It's actually common practice in many parts of the country. The practice is called Economic Development. Rarely used for residential purposes, but does finance commercial development and promote hiring. The funding typically comes from the calculated/expected incremental tax revenue to the area (State, Local, etc). Newark, CA in the Bay Area did this for a while (may still?).
Kind of a different use case with needing distance and dangerous stuff being deployed but still probably a worthy bit of development history and municipal dynamics to be shared there.
Ok but why spend that money at all? Companies are happy to create jobs and hire people in existing cities. And we can build housing at the cost of 0 tax dollars, for all those people, by easing zoning. It'll also cost a lot less to upgrade infrastructure for higher density that to build it wholecloth for new communities.
Too funny - did the same thing in 2009 for a print on demand greeting card site. Wonder how many of these are still around. Cardstore, Greeting Card Universe, SendOutCards, etc. There was a moment ~ 13-15 years ago...
Funny enough, on the completely opposite end of the spectrum, I was once surprised that after you close an account (post M&A in this case), you can typically restore the resources for ~90 days if you decide you want it back and don't nuke before you request the closure. Can be useful or scary depending on the contents of the account...
Many folks are talking about bus schedules, but California hardly offers transporation in most districts. Only 9% of children take a bus to school [1] and that's been trending down for decades. Pay more, get less; sad state of affairs.
Finally. There are these long comment threads talking about high school students taking public transit/school buses, but that just isn't how most high school students get to school. It is unfortunate that mid/late teenagers are so dependent on cars, which often means dependent on a parent or other adult, but that's the type of cities we've built in this country.
Another thing to note is that none of this is new information. This trend has existed for perhaps a decade or two, and the ignorance to that in this thread is really showing the age of the users on this site.
We are a fork of Noms. Lots of incremental changes and we're in the process of a major storage engine overhaul (what we use Noms for) for performance as we speak.
Also vividly recall buying my first Bigfoot HDD, which I think was multiple GB, thinking I'd never have use for any more storage...