I put up a post in May about CITE, the insta-ghost town to be built in Hobbs, New Mexico. The billion-dollar project, planned by Pegasus Holdings was to simulate a city that could hold (but wouldn’t hold) 35,000 people and be a testing ground for all sorts of technological innovations. But land acquisition and other factors has proven difficult, and the project seems more and more merely a pipe dream and a press release. It’s just hard to build a ghost town these days. From Wren Abbott in the Santa Fe Reporter:

“Part of Pegasus’ vision for CITE includes testing of driverless cars, but the company has yet to announce a partnership with the country’s forerunner in that industry, Google, Inc.. Google is already testing its cars in California, with drivers sitting behind the wheel to intervene in case of emergency. Legislation passed in Nevada allows Google to do the same thing there.

Pegasus’ plan also seems to now include power generation, despite the significant obstacles it would have faced with an alternate location it considered for CITE. If Pegasus had chosen a site near Las Cruces, the city would have had to build $40 million of infrastructure in order to begin alternative energy production, [Las Cruces Mayor Ken} Miyagishima says.

‘The land they were looking at has no infrastructure at all—it’s just desert,’ Miyagishima says. ‘It would have taken awhile to get infrastructure out there.'”