Reinventing the Tribe: RidgeRunner and the New American Village

Most new cities are conceived as centralized, urban projects. California Forever, Irvine, Próspera, and the towns of 30A all share a master plan, a guiding hand, and clear planning guardrails bending land and residents toward a specific vision.

But a separate, decentralized American development tradition runs alongside it: a constellation of small rural communities organized around shared identity and local self-governance rather than master-planned density, a Jeffersonian rather than Hamiltonian vision of how America should be built.

So what would a Jeffersonian vision for new development look like in 2026? Not one city, but a framework for a number of rural villages, each anchored in a specific cultural or religious affinity, riding the tailwinds of remote work and the geographic political sorting accelerating across red and blue America.

This is the RidgeRunner project, a real estate spinout of New Founding, the conservative venture and media platform led by Nate Fischer. And this is not just a utopian experiment.  RidgeRunner is currently investing out of a mid-eight-figure fund backed by family offices, high-net-worth individuals, and the principals themselves. 

But the project is not without controversy. RidgeRunner's inaugural community in rural Tennessee has attracted high-profile figures with ties to Christian nationalism, a movement that seeks to reshape American institutions and government in an explicitly Christian mold. Even in RidgeRunner’s deep-red home base, some locals are up in arms.

Despite the controversy, RidgeRunner has found commercial success, and it has the plans — and capital — for much more. 

Let’s dig in.

The City that is to Come

In the earliest years of the American republic, two competing visions of the nation’s future dominated the political landscape. One, represented by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, advocated for centralized power, urbanization, and an economy dominated by manufacturing and trade. The other, championed by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, envisioned a decentralized nation of yeoman farmers, an agricultural economy with constrained federal powers.

The arc of history largely took America, and the western world, in the Hamiltonian direction. Industrial development was already well underway at the time, and the economies of scale and wealth it would provide set the country on an irreversible track toward urbanization. Rapidly improving transportation through the development of canals and railroads made centralized planning (as well as the development of dense cities) more feasible. 

In 1800, less than 10% of America’s population lived in cities. Today, more than 80% of the country lives in areas considered urban or suburban.

At Thesis Driven, we track the new city projects underway in an annual compendium. And these new places are mostly, as it says on the can, cities; urbanism underlies them all. They may have good urbanism (California Forever) or bad urbanism (Phoenix exurban sprawl), but they are all fundamentally master-planned, high-density developments.

This is not a criticism. You have to take a top-down approach, particularly in a highly-regulated environment like California. The complexity of planning, environmental review, and community engagement necessitates a central guiding hand. A decentralized, bottom-up approach simply doesn’t work when CEQA review might take a decade and tens of millions of dollars.

But going into rural areas with cheap land and loose zoning invites a different approach. Rather than building a singular city, Josh Abbotoy and RidgeRunner are looking to build a series of villages, each centered around a shared viewpoint or goal and led as much by local community leaders as RidgeRunner itself.