Comment on Well done, all of you!
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 6 hours agoWhen you spread people out, you have to build more water and gas pipes, more internet cables, more roads, deliver things farther, send the garbage trucks farther, the post, the news… It all adds up to a LOT of money. Strong Towns is a financial consultancy organisation that helps cities get out of debt, and they keep finding the same pattern, very consistently, in American cities: The urban core generates tons of revenue for the city, and then the suburbs spend it all. The suburbs are making American cities broke, because they just cost way more to maintain than the residents are paying in taxes. The city is subsidising the suburbs.
America’s “welfare queens” are the people living in detached single family homes in cul-de-sacs and making 100,000 a year. If cities charged those welfare queens a fair amount of taxes, they’d all be broke and try to move into the urban core, and the housing problems would get even worse for poor people. So cities are stuck propping up a failed economic housing model while trying to figure a way out of the crisis.
The answer that Strong Towns keeps finding is to invest more money in medium density mixed use neighbourhoods. The kind of place where you can live down the road from your office and walk there on a nice day, or take a leisurely stroll to the tram station for a day trip into the city. Those wonderful neighbourhoods full of trees, which are quiet because there are less cars, where kids can ride their bikes to school in safety, are economic powerhouses. Those neighbourhoods make more tax dollars than they spend. And I think you deserve to live somewhere like that.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
The urban core is consuming the resources produced in the rural surroundings. Again, two acres of agricultural land per urban dweller. The population density of land used by/for humans is 320 per square mile.
Agreed, the suburbs are terrible. More specifically, lawns are terrible. Replacing all those lawns with gardens and orchards would completely reverse that problem..
But again: every 320 people need a square mile of agricultural land, regardless of how densely you decide to pack those people. There is no replacement for that land area. Whether we cram ourselves in high-rise apartment buildings, or spread ourselves out among our crops, we’re using two acres of ag land per person.
We still need the rural roads, the rural water. Vegetation needs irrigation. We still need rural wires to convey solar and wind power from those agricultural areas back to the grid at large. Internet Cabling is a little less important: lower rural population density means substantially less interference for wireless.
Please don’t wish that on me. That sounds like the worst of all worlds. None of the benefits of rurality; none of the benefits of urbanity. Not dense enough to actually justify public transit, but still packed in like sardines. Needing to leave home and go into the city for any sort of entertainment. Needing transportation, because you don’t have enough room to simply be comfortable where you live.
It seems that “Strong Towns” is primarily interested in maximizing tax revenue. That is not an objective I find particularly appealing.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 5 hours ago
One thick water pipe going to one farmer’s irrigation system, alongside one gas line, one power line and one internet line, costs a whole lot less than hundreds of long water, gas, power, and internet lines going out to an entire rural neighbourhood. And I think we can do even better than that. I think you’d be able to get by just fine with a Starlink internet connection, and by cooking with induction. So that’s just one water and one power line, and they only have to be thick enough to fit your farm’s needs, not an entire community of people getting up to shower at 7am. Plus if the roads out to your farm were only being used by your truck, and the occasional post van or visitor, they’d take way less wear, and could be engineered to a much more basic standard. We wouldn’t need to build a 6 lane elevated highway, we could just make a simple two lane asphalt road with reflector posts.
So why don’t you go live alone on your square mile farm, feeding 320 people, and ship the food over to our nice walkable medium density neighbourhood? Overall, the whole lot of us would be using less carbon, spending less time fixing roads, and we’d all be happier. We all get the freedom to choose how to live and how to travel. Because right now America’s zoning boards are only approving single family homes in suburban and rural areas, and I don’t call that freedom.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
You’ve still got that centralization mindset…
Electrical power. In your head, electrical power is in the city, and we need to take a little bit out to a farm house. We don’t want to take a big-ass cable out to a big rural community, because that would be wasteful.
The electrical power produced in the city is a coal-fired plant in the heavy industrial sector. That is not the kind of power we need.
The kind of power we need is produced by big-ass solar generators out near the farmland. It’s produced by big-ass wind turbines out near the farmland. It’s supported by big-ass pumped-storage facilities out near the farmland. This kind of power needs big-ass cables out to the rural areas. You don’t want to build big-ass cables out toward the farmland; big-ass cables are exactly what we need to bring power from the farmland to the cities.
Gas. Gas isn’t produced in the cities. Gas comes from wells scattered throughout rural areas, and flows toward the cities. The gas lines you don’t want to build are the ones that supply the city.
I’ve already addressed internet, but I’ll hit it again: Wireless works better out of town. In town, it is subject to all sorts of interference from everyone trying to use it at once. You need the cables in the city because the available EM spectrum is not nearly enough to meet the needs of that dense populace. Out in the rural areas, where interfering signals are physically separated, there is much more bandwidth available per person.
Those simple, two-lane asphalt roads can handle much more than 320 people per square mile. Those simple roads would be much better utilized by increasing rural densities to the human average, rather than leaving them grossly underutilized. 6-lane elevated highways are features of the medium and high density urban areas, not rural.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 4 hours ago
If the roads have more cars on them, they’ll break faster and cost more effort to fix. Ideally, we’d build rails out to your farm and send a train to pick up the food you make.
Now the problem with your gas and electricity logic is you’re talking like the countryside is one place. Like the power and gas are made right next to your farm and you can just plug into it with a 100m cable. And since you mention it, I think an off-grid solar setup would be a great idea for your farm. That’s one less line needed. Now you just need to get water for your crops from elsewhere. I figure you’re not gonna want to use well water, because if there were enough water under your farm to feed the crops, you wouldn’t need irrigation.
But if we’re talking about 300 people’s houses, we can do better than a 300 off-grid solar setups. We can build an economy of scale. We can diversify between solar and wind turbines to reduce the battery requirement. We can build a nuclear plant. We can build row houses that share some nice thick walls, to prevent air conditioning energy loss to the environment. We can run trams instead of electric cars and waste far less energy moving metal vehicles around. We can take up less land than 300 times your farmhouse and amenities do.