New Athens is for everyone who believes there must be a better way.

We’re recruiting many kinds of people to move to New Athens. It helps us if you yourself are interested in moving, but it helps everyone to see how the city benefits everyone else, from family members, to friends, to public figures we look up to. That is, the kind of people we’d all like to live in 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.

Quick links

• The game plan – Learn about the teams we’re assembling to build the city.
• Who New Athens is for – Who we’re recruiting to move to the city, and why they say yes.
• Newsletter – Progress reports, news, and essays from our team members.
• Partner with us – Do you represent a company or organization? Partner with us.
• Join the waitlist - Indicate your interest in moving to the city.
• Get involved - Help bring New Athens to life.
• FAQ - Questions we’ve been asked, including the wild ones, and our answers.