[SomeStupidPoint]

I think it takes less than most of us imagine -- but more than most of us are capable of organizing.

If you wanted to build complexes to stimulate the economy, you'd probably need on the order of... $100M in buildings, and another $100M in endowments for operating expenses/grants/risky loans.

So 200M is a lot, but it's also only the retirement wealth of 100-200 upper-middle class families, of which there will be thousands per major metro (and perhaps a million or so across the US).

I think it's mostly a logistics problem -- in those million families, there are probably 10,000 that are interested in resettling to the middle of the country and would be willing to move half of their wealth into local investments on a generational scale (while keeping the other half in say, the market).

That means we could do 250-500 self-sustaining mixed-use complexes backed by endowments for operations costs, which is probably enough to target 50-100 towns.

The question becomes the organizational aspects of those people finding each other, building trust (between each other and with the involved communities), and finding the appropriate legal instrument to manage the money on that scale.

These are all much harder problems than finding money or media attention.