When e-commerce billionaire Marc Lore announced his plans in 2021 to build a city called Telosa — a 150,000-acre metropolis for 5 million people, designed from scratch with autonomous vehicles, renewable energy, and a new economic model he calls “Equitism” — most observers imagined a desert setting. The architectural renderings from Bjarke Ingels Group showed gleaming towers rising from arid landscapes dotted with cacti and sagebrush. But buried in the project’s early announcements was a surprise: Appalachia was listed as one of six potential locations, alongside Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona and Texas. A two-decade Western drought that has lowered the Colorado River to emergency levels may well turn the planners to the mountains as the best alternative. Marc Lore (LinkedIn) By 2022, the Telosa team had narrowed their search to three western states. Yet the Appalachian option has never been formally ruled out, and the region continues to surface in discussions about the project. For those of us who have spent decades studying how outsiders have tried to remake the mountains — and how those efforts have fared — the prospect of an e-commerce billionaire dropping a futuristic city into the coalfields or another part of the region raises questions that go far deeper than site selection. We have been here before. The mountains have served as a laboratory for planned communities, model towns and social engineering experiments for more than a century. From the company towns built by U.S. Steel to Eleanor Roosevelt’s beloved Arthurdale to the TVA’s showcase community at Norris, outsiders with grand visions have repeatedly seen Appalachia as a blank slate waiting to be filled with their dreams. The results have been decidedly mixed. Before anyone plants Telosa in our hills, they should understand this history — and grapple with a fundamental question that has defined Appalachian development for generations: Who owns the land, and who gets to decide what happens on it? What Lore wants to build Lore made his fortune in e-commerce, not Silicon Valley tech. A native of Staten Island who grew up in New Jersey, he founded Jet.com (sold to Walmart for $3.3 billion) and Quidsi, parent company of Diapers.com (sold to Amazon for $545 million). After serving as Walmart’s e-commerce chief, he turned his attention to what he describes as reinventing how cities work. The project has attracted notable supporters. Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a childhood friend of Lore’s, has been actively involved in planning. At a 2022 town hall covered by Smart Cities Dive, Bharara spoke about the opportunity to build better civic institutions from scratch: “You don’t have to have a police department that has been marred by scandal and excessive use of force. You don’t have to have a local prison system like Rikers Island.” Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, whose firm designed Copenhagen’s innovative Copenhill waste-to-energy plant, serves as lead architect. Lore’s business partner Alex Rodriguez, the former baseball star with whom he purchased the Minnesota Timberwolves, has also been involved. The Telosa project, named from the Greek word telos meaning “highest purpose,” promises to be “the most open, most fair and most inclusive city in the world.” The design calls for 36 mixed-use districts, each organized around the “15-minute city” concept where residents can reach work, schools, health care and recreation within a short walk or bike ride. Fossil-fuel vehicles would be banned. Renewable energy would power everything. Autonomous vehicles and even flying cars would move people and goods. At the heart of the project is “Equitism,” Lore’s economic model based loosely on the ideas of 19th-century economist Henry George. Under this system, the land would be owned by a community foundation rather than individual property owners. As the city grows and land values rise, the foundation would capture that appreciation and use it to fund social services — health care, education, small business development — without burdening residents with high taxes. “There’s a finite amount of land and that land was claimed generations ago,” Lore has written on the Telosa project website. “Land could essentially go from a barren piece of desert to a modern-day city worth billions, or even trillions. What if that land had been owned by a community endowment?” It’s an intriguing question. But it’s not a new one in Appalachia. Why Appalachia made the list When Cardinal News editor Dwayne Yancey examined the Telosa proposal in 2021, he noted something that other commentators had missed: Despite all the desert imagery, the Appalachian region remained officially in play. “Virtually all the news coverage of Telosa described it as a desert oasis,” Yancey wrote. “‘Former Walmart president reveals plan for $400 billion Utopian city in the US desert,’ headlined USA Today. And, sure enough, all the artists’ conceptions by the architectural firm show a desert backdrop with cacti and sagebrush. And yet … there’s still that sixth Appalachian option.” Yancey explored what an Appalachian Telosa might mean for Southwest Virginia. The region, he noted, is “arguably underpopulated” — Buchanan County has lost nearly half its population since 1980, declining from 37,989 to around 20,000 today. “There’s plenty of room for more people.” The practical advantages are considerable. Unlike the desert Southwest, Appalachia has abundant water — rivers, aquifers and reliable rainfall that could sustain a large population without the massive infrastructure investments required for desert living. Land costs are far lower than in the growth corridors of Nevada or Arizona. The region sits within reasonable distance of major metropolitan areas: Knoxville, Lexington, Roanoke and Charleston are all within a few hours’ drive. But Yancey also raised the harder questions. A city of 50,000 — the initial phase of Telosa — would dwarf the existing population of most Appalachian localities. “That wouldn’t just change the culture of a county,” he observed. “It would create a new one. Is that desirable?” That question cuts to the heart of Appalachian development debates that have raged for more than a century. The company town model: Lynch, Kentucky In these undated photos, the company store, more formally known as The United Supply Company, is at top right. Located in nearby Benham, it is now home to the Kentucky Coal Museum. The photo at bottom left is the Lynch Colored Public School. (Louis Edward Nollau Nitrate Photographic Print Collection, University of Kentucky Libraries, Special Collections Research Center) In 1917, U.S. Coal and Coke Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, began building what would become the largest coal camp in the world on 19,000 acres in Harlan County. They named it Lynch, after company president Thomas Lynch. By the 1940s, Lynch had a population of 10,000 and employed more than 4,000 workers. The company provided amenities that were remarkable for the time and place: quality housing built of local stone, a hospital, schools, a movie theater, churches, and recreational facilities. Housing was subsidized; no worker paid more than 25 percent of their salary for rent. The company store offered goods at competitive prices. Lynch was considered one of the model coal camps in Appalachia because of its relatively high quality of life compared to the typical coal camp. The town attracted workers from across the globe — by 1926, it was described as “the new melting pot,” home to immigrants from Germany, Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Poland, Greece, Italy, Russia and dozens of other countries, alongside African Americans from the Deep South and local mountaineers. As historian William Turner documents in “The Harlan Renaissance,” the African American community in Lynch created a vibrant cultural life despite the constraints of segregation, building institutions that would shape generations. But Lynch was also a closed community where the company controlled every aspect of political and economic life. U.S. Coal and Coke maintained its own police force, used not only to keep order but to intimidate workers who showed interest in unionization and to keep organizers out of town. The battles between coal operators and miners in Harlan County during this period earned the region the name “Bloody Harlan.” When the company no longer needed Lynch, it simply walked away. U.S. Steel began tearing down buildings in the 1960s and sold what remained to residents. Today, Lynch has fewer than 700 people — a 93% decline from its peak. The rails that once carried millions of tons of coal to steel mills in Gary, Indiana, were abandoned in 1996. The lesson of Lynch is sobering: Even a “model” company town serves the interests of its corporate owner first. When those interests change, the community is left to fend for itself with whatever infrastructure remains. TVA’s social laboratory: Norris, Tennessee Interior of scroll case in the Norris Dam Powerhouse in 1937 photographed by TVA staff photographer Charles Krutch of Knoxville who began working for TVA in 1934, the second year of its existence. Krutch’s photos of TVA dams under construction were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941. (TVA) When Franklin Roosevelt appointed Arthur Morgan to chair the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, he got more than a flood-control engineer. Morgan had spent the previous decade as president of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he pioneered a cooperative education model combining work and study. He was a utopian who saw TVA as “little less than a means of reinventing civilization.” His grand vision went far beyond dams and power lines — he wanted to transform how people in the Tennessee Valley lived. His fellow TVA director David Lilienthal would later call the agency “democracy on the march” — a phrase that carried considerable irony given that three appointed directors held total control over a seven-state utility with no meaningful accountability to the people whose lives they were transforming. What began as America’s boldest experiment in public planning would end up, as I wrote in American Heritage magazine in 1977, as the nation’s first flirtation with socialism that devolved into little more than a gigantic federally owned utility. The human cost was staggering. TVA displaced approximately 125,000 people to create its dams and generating stations — families who had lived on that land for generations, removed with minimal compensation and little say in the matter. And the agency’s appetite for cheap electricity led directly to one of Appalachia’s greatest environmental catastrophes: TVA promoted and enabled the introduction of strip mining to Eastern Kentucky and the broader region, devastating mountaintops and hollows that had sustained communities for centuries. Norris, Tennessee, was Morgan’s showcase. Built to house workers constructing Norris Dam, the town was designed as a permanent demonstration of cooperative living. Working with landscape architect Earle Draper, Morgan created a community that emphasized walkability, natural materials and communal facilities. Houses were modest but modern, built with native stone and cedar, each equipped with electric heating and refrigerators — luxuries in Depression-era Appalachia. A greenbelt of protected forest surrounded the residential areas. Morgan dreamed that Norris would become economically self-sustaining through local industry — particularly ceramics, using native materials and traditional skills. It never worked out as he hoped. The ceramics venture failed, and Norris never developed an independent economic base. More troubling was the town’s racial policy. TVA excluded Black families from Norris, claiming they were simply following local customs. Black leaders pointed out that this was false — the races had lived and worked together in the local mountains and valleys for generations. The policy was federal discrimination imposed on a region that, for all its problems, had more racial integration than the planned community that was supposed to represent the future. Morgan clashed repeatedly with his fellow TVA directors over his ambitious social engineering and was fired by Roosevelt in 1938. The federal government sold Norris at auction in 1948; a Philadelphia consortium bought the entire town for just over $2 million and resold individual homes to residents. Today, Norris survives as a pleasant bedroom community for Knoxville and Oak Ridge. Its design still wins admirers among urban planners. But Morgan’s dream of a self-sustaining model community that would “reinvent civilization” never materialized. Even TVA’s own institutional history acknowledges that Morgan “proved far more adept at technical engineering than at social engineering.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s heartbreak: Arthurdale Eleanor Roosevelt square dances in Arthurdale in the 1930s. (Courtesy of West Virginia Regional History Center via Arthurdale Heritage) No New Deal project was more personal to Eleanor Roosevelt than Arthurdale, a subsistence homestead community in Preston County, West Virginia. In 1933, the first lady visited the Scotts Run mining camps near Morgantown and was devastated by what she found: families living in filthy, crowded housing without sanitation, children going hungry, a community hollowed out by the collapse of the coal industry. She threw herself into creating something better. Arthurdale was the first of what would eventually be about 100 homestead communities built by the federal government during the Depression. The vision was to move struggling families out of failed industrial communities and onto small farms where they could achieve a measure of self-sufficiency while working in nearby industries. On roughly 1,200 acres, the government built 165 homes with indoor plumbing, modern appliances and furniture — amenities that seemed miraculous to families coming from Scotts Run. An experimental school operated on progressive educational principles developed by John Dewey’s disciple Elsie Ripley Clapp. The community operated cooperatively, with residents working together to support the town. Construction on the first 50 houses in Arthurdale started in 1933. The prefabricated homes were made by the E.F. Hodgson Company in New England. In keeping with the plan that Arthurdale be a self-sufficient farming community, each home came with a barn and hen and hog houses. The homes had a complete basement mostly used to preserve farm produce. The federal government additionally provided each house with electricity, indoor plumbing, refrigerators and coal-fired furnaces. (Arthurdale Heritage) But Arthurdale struggled from the start. The government had difficulty attracting industry to the remote location — a problem that would doom many of the “stranded community” homesteads. Cost overruns drew fierce criticism in Congress. The selection process for residents was criticized as arbitrary and paternalistic, favoring applicants who “seem likely to welcome supervision and guidance from project administrators.” Most damaging, the program required that applicants be white, native-born, Christian and part of a “standard nuclear family” — federal discrimination that excluded many of those most in need. The federal government closed down Arthurdale in 1947, selling the land and buildings to private owners. The community survives today, with many original structures preserved in a museum complex. Historians still debate whether it was a noble experiment that failed for lack of sustained support, or a cautionary tale about the limits of social planning. What’s beyond dispute is that the model didn’t scale. The subsistence homesteads that succeeded were those closest to cities with industrial employment. The isolated communities — the ones most like Appalachian coalfield towns — could not create self-sustaining economies. Oak Ridge: The exception that proves the rule Alpha calutron operators at their control panels, Y-12, Oak Ridge. 1943-1944. (Ed Westcott, U.S. Department of Energy via National Park Service) If you want to see what unlimited federal resources and a singular mission can accomplish, look at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In 1942, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers forcibly purchased nearly 60,000 acres of farmland along the Clinch River, evicted about 4,000 residents, and built a secret city from scratch. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Oak Ridge was intended to house workers for the Manhattan Project’s uranium enrichment facilities. Original plans called for 13,000 residents. By war’s end, Oak Ridge was Tennessee’s fifth-largest city, with 75,000 people. The government built 300 miles of roads, 55 miles of railroad track, 10 schools, seven theaters, 17 restaurants and 13 supermarkets. A library, symphony orchestra and churches for 17 denominations served the community. Housing ranged from single-family homes to dormitories to the infamous “hutments” — one-room shacks assigned primarily to Black workers, who were segregated by race and generally relegated to lower-status jobs. One of several billboards that appeared in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. (Ed Wescott, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy) Oak Ridge succeeded as a production facility because it had what no other planned community in Appalachia has ever had: essentially unlimited funding (60% of the Manhattan Project’s $2 billion budget flowed through Oak Ridge), an existential national purpose, and total government control over every aspect of the operation. When the war ended, Oak Ridge had to reinvent itself. The government retained control until the 1950s, then gradually opened the city. Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex continue to operate, providing an economic anchor that most planned communities never achieve. The lesson is not encouraging for Telosa’s prospects: Oak Ridge worked because the federal government was willing to spend virtually any amount of money to achieve a wartime objective. When the mission ended, the community survived because major federal facilities remained. No private-sector project, however well-funded, can replicate those conditions. The central question: Who owns the land? In 1973, I wrote in the Mountain Eagle of Whitesburg in Southeastern Kentucky: “If Appalachia is to survive, land reform is a must.” Fifty-two years later, I stand by that assessment. The fundamental problem with every outside-imposed development scheme in Appalachia — whether company town, New Deal homestead or billionaire’s utopia — is that it leaves the basic structure of land ownership intact. The mountains have been owned by outside interests since the late 19th century, when land agents acquired vast holdings from families who didn’t understand what they were signing away. Coal and timber companies accumulated millions of acres, extracted the wealth, and left behind devastation. Today, the situation is largely unchanged. A 2013 study by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy found that six West Virginia counties have 50% or more of their land owned by just 25 landowners. Five of those six are in the southern coalfields. Not one of the state’s top 10 private landowners is headquartered in West Virginia. After every flood, more families ask whether it makes sense to rebuild at the bottom of a hollow when idle corporate land sits unused on the ridgelines above. In Eastern Kentucky, a former strip mine on the Knott-Perry line is the planned site of the Olive Branch development. (Governor’s office) Lore’s “Equitism” model at least grapples with land ownership — he proposes that a community foundation would own all the land and capture rising values for public benefit. But there’s a crucial difference between a foundation controlled by residents and one established by a billionaire who selects the initial governance structure. A more promising model already exists in Appalachia, though it has never achieved the scale it deserves. In 1977, Marie Cirillo and her neighbors in the Clearfork Valley of northeastern Tennessee established the Woodland Community Land Trust. Working with land trust pioneers Robert Swann and Susan Witt, they created a structure where the community owns the land collectively and leases it to residents for housing, small business and agriculture. The community land trust model keeps land affordable permanently through resale restrictions, prevents outside speculation and ensures that decisions about land use are made democratically by the people who live there. It’s the opposite of both the company town model and the billionaire-imposed utopia: Control flows from the bottom up, not the top down. I’ve proposed a modern Homestead Act for Central Appalachia built on these principles. The plan would use existing legal frameworks — Virginia’s Land Bank Entities Act, federal brownfields protections, Appalachian Regional Commission programs — to acquire tax-delinquent and abandoned corporate land and redistribute it through community land trusts. Homesteaders would own their homes and improvements while the trust retains ownership of the underlying land, preventing speculation and ensuring permanent affordability. This approach addresses what outside planners have consistently gotten wrong. It doesn’t try to “modernize the mountaineer” or impose someone else’s vision of the good life. It puts land and decision-making power in the hands of the people who will live with the consequences. Would Telosa be different? To be fair, Lore’s vision differs from the company towns and New Deal homesteads in important ways. He explicitly rejects the paternalism of corporate-controlled communities. The Telosa governance structure, as currently described, would involve resident participation in decision-making. The economic model, whatever its flaws, at least attempts to share rising land values with the community rather than concentrating them in private hands. And the region could certainly use investment. The coalfields face projected population losses of 26% to 48% by 2050 according to university demographic studies. Schools and clinics are closing. Volunteer fire departments can’t replace aging equipment. After every flood, more families ask whether it makes sense to rebuild at the bottom of a hollow when idle corporate land sits unused on the ridgelines above. A project that brought 50,000 new residents — let alone 5 million — would transform the economic calculus overnight. New tax base, new businesses, new opportunities for young people who currently see no future in the mountains. But that transformation comes with risks that Telosa’s planners have not seriously addressed. First, who would these new residents be? The Telosa vision seems oriented toward attracting outsiders rather than providing opportunities for current Appalachian residents. The project emphasizes high-tech employment, advanced education and “diverse” demographics — admirable goals, but ones that could easily result in displacement of existing communities rather than their revitalization. Second, what happens when the billionaire’s interest wanes or the project falls short of its astronomical ambitions? Lynch declined because U.S. Steel no longer needed its coal. Arthurdale struggled because the federal government couldn’t sustain interest in an expensive experiment. The history of planned communities is littered with projects that thrived during their founders’ enthusiasm and collapsed afterward. Third, who makes the decisions? Lore talks about resident participation, but the initial governance structure would be established by his team. The community land trust model puts democratic control first, from the very beginning. Equitism puts democratic participation second, after the foundation has been established on terms set by outside investors. A different path Central Appalachia stands at a genuine inflection point. The coal economy that defined the region for more than a century is ending. Climate change brings floods that devastate communities built in hollows and valleys. Population decline threatens the critical mass needed to sustain basic services. The question is not whether change is coming — it’s who will control that change and who will benefit from it. One path leads through outside control: billionaires with visions, corporations seeking opportunities, investors looking for returns. This path has been well-traveled in Appalachia, and the results speak for themselves. Even the best-intentioned outside interventions have foundered on the basic problem of absentee ownership and control. Another path leads through community ownership and democratic decision-making. This path is harder — it requires building institutions from the ground up, developing local leadership and insisting that the people who live with the consequences have the primary voice in shaping the future. But it’s the path that has proven durable in places like the Clearfork Valley, where Woodland Community Land Trust has now operated for nearly half a century. If Marc Lore is serious about building a community that embodies equity and sustainability, he could do worse than to study what Appalachians have already built for themselves. The community land trust model demonstrates that you don’t need a billionaire’s money to create lasting, affordable, democratically-controlled development. What you need is land that belongs to the people who live on it, and the freedom to shape their own future. That’s not a lesson that translates easily to a $400 billion megaproject. But it might be the most important lesson the mountains have to teach. GET THE MORNING HEADLINES. 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