Telosa (Marc Lore's Proposed City)

Overview

Telosa is a proposed planned city in the western United States, announced by entrepreneur Marc Lore (co-founder of Jet.com and former Walmart e-commerce executive) in 2021, with a design masterplan later unveiled by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).[1] The project targets an eventual population of 5 million on roughly 150,000–200,000 acres, with an initial phase intended to house 50,000 residents; as of 2025 Telosa remained in the planning and community-building stage, with no site finalized among candidate states (Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Texas have all been named) and no construction underway, despite an initial target of being "ready to move in" by 2030.[2]

Land Model: "Equitism"

Telosa's land ownership structure is explicitly modeled on Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879). Rather than being sold to residents outright, the city's land would be donated to and held by a nonprofit community endowment: residents and businesses would be free to build, own, and sell structures on their sites, but the underlying land itself would remain collectively owned, with rising land values captured by the endowment and reinvested into city services, education, and healthcare rather than accruing to private landowners.[1] Lore has branded this approach "Equitism," presenting it as a way to let a growing city's own land-value gains fund public goods without conventional taxation — the same land/building separation and rent-capture logic behind Georgist proposals more broadly, though applied here to a for-profit-founded, privately initiated new city rather than a sovereign state.

Significance

Telosa is one of the highest-profile contemporary attempts to build Georgist land-value capture into a city's founding legal structure, drawing direct and repeated comparisons to historical experiments such as the garden-city movement. Its outcome is far from settled — as of the most recent public updates the project has secured neither a site nor construction financing — which makes it, at present, a proposal and case study in Georgist urban design rather than a proof of concept.

See Also

• Henry George — Telosa's founder cites Progress and Poverty as the direct inspiration for its land endowment model
• Ebenezer Howard — earlier garden-city movement pursuing a comparable land-trust financing model
• Community Land Trust — the smaller-scale land/building separation mechanism Telosa's endowment resembles
• Land Value Capture — the general category Telosa's Equitism model belongs to
• Land is a Big Deal (Doucet, 2022) — discusses contemporary attempts, including Telosa, to build Georgist principles into new cities

Sources

1. "Telosa," Wikipedia; CNN, "Telosa: Marc Lore and Bjarke Ingels unveil plans for 5-million-person city in the American desert" — used for the project's 2021 announcement, the Equitism/community-endowment land model explicitly citing Henry George, the BIG masterplan, and target population. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa; cnn.com/style/article/telosa-marc-lore-blake-ingels-new-city
2. Dezeen, "BIG's Telosa city includes circular transit hub and flying vehicles" (Aug. 2025) — used for the 2025 status update (design-to-community-building shift, no confirmed site or financing as of late 2025). dezeen.com/2025/08/21/telosa-city-big-marc-lore-big-usa-city-images
3. Lars A. Doucet, Land is a Big Deal (2022), Ch. 26 — discovery source; discusses contemporary attempts to build land-value capture into new city projects. Book page