Chapter 115: That Time I Built a First-Generation New Town in South America (2)

TL: Skye

7 a.m.

A bus stop somewhere in Libertad.

The line of people waiting for buses bound for the industrial complex stretched so far that the end was nowhere in sight.

“Were the bus lines always this long?”

“It only suddenly got like this recently. Until last month, I could get on right away.”

“Yesterday, I had to let two buses go by before I finally got on the third.”

Unfamiliar faces were mixed among the grumbling citizens.

A young man speaking in an eastern dialect.

A middle-aged man with the sun-darkened skin typical of fishermen from the north.

A woman wearing the distinctive hat found only in the western mountain regions.

People were pouring in from all over the country.

And this chaos was not limited to transportation.

A typical restaurant during lunchtime.

“Boss, two chicken tacos!”

“Hold on! I’ve got twelve people ahead of that order!”

It had always been crowded at lunchtime, but never to this extent.

Customers grumbled about the recent changes as they waited in line.

It took forever and was inconvenient, but they had no other choice.

“Feels like there’s nowhere you can go these days without running into a crowd.”

“Must be nice for you, boss. So many customers.”

“Nice, my ass! A reasonable number is nice. This many are going to kill me!”

As people from the provinces came to Libertad in search of work, the capital began descending into increasing chaos.

“Wait, how much did you say the rent was?”

Pedro, a young man who had come up from the south, widened his eyes.

“One hundred dollars a month.”

“A hundred dollars? Three months ago, you could get a place for fifty...”

“That was then, and this is now. There aren’t any vacant rooms. Are you taking it at this price or not?”

“......”

Pedro felt around in his pocket.

He made six hundred dollars a month at a food-processing factory.

If a hundred dollars of that went toward rent, there would not be much left.

“Isn’t there somewhere cheaper?”

“There is one place for eighty dollars if you share a three-bedroom house with a bunch of people...”

“Share it?”

“That’s what everyone does these days. If anyone could afford to live alone, they would’ve snapped up a place already.”

“If I’m going to do that, I might as well live in the dorm...”

In the end, Pedro decided against renting a room and moved into the dormitory provided by his company.

The problem was.

“This is... the dorm?”

The dormitory had been thrown together out of shipping containers.

And even the containers were secondhand.

There had been no helping it.

The company had been in a hurry too, so they had built whatever they could as quickly as possible.

“Ha... this isn’t going to be easy...”

Pedro peered inside the container.

Four bunk beds, eight people to a room.

It was cramped as hell, but still much better than finding a place that cost a hundred dollars a month.

“Well, at least there’s a roof over my head.”

And so Pedro unpacked his things.

Nor was Pedro alone in this situation. Nearly five hundred people had already moved into the temporary housing complex built in this fashion.

Even that was not enough.

New arrivals came every day, and although the Ministry of Construction installed ten additional containers a day, it could not keep up with demand.

Housing was not the only problem.

The roads in front of the industrial complex were packed with people during rush hour.

The sidewalks were so narrow that some people had begun walking in the road, which in turn caused traffic congestion.

“Since when did traffic get this bad around here?”

A truck driver for Tortilla Construction grumbled as he drummed his fingers against the steering wheel.

“There are too many people. My material delivery is already an hour behind.”

Hospitals were no different.

The waiting room at Libertad Central Hospital, which had always had long lines, now had queues stretching outside the hospital itself.

“We’ve got three doctors and two hundred patients a day. How does that make any sense?”

A nurse complained to her colleague.

“We were always busy, but never like this...”

At schools, classes that had once held sixty students were now exceeding seventy.

As the children of families arriving from the provinces transferred in, the schools were also reaching capacity.

Water, electricity, healthcare, education, and everything else.

The entire infrastructure system was beginning to strain under the load.

Libertad had barely been able to support a population of six million to begin with.

With more than six hundred thousand people from the provinces flooding in all at once, it was only natural that the city would start creaking at the seams.

The administration was the first to confirm all these changes through hard numbers.

After the Resident Registration program was implemented, filing a Move-in Registration became mandatory whenever someone relocated.

Isabella headed for Yu-jin’s office carrying the relevant report.

“Your Excellency, Libertad’s population has increased by more than ten percent.”

“...Ten percent?”

Yu-jin took the report and checked the figures.

Libertad’s population had exploded after his speech about the labor shortage.

Thanks to that, the shortage of workers had been solved in one fell swoop, but the burden on the capital had begun to mount.

“Was that speech a little too effective...?”

If they left things alone, the situation would eventually stabilize, but there was no way to avoid the chaos in the meantime.

Yu-jin shook his head and said.

“We’re going to need countermeasures. Please convene a Cabinet meeting.”

“Yes.”

Watching Isabella leave the office, Yu-jin let out a sigh.

“Never a moment’s rest. Not one.”

*

A short while later.

Yu-jin entered the main conference room with the president’s ceremonial sword hanging at his waist.

The Senior Secretaries rose to greet him, but Yu-jin raised a hand to stop them.

“We don’t have time, so let’s get straight to the point.”

Once Yu-jin took the seat at the head of the table, Isabella explained how Libertad’s population had increased by ten percent over the past three months and detailed the problems it had caused.

“We can manage for now, but if this trend continues, Libertad’s population will exceed seven million within six months.”

Libertad had never been a city designed to accommodate six million people in the first place.

People had simply gathered there after independence and started living. It was not a city that had been built according to any kind of plan.

They had only managed to keep six million people living there by patching up shortages as they appeared. With another six hundred thousand people suddenly moving into the capital, problems were inevitable.

“We need countermeasures.”

At Yu-jin’s words, the Senior Secretary for Construction and Housing spoke.

“We are immediately facing a housing shortage. We can build more temporary accommodations, but that is not a fundamental solution.”

Ricardo added.

“Rents are skyrocketing. They have risen by an average of eighty percent compared to three months ago. Housing expenses for ordinary citizens are rising sharply, and their real disposable income is falling.”

Aman said.

“The industrial complex is also at capacity. We added more buildings, but there is already a backlog of companies waiting to move in.”

Yu-jin folded his arms and looked around at the Senior Secretaries.

Everything was concentrated in Libertad.

The government, industrial complex, port, universities, hospitals.

With everything in Libertad, of course people would flock to Libertad.

And it was obvious that this trend would only accelerate with time.

‘That’s how Seoul got so huge.’

In the end, there was only one answer.

Yu-jin proposed a Korean-style solution.

“Let’s build New Towns near Libertad.”

All eyes turned toward him.

“We need to disperse the population currently concentrated in Libertad.”

“What specific approach do you have in mind?”

Isabella asked.

“Let’s build our first-generation New Towns beside the industrial complex.”

Murmurs spread among the Senior Secretaries.

“New Towns?”

“We’ll build three New Towns, each capable of accommodating at least five hundred thousand people.”

Of course, it was not an ideal solution.

Most of the nation’s industry and infrastructure were already concentrated in Libertad. If they built New Towns right next to it, there would be no avoiding the same kind of metropolitan overcrowding Korea had suffered.

But.

‘What other choice do we have?’

San Marcos simply did not have the national capacity to foster new industries in other regions and build New Towns there at the same time.

Their best option was to create ecosystems that could be as self-sufficient as possible.

Yu-jin stood before the map hanging on the wall and pointed to one location with his ceremonial sword.

“The first New Town will be built next to the industrial complex and designed for factory workers and their families.”

Yu-jin pointed to another location.

“For the second, I’m thinking we build it near the southern agricultural belt and center the city around food processing and agriculture-related industries.”

Tap.

“For the third, I’m thinking we build near the port and center it around fisheries and logistics.”

Ricardo cautiously raised a hand.

“Your Excellency, building three cities simultaneously would require an astronomical amount of money. As for funding...”

“Right now, our government has more money than at any point in its history.”

Ricardo nodded.

He knew that as well.

International oil prices had skyrocketed after the airstrikes on Iran.

Oil that had been hovering around sixty dollars a barrel had shot past eighty almost overnight.

San Marcos was an oil exporter.

The higher oil prices climbed, the more money poured into the national treasury.

In the past two weeks alone, crude oil export revenues had reached three times their usual level.

“And we’ll soon be receiving a large-scale, low-interest loan from the United States.”

“......”

“So I’m thinking we invest twenty billion dollars into this New Town project.”

The conference room fell silent at the largest construction project in San Marcos’s history.

Of course, some might ask how anyone could possibly build three cities with only twenty billion dollars, but San Marcos could.

For one thing, the land already belonged to the state.

There was no need to pay land compensation, and areas around the highways had already been leveled, so all they had to do was lay roads, pour concrete, and build apartment blocks.

On top of that, the people of warm-weather San Marcos were not particularly picky about housing.

As long as it kept out the heat, rain, and wind, it was good enough.

“Senior Secretary for Construction and Housing.”

“Yes!”

The Construction Senior Secretary shot to his feet.

“Mobilize every resource at your disposal and locate suitable sites for all three New Towns. Take the terrain, water resources, and accessibility to the existing road network into comprehensive consideration. Come up with measures to alleviate traffic congestion at the same time.”

“Yes, understood!”

“Senior Secretary Resa of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism.”

Resa raised her head.

“Work with the Ministry of Construction so the new cities themselves can become tourist attractions. If there are suitable sites where we can design cities that take advantage of the Caribbean coastline, prioritize those.”

“Understood, Your Excellency.”

“Senior Secretary Ricardo, review the feasibility of allocating twenty billion dollars to this project. Taking projected oil revenues and the loan schedule into account, submit a financing plan within two weeks.”

“Yes.”

Ricardo was already tapping away at his calculator.

“Senior Secretary Aman for Industry.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“The New Towns cannot become nothing more than bedroom communities. A city where people only live but have nowhere to work is a dead city. Establish an industrial foundation for each New Town.”

“Understood!”

“Chief of Staff Isabella, let’s work together on temporary measures to hold us over while the New Towns are being built.”

“Yes.”

Yu-jin looked around at the Senior Secretaries and said.

“We don’t have time to sit around.”

He fastened the ceremonial sword at his waist.

“We need to build places for people to live before Libertad bursts at the seams. I expect each of you to do everything in your power to carry out the New Town project.”

The Senior Secretaries rose from their seats in unison.

“Yes, Your Excellency!”

Their thunderous response filled the Cabinet meeting room.

The map of San Marcos was about to be redrawn.

*****

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