Silicon Valley’s latest startup offering is a whole city

"We want to build cities," Y Combinator partner Adora Cheung and President Sam Altman wrote in an announcement Monday. YC Research, Y Combinator’s nonprofit arm, plans to solicit proposals for research into construction methods, power sources, driverless cars, even notions of zoning and property rights. Among other things, the project aims to develop ways to reduce housing expenses by 90 percent and to develop a city code of laws simple enough to fit on 100 pages of text. Eventually the plan is to produce a prototype city. "We’re not trying to build a utopia for techies," says Cheung, the project’s director and the former CEO of failed housecleaning startup Homejoy. "This is a city for humans."

By Max Chafkin

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