar of every law enforcement and bounty hunting company in the country. They don’t need any more interest than what they already get, in spicy times they’d last about as long as a trailer park in a tornado, and are far more likely to join any post-apocalyptic hordes than to band together and repel them.

      Which is assuming the Navy SEALs, whose primary desert training base is located just yards from Slab City across the canal from them, and has been for 50 years, didn’t just wipe them out pro-actively if and when any balloon went up, or for any one of ten other good reasons.

      I spent months at Chocolate Mountains Range, on and off, including a couple of E&Es through Slab City, and I know whereof I speak.

    • Yeah. Slab City is a dump. It is not a city at all, there are no services of any kind. It’s a bunch of homeless people squatting in one spot, and some of them make “art”, but that’s about it. Without the ability to get to civilization and buy supplies, it wouldn’t last a month out there in the desert. I’m not sure but I believe they even have to bring in their own water.

  3. It sounds like possibly a good Idea, but these days, any serious attempt to create anything seen by the government as trying to be even slightly ‘Independent’ of the Corporate State, would be Infiltrated and Stymied right from the Start. If that failed, the label of “Terrorists!” would be applied, and then they would get the “Waco Treatment’.

    The …”trope of virtually every post apocalyptic story…” would, IMO, be the only way something like this would “Work”, meaning ‘government’ would have to Collapse before “We the People” could form new Political Communities.

  5. Anything in there about starting a new country. I’m thinking we need to start one. And the only states will be the ones we want. No blue state losers.

    • To start a new county, you have to get an old county to agree to give you up, and pay them for their lost infrastructure.

      As far as a town of LMIs, it would probably be a lot easier to find a small town (Ismay, Mt?) that already is incorporated, move there with a few friends and start voting….

        • Yeah, hopefully with people that can get along better.

          I was all jazzed about the FSP until they chose their east-coast location. Sorry, but that’s a hard no for me.

  6. It’s going to come down to what are the laws of the state you live in. So, if you have an unorganized community of say 500 and only 300 vote to incorporate, then only the property of those who vote yes would be in the city limits. In Texas, a city has to have a population of 5,000 before they can become home rule with forced annexation rights. As far as a police department, it’s formation again would be base of the laws of the state you live. In Texas every law enforcement office (full-time and reserves) has to be licensed by TCOLE. As far as NFA restricted items such as machine gun, the agency would own them, and they would be non-transferable to anyone other than another LE agency or a class 3 dealer. If it is a LE only restricted firearm, then the dealer could only sell it to another LE agency or just keep it in their inventory. I think the boys at ATF would block any sale to a PD who claims their entire city population were member of their agency thus their need for 200 automatic weapons. It would not be a good day for whoever signed that form 4 for the agency. The formation of the city would not be the challenge, it would be attracting the right people and keeping them.

    • You needn’t do it at a single blow. And obviously, shouldn’t try.

      Boil the frog slowly.

      Start with incorporation. Then begin in small increments.
      Elect the police. Make qualified immunity revocable by simple majority vote.
      Then make every adult in the community who desires it a reserve officer, with commensurate training.

      You wouldn’t buy 400 Class II weapons at one time.
      A few here, a few there.
      Who takes and maintains custody, as long as they are regularly inventoried, is purely a matter of department policy, not federal law.
      Feds and LEOs take machineguns home every day. And lose them, on occasion. Yet no one’s revoked their charters for it. Individual spankings, yes.

      Once you become The Man, a host of opportunities arise. Not least of which is the state and federal grants trough. Buying APCs for a dollar, and such. Just mind the strings that come with any of that.

      The real problem as always, as Benjamin Franklin noted, is the “if you can keep it” part.

      Getting and having an entire cohesive community is the hard part.

      Getting a few hundred machineguns after that is what we would refer to as a First World Problem, and a minor inconvenience, compared to the hurdle of the community in the first place.

      There are entire towns in the Rust Belt, for sale for a pittance, begging for this solution.

      Anyone with a tribe should absolutely seek to get their own reservation, with all the legal trimmings

      Imagine three-such incorporated small communities near but outside any Blue Hive: the draw would become irresistible, and offset or even checkmate them commensurately, starting with denying them a monopoly. Demographics is always a zero-sum game.

      This is called Preparing The Battlespace. 😉

      • You can do whatever you want with qualified immunity, but it’s a USSC recognized right and they don’t care what you think. Also, the laws it applies to are county, state or federal, not local.

    • Small town chiefs of police and lightly populated counties’ sheriffs get themselves in trouble with schemes of this sort on a not-infrequent basis. Sometimes with BATFE over NFA purchases, sometimes over handing out badges. Some town in Georgia recently got a lot of attention for the latter.

      I’ve occasionally wondered how BATFE would respond to a Type 7 or Type 10 FFL with SOT who had a LOT of ‘part-time employees’?

      • +1
        Liberty and society…. why do we think coming up with the US Constitution was so difficult?

        LIFE, Liberty, pursuit of happiness….
        A basic framework that represents these values.

        I saw a recent article proclaiming the “virtue” of direct democracy. Utter garbage that you KNOW the masses will accept as “justice”. Be wary my friends… be very wary. I wish it were that simple, I really do. A “red state” is probably the most realistic option. 300 like minded individuals is only relevant if you’re a Spartan. Society today…. not so much. You’ll be swept under the rug faster than Rosanne Barr.

  8. This smells like the Free State Project, but certainly different enough.

    I enjoyed the book Molon Labe by Boston T Party, which is a novel about this kind of thing. I’m sure CZ is already aware of it.

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