Make it 100 appartments in 3-4 times the space (in 4 smaller buildings with balconies, community gardens, shared spaces, picnic areas and so on) as a compromis and I am all in!
And lets add commercial/restaurants to the bottom floors of those buildings, and lay them out so that their central courtyard area is a pedestrianized plaza connecting all the residents and businesses and not a massive parking lot.
In this image I can’t help but notice how much infrastructure cost there is here. Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure. Keep in mind that failure rate increases with each house and by length of these runs that you are adding and fire hydrants being added every so many feet, shut off valves. Don’t forget that we now have significantly bigger demand for water as we now have a lot more vegetation to manage and a higher reliance on emergency services as we are spread out over a larger area so we now have to increase ems, fire, and police spending. Then you add the costs for electrical infrastructure with your sub stations and transformers and all the costs set to maintain that especially since these are underground lines apparently and ofcourse we have increased risk of failure again per service and foot run and higher demand on those services which will require more workers which turns into money being spent outside of the community. You then add the cost of data lines and phone lines including the costs associated with maintaining and upgrading those which are also apparently underground which means your upgrades may be significantly more expensive and will take much longer to deploy. Now that we have all these houses separated we will now have a population that will be more dependent on vehicles so now we have to factor in all of our road maintenance costs and our public services will not require far more vehicles as well which means we will also need mechanics to repair and maintain these vehicles. Now with roads alone when we consider the costs involved things get rather expensive quickly. Cost to maintain roads, even roads that are seldom used, is surprisingly expensive and require a lot of workers to build and maintain as well as vehicles, machinery, and land to store, recycle, and create materials needed to repair and build the roads. On top of that there is also an often missed statistic of vehicles which is public safety as they are a leading cause for injury which is another stressor on our little community.
This is far from all the possibly missed costs of our suburban/rural neighborhood but I feel these are some of the important ones people live to overlook.
You’re absolutely correct. Suburbia is subsidized. sprawling, car-dependent suburbs are almost universally financially insolvent on their own, as they literally don’t produce enough tax revenue to cover the colossal cost of infrastructure needed to serve it. They require the financial backing of denser communities to prop themselves up.
The scale of money needed for car-centric development is astounding. Consider Massachusetts:
Using publicly available data, the authors put the annual public tab at $35.7 billion, which amounts to about $14,000 for every household in the state. Those that do own vehicles pony up an additional $12,000 on average in direct costs.
Using the numbers from the article, Massachusetts literally spends over 10% of their GDP on cars, more than half of that being public subsidy. Absolute insanity.
Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure.
Someone has never heard of “well and septic”.
Out in the country, you have enough biological diversity around you that sewage is just fertilizer for your lawn. You don’t need the extensive network of sewers to concentrate it, the chemicals to treat it, and the sufficiently large body of water necessary to dilute it back down to something that nature can tolerate.
Much the same with potable water: there’s no need for an extensive system of water treatment plants, chlorination, the network of underground piping when you are just pulling water up out of the aquifer. It has been filtered through hundreds of feet of sand and gravel, in the absence of oxygen. All the biological material has been filtered out, leaving just water and some trace minerals.
Electrical infrastructure is moving away from centralized fossil fuel plants to distributed solar and wind power. Spreading the load out allows generation to be moved closer to the point of consumption, which reduces the total load at any point on the grid, and increases redundancy and resiliency.
Spreading homes apart introduces a natural firebreak between them, reducing the demand on fire services. A single kitchen fire in an apartment complex can put hundreds of people out of their homes. High-rise fires are especially dangerous. It’s much easier to attack a house fire than an apartment fire.
Roads are not reduced: food and raw materials used by humanity come from the countryside. Transportation infrastructure must stretch out to the farms and mines. Housing farmers and miners in the cities just increases their commutes on top of their long work days.
Wireless data can be much more feasible in the country than the city. Less building interference; less RF interference.
No, I’m afraid you’ve overblown the cost difference considerably.
I started to respond to this but it’s so full of obvious bullshit it’s not worth the time. Dump raw sewage into the ground in suburbia? What the fuck kind of capitalism hellscape do you live in?
Well and septic are viable options down to as little as half-acre lots, yes. Raw sewage is dumped into the first of 2-3 tanks, where it is biologically processed with virtually no intervention, before the nutrient-rich effluent eventually flows into a leach field and soaks into the topsoil.
Municipal sewage processing does it much the same way. The problem is that the cities don’t have sufficient biomass, so they have to discharge their effluent over a very large area. A city typically converts a nearby river into a massive leachfield.
You have a problem with individuals processing their own sewage and discharge it to vegetation on their own lands, but you support massively upscaling that process and dumping the effluent directly into waterways.
“Capitalism hellscape” accurately describes one of these scenarios, but not the one you’re thinking of.
When I left home this afternoon, I briefly disturbed two doe and four fawns eating ground ivy in my front yard. When I get home, I’m going to hear crickets in the woods behind my house, and bullfrogs in the pond. I’ll probably hear the big owl in my neighbor’s tree, talking to his girlfriend down the road.
While I was last in the city, I saw a homeless guy pissing on the sidewalk, dozens of boarded buildings, and hundreds of broken windows. I heard four sets of gunshots. The local “park” has nothing growing in it; it has an asphalt basketball court and a gravel playground with busted equipment. An industrial site has a methane flare burning overhead 24/7.
The reason you are having a rough time explaining what’s wrong with my argument is that you are accustomed to the dystopian nightmare of urban living, and expect everyone to accept and tolerate that nightmare.
Sorry dawg I grew up in a rural area. I have to return to rural areas frequently to visit family and I currently live in a suburban area so… sorry? But your anecdote is pretty awful
Condos and Housing coops go a long way I think to reduce some of the pain points most people have had with apartment living. The issue now is that most people are comparing owning a home where you have a lot of control over your circumstances and price stability, vs having a landlord that is doing the minimum and raising rents every chance they can. If apartments were built for people, and not landlords would they still have cramped hallways and balconies, would they have poor insulation and sound proofing, would they have old noisy AC units, etc, etc. The thing is, even in cases where people do choose to not have an amenity, people still had the choice.
In my country, there’s no distinction between apartments and condos or whatever you have in the US. An apartment could be owned by anyone and that person can choose to live in it or rent it out. Institutional ownership of entire apartment buildings DOES happen (legally nothing is stopping you from doing it), but it’s not super common. Most companies prefer to get their quick buck out of building the place and then selling the apartments. And bailing on you before the warranty is over lol
That’s 10 million x 1 million square meters (10^13 )
There will soon be (source: people like sex) 10 billion people on earth (10^10 )
This would give you 10^13 / 10^10 = 10^3 square meters (10700 square feet) of land for everyone on earth to live on. EVERY SINGLE PERSON. Not families, individual fucking people.
All of them contained within the US.
10700 square feet to build a house, have a small garden etc. Okay, not a lot. But that’s one country that could house everyone. An extreme example of course - you’re not gonna be able to use all that land, some of it is uninhabitable (red states lol). But just imagine it for a second, everyone living in one country would still be comfortable. And look how much is left of the rest of the world.
1000 square meters isn’t enough space? Make your house have 4 stories, who gives a shit, make your own wizard tower. In a relationship? That’s 21400 square feet for the couple. Have a couple of kids? 42800 square feet. That’s a decent enough house+yard for 4 people, especially if you add one or two floors.
The problem is not that there isn’t enough space. The problem is that some motherfuckers want and get more than their share of square feet. And then they charge you money to live in their share of land without owning it.
Your premise is wrong. You need to start with total buildable area, not the boundary size. And when you evaluate for buildable area take into account critical areas such as wetlands, flood zones etc.
A truth most people don’t want to hear is that densely populated cities are overall better for nature and resources. You need less roads and tracks, fewer concrete overall, compact cities are much easier to make walkable, etc.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is “I don’t like people”. That shouldn’t really be a priority.
For nature to recover we need to give back space. The worst you can do is build rural homes or spread out suburbs.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is “I don’t like people”. That shouldn’t really be a priority.
There’s also: “I want to have nature around me” - and there’s “I have pets that need to go out” - and there’s “In a big city it can be dirty, smelly and loud” and “People neglected by society hang around big cities” and “Big real estate firms crank up housing prizes”.
What we really need is better city planning, to reduce traffic & roads, and make areas pedestrian only - at that point, quality of life in a city improves. Also, we need to kill big real estate corps and regulate housing prizes. And there needs to be a will in politics to actually address social issues, including but not limited to violent crimes.
Nearby is relative to the quality of public transportation though, as not everyone can afford a car, and even if they can, it kills the environment and quality of living in the city to have traffic. And public transportation infrastructure is sadly still next to non-existent in many metropolitan areas in the world.
Public transport is cheaper too when cities are not sprawling. We are talking about the benefits new dense development, where public transport should be a core consideration and not an afterthought.
Don’t forget “We’ve had a pandemic going for over 3 years, I’d like to not be around a bunch of sneezing and coughing people” at this point, particularly because public transit is objectively better for cities than driving, but also a better place to catch COVID than your car.
You are right, this is of course argumented from an ideal perspective. Building and managing cities like they are now, just denser, wouldn’t work.
In an utopian world that really put the environment first there would be no greedy investors and greedy landlords, no one would feel left behind and instead of using farms we’d have some kind of ultra efficient vertical hydroponics stuff going on.
It would be amazing having sci-fi mega cities, perhaps connected via underground railroads and between them just nature undisturbed. It feels like we are so close from a technological standpoint to make that happen. At least it’s not completely unimaginable.
It would be amazing having sci-fi mega cities, perhaps connected via underground railroads and between them just nature undisturbed. It feels like we are so close from a technological standpoint to make that happen.
I wholeheartedly agree. And I believe we have everything needed to make that happen - but if everyone has good living conditions, that just isn’t profitable / exploitable for the corporate world. Happy people means it’s harder / impossible to scare them or make them angry at some perceived threat / enemy, and exploit their dividedness. All megacorporations without exception and a lot of mid- to large size businesses thrive on exploiting workers who are too divided to unite and demand a fair share of work and profits and acceptable working conditions.
At least in the US which has a lot of non-dense areas, there is so much land that there is still a ton of land for nature, and a lot of the biggest consumers of nature are non-residential developments like farmland
I wish I had a way to share a certain GIS-generated image of projected development growth in my US state over the next 50 years without doxxing myself. Needless to say, it’s ABSOLUTELY INSANE - with planning relegated to Counties (some of which don’t even have zoning), and those counties being ruby red with their local governments captured by builders and developers that don’t care whether the world looks like a strip mall or a forest, sprawl is the name of the game and it is eating into both farmland and forest on a scale that is hard for a person to fully comprehend.
Imo, we should have dense, walkable villages in rural areas to serve farms and whatnot, and they should have train stations connecting to the nearest city. That way neither our cities nor our towns are sprawl, but rather compact, walkable, and transit-oriented.
After all, that’s how we traditionally built cities and villages before all this modern automobile malarkey.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is “I don’t like people”.
I’m sorry, but that’s a really great fucking argument. I don’t like people. I don’t want to share walls with people. I want a quiet, private, green space to live in without the density porn half of this thread is fellating (and a significant number are also condemning).
Dense cities are uninhabitable to me, and I can say it from experience - having lived in cities having from 1-10m people including NYC, and including not owning a car and being fully dependent on public transit. The city life was always worse in every way than living in the suburbs. In the suburbs, it’s easier to get groceries, it’s easier to enjoy nature, it’s easier to go to the gym, or get to work. Everything about living in the city was harder, shittier, and more expensive.
There are limits to how many trees, how big they can be and how close to the house you can have them. There is also a ton of car infrastructure that needs to be spread out across all the houses that takes up a good percent of the land no matter how you slice it
The most important difference though is that each person only has access to their stamp of nature that is 1% of the island. With the apartment all 100 people living there have access to 96% of the nature on the island.
It doesn’t have to be just nature either. You can use it to build playgrounds, outdoor gyms, running tracks, community centers and tons of other public use things.
I hate apartments, I believe humans should spread out and live in lower densities. Cities are important in our current infrastructure and a necessary evil.
I’ve moved away from a city and been living in a small town past 2 years and cars are more important here than ever which is just shifted me from one evil to the next. Public transport becomes less relevant the more remote you go.
Wonder if there’s a perfect balance between pollution and nature. I’m in the mountains so bikes aren’t the most comfortable either and useless in case of emergency with an elderly.
Yes, this is important, too (see !nolawns). But no-lawns doesn’t reduce car traffic, neither does it single-handedly create more walkable and public-transport-friendly communities. But you’re right to notice that OP’s meme doesn’t make a compelling argument in itself.
Home Owners Association, it’s a sort of mob made up of Karens that people in US suburbs like to impose onto themselves.
Bermuda is a variety of grass, easy to grow but not so fast as to require too much mowing, it needs a lot of sun though.
HOAs like to dictate stuff that residents need to do in order to keep the neighborhood “look good” and increase home valuations, like what kind of grass to grow on their lawn (because, y’know, a uniform neighborhood is a rich neighborhood… or something)
Maybe but that doesnt change that the forest and ecosystem is eradicated. Clearing an ecosystem and outting in a suburb is still a problem even if theres some trees and shrubs. The wildlife still suffers
It is actually possible to live comfortably without an acre of sterile centimeter high grass around you. Many people around the world actually live in places that arent a suburban hellhole and are very happy
That’s true but I virtually never call tradespeople to do work for me. I like to be as self sufficient as possible and I derive happiness from working with my hands. I’m in my workshop almost every day, repairing and creating. I love the feel of materials and the heft of hand tools, it’s my happy place.
In the past I’ve used off site workshops and they have their advantages but usually what happens is that I use them less and they are more vulnerable to thieves. They’re far more expensive too.
If an apartment block had a shared workspace in the basement, that could work. I’ve never seen one like that. People who live in apartments tend not do things for themselves and have no need for tools.
I think I’d join a maker’s space or other shop-type coop if I lived in a city again. That said, cities stress me out - I can only handle the overstimulation for so long before I start sprouting white hormone hairs randomly out of my forehead.
Here, buying an apartment makes you liable for any structural issues to the whole building, it’s a huge risk and with how terrible build quality is these days I’d never buy an apartment
There are many highrise buildings in Australia with residents paying hundreds of thousands each for issues caused by dodgy builders. The builder simply closes the business during the warranty period and they are off the hook for claims
I am sorry but wouldn’t be the same issue with a house? It’s still done by a builder. Plus in the apartments case the costs are shared, yeah they might be bigger but the house costs are all you.
Cost to build a brand new house is like $200k, and they are typically audited on purchase. You can demolish the house and still have $800k in land value. You don’t own any land when buying an apartment
This is something I’m seeing A LOT in this thread, this NIMBY notion that if we just refuse to build housing that the rest of the population needing housing will just poof and disappear.
There are 8 billion people on this planet. We can either choose to build sprawl-for-all and destroy the planet, or we can build denser, more walkable, more transit-oriented cities.
It’s simple: blocks are not built in cities to minimise the footprint like in your meme but to build cheaper and sell more and in the same time externalising the costs of infrastructure development.
A mid density block is something, a heavy packed “bedroom” neighborhood is another.
If you look at land use maps, you will see that the urban areas are so small compared to the agricultural and livestock area needed to support the population. This is the biggest cause of deforestation, and population density actually makes it much worse, because it centralizes consumption and requires more logistic costs to deliver the needed food, with much higher rates of wastes. If we lived in less dense areas, perhaps we could do with local, smaller-scale agriculture instead.
Do you have anything you can cite for that proposition? I fully acknowledge that there could be something I’m missing, but just thinking about it logically it doesn’t make sense.
It takes X agriculture and Y livestock to feed a person for a year. Economy of scale would allow you to produce more with less in a larger centralized facility compared to many smaller farms. The implements required to support a large facility should be less than the sum of many smaller facilities that produce an equal output. The agriculture and livestock are brought to a central point (the city) as opposed to many decentralized towns.
Happy to be wrong, would just need to see the evidence, because right now my intuition is saying no. Love to see whatever you have!
There are a couple articles I can link when I get home. They studied a similar phenomenon in some Brazilian cities. There are several factors involved, including food losses due to distance to consumption and the fact that smaller producers tend to grow more diverse food.
And the fact that so much food is thrown out, because it spends 75% of it’s expiration date traveling between facilities. That’s why fresh food from big chains starts being bad way faster than local market bough.
Your take on urban density is wayyyyy off base and wrong.
The deforestation being a result of agricultural expansion to support a growing population is spot on.
Urban density increases the efficiency of logistics, you state it makes it worse. The cost-per-unit goes down as density goes up. Economies of scale apply here, logistics almost always becomes cheaper per unit the more of it you do. This applies to farming, transportation, processing, packaging…etc
Logistics are something too complex. Your statement makes me think you’re referring to a scenario with one source of a product and either one consumer area or several ones. In that cass, indeed, a more denser region would make it easier, but the scenario I described consists of production decentralized and closer to consumption, making logistics easier and cheaper, with fewer middlemen.
But maybe I didn’t explain it all very well. I have a couple or articles bookmarked in my pc that I will link here when I have the chance.
I just hope my memory isn’t playing tricks on me, because it so, it’s gonna be really shameful lol.
Low density centralized urban areas require even more logistics, higher waste rates, higher utilities costs, and so on.
As an example: a 10 floor high rise with 40 apartments, can be wired for optic fiber in 1 day. There is no way to wire 40 standalone houses just as fast.
The only reason we have huge farms is because of livestock, not population density. Large farms grow commodity crops, most of which go to feeding livestock, most of which are cows. Farms growing fruits and vegetables for human consumption don’t require anywhere near the amount of land that commodity crops do. You can feed a surprisingly large number of people off of an acre of land if you take large livestock out of the equation.
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