Duane Nason thinks he has a solution for California’s rising homelessness crisis. The software developer and web engineer envisions a 300-acre property—similar in size to an amusement park, he says—with high-rise apartment towers, on-site medical services, and access to job training. Nason’s plan would create what’s essentially an entirely new city with as many people as Berkeley, but in rural California, with enough room to house the state’s entire homeless population, which currently numbers over 150,000.

“The only way to come up with a complete solution was to build a complete city,” he tells Curbed.

Nason, who has a degree in mathematics, says he’s been studying the state’s response to the homelessness crisis for the past two years. He’s confident that his plan for a “single, supportive living environment,” which he’s calling Citizens Again, is the best way to solve the problem because it would only cost $3 billion to build—what he says the entire country spends every eight months on homelessness responses that are largely replicated or repetitive efforts. (The $3 billion doesn’t include annual operating costs; he’s currently crowdfunding $50,000 to launch the project.)

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