Billion Dollar Ghost Town In New Mexico With No Residents

A city was planned near Hobbs, New Mexico to be a modern day ghost town with everything you would expect to find in a city ... except people.

Yep, a $1 billion dollar price tag on a city that nobody would ever live in. The place was abandoned before it could be abandoned though.

The ghost city, called The Centre for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, was to cost around $400 million to build with another $600 million spent designing, installing and testing new technology.

Construction on this UN-city was supposed to start back in 2012 but was postponed a couple of times and is now ... maybe ... to begin in 2024.

The city was to be a testing site for new technologies and "techno" stuff like self driving cars and wireless networks to see what worked and what didn't without interfering in people's daily lives.

It was described this way:

... Hobbs is going to be a fully functioning ghost town with all the amenities: roads, water, electricity, computers,  telecommunications gear, and even experimental post Wi-Fi wireless networks. And while it seems a shame that no one will be around to live in this city of the future, it’s worth remembering that it’s not the city of the future quite yet. It’s certain that the city’s operations will be littered with bugs (the technical kind) that would make actually living there less of a dream and more of a complete nightmare. - themarysue.com

Las Cruces was almost chosen as the cite for "Raccoon City" but lost out to Hobbs who, apparently, have now also lost it.

Finding info on this thing has been tricky but Wikipedia and the Construction Journal say it's back on and will now be built near Deming, about 100 miles from El Paso.

The map in that article shows an area near Dallas though, weird. I found lots of info about it from years and years ago but only those 2 articles about where it stands now.

I'll keep looking though as it seems 2024 is a go.