The first great American city for families.

New Athens is a proposed new U.S. city where a family of four can live comfortably on a single income.

Out: Smartphones.

In: Beautiful neighborhoods designed for “be back before dinner” childhood adventure. Inexpensive houses built by locals. Good neighbors. Full churches. Clean food. A thriving economy of businesses that put people before AI. Brave writers, tangible art, and music that sounds good. A nightlife. Old-school public schools: great teachers, no screens, high standards, no nonsense. And so much more.

A brief welcome

When you tell people, “I’m helping start a city!” they’ll give you the ‘don’t-touch-me’ look for about 10 seconds until they realize you’re not kidding—and they remember how worried they are about America, too. You end up in the kind of real conversation we’re told people don’t have any more.

It gets extra real when you talk about going backwards in order to go forwards, like banning smartphones in order to improve mental health. Schools nationally are moving to do it, but ban smartphones for everyone? All at once these are fighting words, a reminder of what we’ve lost, and the source of unexpected, often unnerving feelings of hope.

And this is in stark contrast to the conversations we have online. We, the American people, are good at noticing things we don’t like about society. It just turns out that social media, and the entire digital world, is a bad place to actually do or build anything.

New Athens is an outlet for our best instincts. We’re developing serious solutions to urgent problems faced by most Americans; we’re a way for people to put down their phones and tangibly do something—build a city together; and as a middle step, this website, and our growing waitlist of people who want to move to the city, fuel the startup process. Whether you move to New Athens or not, you won’t regret grappling with the problems we’re seeking to solve.

We welcome you to the conversation and, hopefully soon, a neighborhood you love in New Athens.

—Jackson Solway, on behalf of the founding team

The game plan

New Athens will deploy a set of Launch Teams to guide the development of the city, each with a mandate on an important topic. Learn more.

Who New Athens is for

Here’s who we’re recruiting to move to the city, and why they say yes. In other words, how New Athens can benefit your family members, friends, and other people you’d like to share a city with.

For parents

Give your kids what you loved about your own childhood. Do not raise your children to be screen addicts or second-class citizens to AI. Move your family to New Athens to prepare your children for full lives of adventure and flourishing. As you relied on your parents, your children are counting on you to make the best decisions for them. We invite you to join us.

For young couples

New Athens aims to be the best place in America to start a family. A place where a parent with a crying baby is offered a hand, not a scowl. Where it’s normal to kick your kids out of the house to go play in the neighborhood. Where you don’t need to justify your decision to have kids, nor nod along with childless coworkers as they laugh at photos of their cats. In New Athens, most adults will have been in your shoes, and everyone will be on your team. We invite you to join us.

For students under 18

Have a normal childhood: make friends, learn, play, get away with stuff, etc. If you have a smartphone today, you are a subject in a social science experiment that just sort of…happened. New Athens is an Opt Out button for you and your family—a return to real life. And, together as a city, New Athens is a shield against a digital world that is fundamentally not real, not compatible with mental health, and a barrier to your natural interest in growing up. We invite you to join us.

For college students

Build a city on a hill, not a mountain of debt. All but a few colleges abandoned the pursuit of truth decades ago. All but a few degrees are economically worthless. All but a few of your peers use AI to cheat relentlessly, as do your professors, and perhaps you too, and nobody blinks. You know in your gut it’s all madness. Move to New Athens to start a real life, with real people, building something real for the same reasons great Americans before you toiled. We invite you to join us.

For single men

Join the New Athens Corp of Engineers, the sane alternative to college, and build a city for your community, not a mountain of debt for yourself. The Corp is a hybrid of classical education, trade school, and residential construction labor in a disciplined environment modeled on military service. Men and women are assigned to a 30-person unit and commit to a 3-year tour of duty. Upon graduation, you’ll receive full ownership of a single-family home. While you work, date. Single women in New Athens have self-selected to prioritize hard work, sanity, and interest in starting a family. We invite you to join us.

For single women

Wondering where all the good men went? They’re here. Single men in New Athens have self-selected to prioritize hard work, decorum, and interest in starting a family. They’re surrounded by mentors and peers who share these priorities and are committed to keeping each other in check. Good friends are here, too, and bad friends who spout off behind screens are not. Because we banned smartphones. We invite you to join us.

For senior citizens

Your country needs you now more than ever. The Retiree Action League (gotta keep it light—old age is hard enough) will place seniors like you in schools to help young Americans recover from everything the internet took from them: reading, writing, basic math, and real-world judgment. And we hate retirement homes, too. Houses in New Athens are built for multigenerational families, with features that keep the essentials accessible and minimize the cost of in-home care. Set yourself up to die with dignity and honor, not getting your ass wiped by a stranger who won’t put her phone down. We invite you to join us.

For teachers

Teach good kids who want to be in your classroom. Parents on the New Athens waitlist have self-selected to prioritize education, value your expertise, and are committed to maintaining vibrant, sane, low-screen homes. No kidding, the first version of New Athens was a school designed to be the best possible workplace for K–12 teachers. It wasn’t good enough so we rethought the entire endeavor as a city. It’s hard to overstate how committed we, as an entire city, are to your success. We invite you to join us.

For business owners and startup founders

Build a better business faster in a community of peers who, like you, find dignity in work and think replacing 99% of American workers with robots is a bad idea. For the last 30 years, the human world has atrophied as investment poured into the digital world. We’re reversing course. New Athens represents the rebirth of cities as hubs for human flourishing. Our economy will focus on re-creating the supply chain for home life, school life, city life, and work life without smartphones. Business culture in New Athens is the meeting point of an old-school moral compass and the ambition, speed, and large-scale thinking of Silicon Valley. We invite you to join us.

For tradesmen

Help us put lawyers out of work. Over the last 50 years, the culture of craftsmanship that built America was replaced by top-down technocratic management. The construction industry became an extension of the legal industry: code inspectors and lawyers battling over whether code was precisely followed, rather than craftsmen solving problems to ensure a building is safe, practical, and beautiful. New Athens represents a rebirth of craftsmanship and guild-based leadership, where people trust the buildings they live and work in because they know the guys who built them, and those guys take pride in their work because doing a good job is the right thing to do. We invite you to join us.

For writers, artists, and musicians

We’re creating a population that cares deeply about what you do. And we need your leadership: For New Athens to be successful, we need to feed the soul. People sign up to move to New Athens because, in part, online culture is like candy for dinner—you end up fat, ugly, and full of regret. Join us as we create a crucible of artists interested in this historical moment, in an environment with no smartphones, and where the arts are baked into daily life through our commitment to classical arts education and new-traditional architecture and city planning. We invite you to join us.

Partner with New Athens

Do you represent a company or organization? Partner with us.

For investors

We make babies, you make money. To fuel the startup process, we’re selling rights to New Athens’ future tax revenue. You’ll sign a revenue-sharing agreement. You’ll pay a fixed amount on signing and receive a fixed percentage of New Athens’ tax revenue for 10 years, starting upon New Athens’ incorporation and legal authority to collect tax. At the highest level, New Athens is a bet on humans and a hedge against investments that will only succeed if AI makes 99% of Americans unemployed.

If you share our vision for human survival, or your portfolio balance makes you uneasy, we want to talk with you. Email us.

For policymakers and researchers

New Athens is fundamentally an effort to save America from population collapse without violating basic American values. Our vision demands we tackle dozens of America’s thorniest problems all at once. This is a strategic decision. Our country is increasingly unable to solve problems outside of crises. A new city is, in effect, a crisis that doesn’t hurt people. There’s a long history in the U.S. of people trying to start new cities. Most were religious cults and made quick enemies of the general public. On the contrary, our goal is to serve normal Americans and develop common-sense solutions that can be adopted by other jurisdictions.

If you’ve spent your career modeling solutions to America’s thorniest problems, and would like to actually try them, we want to talk with you. Email us.

For large companies

Hire people who give a damn—and who won’t look at their phone at work, because they can’t, because we banned phones. Open an office or innovation lab in New Athens and gain access to old-school young people: broadly educated, curious, disciplined, and with roots so they won’t quit after 6 months.

If you manage workforce expansion or readiness, or have a moral aversion to replacing your workforce with robots, we want to talk with you. Email us.

For farmers

New Athens residents are not just new customers, but partners who are invested in how and why you farm the way you do. Once we’ve chosen a location, if you’re a farmer nearby, we’ll aim to bring you tens of thousands of people who see you as integral to their health and the fabric of their community.

If you manage a farm that’s aligned with our vision for restoring what Big Ag destroyed, we want to talk with you. Email us.

For our host state

We’re here to make it rain. For our host state, county, and nearby residents: we’re here to pay into your tax system, bring you customers, and keep your population from shrinking to nothing. And all without stressing your physical infrastructure—because, on principle, we’re going to build our own. Count us committed to a win-win relationship: New Athens is about renewal and growth, not airdropping hippies into your backyard.

If you manage economic development for a jurisdiction and like to think big, we want to talk with you. Email us.

For churches and other houses of worship

The problem with religion is that it was replaced. Consider New Athens a partner in ministry in the limited, but essential, sense that we’re going to stop blocking you from doing your work.

If you’re interested in opening a branch of your church or other house of worship in New Athens, we want to talk with you. Email us.

For grant-making organizations

New Athens is a once-in-a-generation research environment: the first true laboratory of Democracy on American soil since Hawaii gained statehood in 1959. We’re looking to partner with researchers who support our vision. Preliminary topics of interest include the impact of policy innovations on coupling, family formation, and birth rates; the impact of smartphone elimination on rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide; the introduction and impact of civic-minded youth rites of passage; the impact of policy innovations on quality-of-life for retirees and senior citizens, and more.

If your organization shares interests with New Athens, we want to talk with you. Email us.

FAQ

Read more in our full FAQ

What are your politics? Are you Republicans? Democrats? Contemptible fence sitters?

New Athens is fundamentally for reform and against revolution. We’re not affiliated with a party. Everyone is welcome to join the waitlist and move to the city. That includes people who have flirted with the far-right and far-left. People with big ideas are essential to any healthy society—so long as they’re building instead of destroying.

In New Athens we unite in the belief that America is worth fighting for, that the Constitution should endure, and that righting the ship will take highly-motivated patriots of all stripes.

While idealistic, our approach is also deeply practical: by giving people something to do with their beliefs beyond screaming them into the void of the internet, New Athens is an offramp from social media nonsense and a re-grounding in the real world. There’s no screen to hide behind and compromise is not a pre-internet relic, but a normal, practical requirement of living in the physical world.

Where’s the city?

We’re going to do what car companies do when they want to open a new factory: solicit bids from multiple jurisdictions and select the best bid. The winning jurisdiction will get two things: tax revenue (from taxing our economic activity and residents); and, taking a longer view, stable prosperity: our residents will be primarily young, energetic families committed to local success.

In exchange, over a large geographic area the jurisdiction must cut red tape, especially zoning restrictions, so we may legally build the city.

Why build an entire city?

Because everything in America broke all at once, and a city is the smallest social unit at which everything can be fixed all at once. Not too big, not too small—just right.

And as normal people who appreciate a good time, if we build an entire city we’ll learn more, have fun, and make some memories.

Another lens: Reforming existing institutions requires god-level skills in bureaucratic knife fighting, a skillset possessed by masochists, psychos, maybe like 4 normal people globally, and nobody else. On the other hand, building a city is urgent work that demands the human spirit—and definitionally requires everyone’s help.

How will I survive without a smartphone?!

We’re hard core about banning smartphones, but we’re no Luddites. A smartphone is a general-purpose computer you carry around with you. If it’s not general-purpose, or if you can’t carry it around, it’s not a smartphone any more. Practically speaking, in New Athens this means you can carry a dumb phone that just makes calls, or lock your smartphone to your desk (standard security cables are $15 on Amazon), or both. That’s it—welcome to town.

Here’s what you get back when your smartphone is literally stuck to your desk: when you take a walk, you’re just walking; when you’re at work, you’re just working; when you’re eating dinner, you’re just eating dinner, likely with people who are also just eating dinner. Ditching your smartphone does not just return you to real life, but grants you multiple lives: a home life, a work life, friend groups, hobbies, side hustles, a good night’s sleep. That’s precisely what smartphones took from us: a smartphone in your pocket makes you one person to everyone in all settings at all times.

If smartphones became popular 15 years ago because they made people feel smart and connected, New Athens will thrive because residents feel sane and loved by real people in the real world.

How are you going to actually ban smartphones?

Everyone you see in New Athens will have decided smartphones are a bad deal. If you do the one thing everyone has agreed is bad, you’re an asshole.

This isn’t us being glib: social norms are powerful. Beyond norms, legal frameworks and precedents are actively being established in school districts across the United States. Importantly, banning smartphones is not a question of regulating tech companies. It’s a matter of regulating personal possession.

As noted above, in New Athens smartphones may not be carried. (When a smartphone is locked to a desk, it’s not a smartphone anymore.) “Don’t carry it” is a concept a child can understand. And it’s easy to spot violators: they’re the people walking around with their phones. Get spotted by a cop and you’ve earned yourself a ticket. Do it repeatedly and the device gets seized.

What are you going to build first?

Free public schools based on the non-religious, low-tech Classical education model. Why? A great free school system is a powerful reason for an existing family to move to the city, and for new couples to plan their future here. Schools are also deeply mistrusted by parents across the political spectrum, so prioritizing our school system serves our goals of attracting a wide range of families and minimizing political groupthink.

Also, to nerd out for a moment, school hours, bussing timetables, and holiday calendars significantly influence local workforce schedules and job opportunities, which drive dozens of other decisions made by families. Any credible effort to help families, not just say “have more kids!”, starts with school reform.

How big is the city going to be?

Big. We’re targeting 200,000 single-income families by 2050 (roughly 1 million total residents). By American standards this is absurd and indicates we’re not serious.

On the contrary, we’re quite serious and not crazy: we’re just the first people (besides tech billionaires) with the balls to say a big number out loud. Other countries, especially China, scale cities even faster on a regular basis. For every reason, America needs grand projects like New Athens.

What do you mean by “single-income family?”

New Athens represents a strong, though limited, set of opinions about children, parenting, and family formation.

We have two primary stakes in the ground: First, we believe is it normal and good for all people to strive to have kids, even if they ultimately don’t. Second, the strongest families are those where one parent is home. We are intentionally not taking a stance on who that should be, husband or wife, though it shouldn’t bother anyone to recall that, for most of human history, the homemaker role has been played by women. There’s also Option 3: both parents work part-time—which is a great option. The point is that, whenever a kid is home, a parent ought to be too.

A few more beliefs: For women, having your first child in your mid teens (as women did through most of human history) is jumping the gun, and if you’re 30 you waited too long—but better late than never. For kids, we broadly believe that playing with other kids is healthy and looking at a screen alone is harmful. Philosophically, we believe the concept of a “free range” childhood is directionally correct, and that intensive parenting stunts a child’s growth and makes parenting harder than it needs to be. Parents should feel like they’ve qualified for the Olympics if their children have reliable food, shelter, and clothing; are getting enough sleep; feel safe at home; and can hear the word “no” without totally melting down. Finally, young children should be read to for at least 10 minutes a day.

There are many other things we, the people behind New Athens, do for our kids, but we’re disinclined to suggest any are right for all families.

Is this a housing development with fancy marketing?

No. Housing developments are short-term business ventures. Typically, an investor gives money to a developer to build and sell a large humber of housing units, then the investor and developer share the profits. Investors are also essential to New Athens, but they are rewarded differently.

In exchange for their up-front investment, investors in New Athens receive a portion of gross yearly tax revenue for a period of time. In financial terms, investors in housing developments make money on customer acquisition (people buy houses), whereas investors in New Athens make money on customer retention (families stay and thrive).

Notably, this means investors are incentivized to keep housing prices as low as possible to attract new residents. Most importantly, this model aligns investors with the long-term success of residents—from the quality of the education in public schools, to the happiness and stability of families, to New Athens’ overall economic strength. We think this investment model is fundamentally better for everyone.

How much will houses cost?

As little as possible. Our goal is for houses in New Athens to be the best bang for the buck in the United States. Our primary tool is investor incentives. As noted above, investors in New Athens only make money when a family stays and makes money in New Athens—not when that family buys a home. In other words, investor profit margins depend in large part on population growth, which aligns investors—and their lawyers—with everything it takes to built a large number of high-quality houses with low price tags.

Tactically, there are many ways to achieve this. That process will begin with negotiations with our host jurisdiction. If you’re new to this topic, a brief primer: Cities and states use laws and regulations to shape almost every aspect of the housing market. Laws and regulations make it faster or slower to get permits, increase or decrease building requirements, allow or restrict corporate, foreign, and non-resident ownership, set rules for the rental market, pass laws that influence transaction costs, and much more.