About NewVistas
Four decades in the making.
Although NewVistas was formally organized in 2015, its origins reach back more than forty years — to one person’s conviction that modern industrial civilization was building on assumptions that would not hold.
A question that wouldn’t leave
During the oil crisis of 1973, David Hall became convinced that many of the assumptions behind modern industrial civilization were unsustainable. An engineer and entrepreneur by background, he began looking for a fundamentally different way to organize how people live and use resources.
He later encountered historical documents from the early 1830s — among them the Plat of the City of Zion and the Plan of the House of the Lord. In them he saw not a relic but a practical pattern: a working system for community design, governance, economics, education, and Business Enterprise.
The documents proposed not a utopia, but a workable order — one that Hall was convinced could be realized today through modern technology, legal structures, and organizational systems. His study turned into a lifetime of work, and over time that work became NewVistas: a modern reconstruction of the pattern for the century that can finally run it.
From a written pattern to a living project
The pattern is set down
The Plat of the City of Zion and the Plan of the House of the Lord lay out a working pattern for community design, governance, and Business Enterprise.
A question that wouldn’t leave
The oil crisis convinces David Hall that the assumptions behind modern industrial civilization are unsustainable.
Recognized beyond NewVistas
The American Planning Association designates the Plat of the City of Zion a National Planning Landmark.
NewVistas is organized
Formally organized to reconstruct the pattern using contemporary technology, legal structures, and organizational systems.
That 1996 designation matters on its own terms: the American Planning Association recognized the Plat of the City of Zion as significant urban design — independent of anything NewVistas would later build from it.
Read for what the words actually meant
NewVistas reads the founding documents for their secular, operative content — offices, measures, and the economic order — and holds two clocks apart so their meaning isn’t mistaken.
When they were written down
The founding texts were recorded in Kirtland, Ohio: the LAW (1831), the Plat and the House plan (1833), and the wider documentary set. This is a fact of provenance, and nothing more.
When their words got their meaning
The governing vocabulary belongs to Tyndale-era English, when a single word still carried civil, legal, economic, and religious force at once. The documents read correctly only at that earlier register.
The strongest evidence is a measurement. The plat declares it containeth one mile square, then gives its own dimensions in rods and perches — and worked out, the side is 6,336 feet: exactly 1.2 statute miles, the old English “long” mile, obsolete long before the modern era. The pattern behaves like engineered civic arithmetic, where the numbers hold the system together.
We develop the blueprint. Communities build themselves.
Develops the pattern
The NewVistas Foundation develops the constitutional documents, building designs, qualification process, licensing system, and operating software. It does not govern communities.
Stay independent
Each NewVistas community is intended to be legally and financially independent. Its unity comes from a shared pattern, not from central control.
The first buildings are coming
The worldwide pattern begins deliberately — with qualified founders, councils of twelve, and a probability-of-success analysis, before large capital is ever committed.
The problem is not people. It is the structure they live in.
Communities can be healthier, more connected, more prosperous, and more sustainable — without becoming restrictive or uniform.