7 ms·

66% of Americans live within 100 miles of the border. It would make more sense to move all the Americans living in the middle (sometimes middle of nowhere) and

66% of Americans live within 100 miles of the border. It would make more sense to move all the Americans living in the middle (sometimes middle of nowhere) and focus on making the cost of living in major cities more affordable; 9 of the top 10 cities are all within 100 miles of the border.

djrogers 10y ago
Have you considered that some of the 34% of people living in 'the middle' prefer to live there? I find it hard to believe you are seriously advocating the forced relocation of citizens in the name of making 'more sense'...
- saycheese 10y ago
  I'm suggestioning that American stop subsidizing vast unpopulated areas of its country for the benefit of a subset of the country. Once the subsidies are deverted, the areas will naturally depopulate.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - madengr 10y ago
    Subsidize? Maybe those vastly unpopulated areas of the country ought to stop feeding those 100 miles from the coast.
    - dao- 10y ago
      Automation is a thing, fewer and fewer people work in farming, and those who do spend less and less time doing manual labor. I'd rather support this trend and work towards full automation and remote control.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - trashtoss 10y ago
      It is subsidization, on too many fronts to name. If anything it has been too effective because it is quite invisible and taken for granted by the recipients, which then allows them to see their own life narratives as stories of succeeding in the market economy due to hard, honest work. The work may indeed be hard and honest, but it only succeeds at the costs and prices it succeeds at due to vast subsidies, which again are taken for granted (if even seen as such--or seen at all). The worst part is that even with this heavy subsidization the cost difficulties of modern infrastructure under sparse settlement leave non-urban residents feeling shortchanged despite the disproportionate spending they receive. Here's how that usually goes: basic infrastructure (roads, power, water, communications) has costs that scale roughly linearly in terms of how much you build: your build and maintenance cost are roughly proportionate to how many miles of road or miles of pipe or miles of wire, and so on. Thus as you have a population that is more widely spaced-out your effective per capita infrastructure costs go up: you have more road per person and more wires per person just to deliver the same level of capability. You often wind up, then, needing as much as 5x or more the per capita budget in a sparsely populated area to build and maintain infrastructure at a comparable level to a denser area (whether this is done or not is about administrative competence but that is a separate issue from the cost themselves). At a state level, however, it is hard to have wildly disproportionate per capita spending: you can maybe get away with spending 2-3x per capita on infrastructure in non-urban areas versus urban areas, but not 5-10x. But this spending-effectiveness discrepancy means that even with heavy subsidization--eg non-urban areas effectively getting 2-3x the infrastructure spend of the urban ones on a per capita basis--the spending outcomes will likely be better in the urban area because the cost efficiency is that much higher. This thus leaves the non-urban areas feeling neglected--the infrastructure isn't as well maintained etc--even though they are in fact already given disproportionate resources...they just aren't given resources that are disproportionate-enough! Ironically the "decaying small town" is the best proof of this effect: you go from comparatively well-maintained state highway to a city of 10-20k with crumbling streets and broken street lamps, etc., back to well-maintained state highway...because the state highway is subsidized by the entire state (and often federal funds), but that small town is on its own fundingwise, and reveals what the surrounding area can actually afford, sans subsidization from outside money.
      - 10y ago
    - hiram112 10y ago
      I agree with you. I constantly hear (especially during election season) about how the blue coastal states are basically 'subsidizing' the idiots from fly over country - some statistics about tax payments and farm subsidies tossed out to make the case. In reality, the situation is reversed. The US largest export, by FAR, is agriculture and meat, almost none of which comes from the coasts. If you want to count GDP, do you really think that the trillions of dollars of bank profits from lower Manhattan are really as important to the economy of the US as the trillions of dollars of corn, soy beans, wheat, beef, pork, etc that's produced in the Midwest? The former is just redistribution of wealth, the latter is actually traded to other countries. How bout all that energy produced in Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Texas? Do you think the US would miss it more than they'd miss the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in DC on mostly dubious military spending or on the thousands of silicon valley companies finding creative ways to serve tracking ads? In reality, if the red states and blue states separated from each other, you'd have one nation with massive real exportable wealth divided by a small population, and another nation with mostly printed and worthless dollars backed by non exportable services, divided by a huge amount of people and their unfunded entitlements.
      - saycheese 10y ago
        Less than 1% of the GDP if you're being generous: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... What am I missing?
  - xherberta 10y ago
    Because unskilled workers (and their children) fare better when uprooted and transplanted into cities??? Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agriculture that minimize labor inputs, so subsidies have already largely depopulated fly-over country. Are you thinking that these rural folk are getting more than their share of federal services? I don't see how... Interstates have to be maintained anyway, and schools are mostly funded locally. Are you worried about the cost of keeping all those small post offices open?
    - mapt 10y ago
      Basically, yes they do. if you build the housing that the market demands, as happens in most cities on Earth, people tend to move there voluntarily. But we haven't. We've pretended that these urban engines of economic growth and fiscal productivity are simply an area of private real estate investments or money trees for state and federal governments to pluck to feed the less privileged. We've surrendered this massive amenity (the ability to move the jobless to places that can give them jobs) due to quirks of our electoral politics, quirks of our property law, quirks of our economy, and quirks of our welfare system. Instead we've propped up jobs and rural communities with massive subsidization, and watched as the very best that our economy can offer prices itself out of existence. The Bay Area is only the most extreme example of this; It can cost 20x as much to house someone there, as to house them in Topeka. This is a massive productivity & economic growth success story that we are holding back because we're choking off housing and driving up prices, preventing the population of Topeka from moving there. The concept of natural limitations ("The peninsula is only so big!") is absolute bullshit, because the population density is drastically lower than many far more economically marginal places have achieved. For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits.
      - saycheese 10y ago
        >> "For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits." Interesting, please explain or provide a link to an explanation.
- dao- 10y ago
  Surely not forced relocation, but on the other hand I don't quite understand why people think it's a good idea to fight urbanization on a policy level rather than embracing it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - lowpro 10y ago
    Many people, including myself, don't like cities. Being from Indiana, everyone I know that lives here wants to be here. Cities are crowded, dirty, and far more dangerous than the country and many small towns. The coasts are already overcrowded, they don't need more people.
    - saycheese 10y ago
      If you're able to cover the cost and except the risks of living in non-urbanized areas, that's fine. Americans spending billions to create jobs for people to maintain them living in areas that are not economically viable needs to stop.
    - rhexs 10y ago
      I spent a few years moving around to big cities for tech jobs. Only thing I really discovered is that I strongly dislike living in big cities. Grew up in a small college town. Great quality of life, affordable (if you have a university job or something supporting them...), very little suburban sprawl, I only have to drive 10-20 minutes to get to the bar district to do something. Sure, I can't go to world renown art centers or find some hyper specific activities/businesses that can usually only succeed in higher population densities, but I'd only be a few hours away from them if needed. Lots of pluses for me. Hope to take a significant pay cut and shoot for a stable job someday in one of these places. The friends I grew up with make 1/3rd what I do, but they all own homes and seemingly enjoy a higher quality of life. My current solution is save up a nice nest-egg and re-specialize into something else. Haven't decided what yet.
  - vinay427 10y ago
coderdude 10y ago
How can you increase demand for housing and decrease the cost of housing at the same time?
- Naritai 10y ago
  ...by dramatically increasing supply?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    ...which would decrease demand (ceteris paribus) :-) I think the question was academic, not practical.
    - hellofunk 10y ago
      Supply and demand can both increase. It's the difference that matters.
      - Noseshine 10y ago
        I wrote "ceteris paribus". Please actually read comments before downvoting. My comment still stands. If, everything else remaining equal, supply "dramatically increases" than demand will fall.
        saycheese 10y ago
        While I didn't downvote your comment, using Latin on an English speaking site isn't an effective means of expressing ideas.
        hellofunk 10y ago
        I have to agree that to assume everyone would understand some Latin phrase is, well.. presumptuous.
taprun 10y ago
If you did that, a handful of people would be responsible for a huge number of votes in the electoral college. That might be interesting.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Apart from issues of gerrymandering, districts are at least supposed to be based on population. So they would just increase district size. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_district#Apportionment_and_redistricting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_district#Apportionme...
vinay427 10y ago
That 66% includes most of the population of the Midwest as well (all of MI, northern OH, Chicago area, etc.). We're not moving them away from population centers by your evidence. https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-governments-100-mile-border-zone-map https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-governments-100-mile-b...
- jdmichal 10y ago
  It also excludes some major cities on the Mississippi, which are not isolated despite being neither coastal nor near a border.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Like what Stalin did to Tartars?
- saycheese 10y ago
  It's Tatars, not Tartars: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_T... ...and no, this is the opposite of deportation and there is no ethnic filter being applied. Please see other comments in this thread for the reasons for deruralizarion.
stephengillie 10y ago
50% of the US population lives east of the Mississippi, on 1/3 of the land. It would make more sense to find why people are so frequently living near the border, and incentivize them to move inland, balancing the population more evenly across the land.
Retra 10y ago
"The border" runs along the great lakes and includes a lot of large cities in the midwest.
sedachv 10y ago
Rural depopulation needs to happen if for no other reasons than environmental. We should be focusing on returning as much land as possible to natural ecosystems. Urban living is more efficient in terms of resource consumption than rural living (http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html), and the possibilities for further efficiency gains are much greater for urban areas.

djrogers 10y ago

Have you considered that some of the 34% of people living in 'the middle' prefer to live there? I find it hard to believe you are seriously advocating the forced relocation of citizens in the name of making 'more sense'...

saycheese 10y ago
I'm suggestioning that American stop subsidizing vast unpopulated areas of its country for the benefit of a subset of the country. Once the subsidies are deverted, the areas will naturally depopulate.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- madengr 10y ago
  Subsidize? Maybe those vastly unpopulated areas of the country ought to stop feeding those 100 miles from the coast.
  - dao- 10y ago
    Automation is a thing, fewer and fewer people work in farming, and those who do spend less and less time doing manual labor. I'd rather support this trend and work towards full automation and remote control.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - trashtoss 10y ago
    It is subsidization, on too many fronts to name. If anything it has been too effective because it is quite invisible and taken for granted by the recipients, which then allows them to see their own life narratives as stories of succeeding in the market economy due to hard, honest work. The work may indeed be hard and honest, but it only succeeds at the costs and prices it succeeds at due to vast subsidies, which again are taken for granted (if even seen as such--or seen at all). The worst part is that even with this heavy subsidization the cost difficulties of modern infrastructure under sparse settlement leave non-urban residents feeling shortchanged despite the disproportionate spending they receive. Here's how that usually goes: basic infrastructure (roads, power, water, communications) has costs that scale roughly linearly in terms of how much you build: your build and maintenance cost are roughly proportionate to how many miles of road or miles of pipe or miles of wire, and so on. Thus as you have a population that is more widely spaced-out your effective per capita infrastructure costs go up: you have more road per person and more wires per person just to deliver the same level of capability. You often wind up, then, needing as much as 5x or more the per capita budget in a sparsely populated area to build and maintain infrastructure at a comparable level to a denser area (whether this is done or not is about administrative competence but that is a separate issue from the cost themselves). At a state level, however, it is hard to have wildly disproportionate per capita spending: you can maybe get away with spending 2-3x per capita on infrastructure in non-urban areas versus urban areas, but not 5-10x. But this spending-effectiveness discrepancy means that even with heavy subsidization--eg non-urban areas effectively getting 2-3x the infrastructure spend of the urban ones on a per capita basis--the spending outcomes will likely be better in the urban area because the cost efficiency is that much higher. This thus leaves the non-urban areas feeling neglected--the infrastructure isn't as well maintained etc--even though they are in fact already given disproportionate resources...they just aren't given resources that are disproportionate-enough! Ironically the "decaying small town" is the best proof of this effect: you go from comparatively well-maintained state highway to a city of 10-20k with crumbling streets and broken street lamps, etc., back to well-maintained state highway...because the state highway is subsidized by the entire state (and often federal funds), but that small town is on its own fundingwise, and reveals what the surrounding area can actually afford, sans subsidization from outside money.
    - 10y ago
  - hiram112 10y ago
    I agree with you. I constantly hear (especially during election season) about how the blue coastal states are basically 'subsidizing' the idiots from fly over country - some statistics about tax payments and farm subsidies tossed out to make the case. In reality, the situation is reversed. The US largest export, by FAR, is agriculture and meat, almost none of which comes from the coasts. If you want to count GDP, do you really think that the trillions of dollars of bank profits from lower Manhattan are really as important to the economy of the US as the trillions of dollars of corn, soy beans, wheat, beef, pork, etc that's produced in the Midwest? The former is just redistribution of wealth, the latter is actually traded to other countries. How bout all that energy produced in Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Texas? Do you think the US would miss it more than they'd miss the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in DC on mostly dubious military spending or on the thousands of silicon valley companies finding creative ways to serve tracking ads? In reality, if the red states and blue states separated from each other, you'd have one nation with massive real exportable wealth divided by a small population, and another nation with mostly printed and worthless dollars backed by non exportable services, divided by a huge amount of people and their unfunded entitlements.
    - saycheese 10y ago
      Less than 1% of the GDP if you're being generous: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... What am I missing?
- xherberta 10y ago
  Because unskilled workers (and their children) fare better when uprooted and transplanted into cities??? Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agriculture that minimize labor inputs, so subsidies have already largely depopulated fly-over country. Are you thinking that these rural folk are getting more than their share of federal services? I don't see how... Interstates have to be maintained anyway, and schools are mostly funded locally. Are you worried about the cost of keeping all those small post offices open?
  - mapt 10y ago
    Basically, yes they do. if you build the housing that the market demands, as happens in most cities on Earth, people tend to move there voluntarily. But we haven't. We've pretended that these urban engines of economic growth and fiscal productivity are simply an area of private real estate investments or money trees for state and federal governments to pluck to feed the less privileged. We've surrendered this massive amenity (the ability to move the jobless to places that can give them jobs) due to quirks of our electoral politics, quirks of our property law, quirks of our economy, and quirks of our welfare system. Instead we've propped up jobs and rural communities with massive subsidization, and watched as the very best that our economy can offer prices itself out of existence. The Bay Area is only the most extreme example of this; It can cost 20x as much to house someone there, as to house them in Topeka. This is a massive productivity & economic growth success story that we are holding back because we're choking off housing and driving up prices, preventing the population of Topeka from moving there. The concept of natural limitations ("The peninsula is only so big!") is absolute bullshit, because the population density is drastically lower than many far more economically marginal places have achieved. For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits.
    - saycheese 10y ago
      >> "For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits." Interesting, please explain or provide a link to an explanation.
dao- 10y ago
Surely not forced relocation, but on the other hand I don't quite understand why people think it's a good idea to fight urbanization on a policy level rather than embracing it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- lowpro 10y ago
  Many people, including myself, don't like cities. Being from Indiana, everyone I know that lives here wants to be here. Cities are crowded, dirty, and far more dangerous than the country and many small towns. The coasts are already overcrowded, they don't need more people.
  - saycheese 10y ago
    If you're able to cover the cost and except the risks of living in non-urbanized areas, that's fine. Americans spending billions to create jobs for people to maintain them living in areas that are not economically viable needs to stop.
  - rhexs 10y ago
    I spent a few years moving around to big cities for tech jobs. Only thing I really discovered is that I strongly dislike living in big cities. Grew up in a small college town. Great quality of life, affordable (if you have a university job or something supporting them...), very little suburban sprawl, I only have to drive 10-20 minutes to get to the bar district to do something. Sure, I can't go to world renown art centers or find some hyper specific activities/businesses that can usually only succeed in higher population densities, but I'd only be a few hours away from them if needed. Lots of pluses for me. Hope to take a significant pay cut and shoot for a stable job someday in one of these places. The friends I grew up with make 1/3rd what I do, but they all own homes and seemingly enjoy a higher quality of life. My current solution is save up a nice nest-egg and re-specialize into something else. Haven't decided what yet.
- vinay427 10y ago

coderdude 10y ago

How can you increase demand for housing and decrease the cost of housing at the same time?

Naritai 10y ago
...by dramatically increasing supply?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Noseshine 10y ago
  ...which would decrease demand (ceteris paribus) :-) I think the question was academic, not practical.
  - hellofunk 10y ago
    Supply and demand can both increase. It's the difference that matters.
    - Noseshine 10y ago
      I wrote "ceteris paribus". Please actually read comments before downvoting. My comment still stands. If, everything else remaining equal, supply "dramatically increases" than demand will fall.
      - saycheese 10y ago
        While I didn't downvote your comment, using Latin on an English speaking site isn't an effective means of expressing ideas.
        hellofunk 10y ago
        I have to agree that to assume everyone would understand some Latin phrase is, well.. presumptuous.

taprun 10y ago

If you did that, a handful of people would be responsible for a huge number of votes in the electoral college. That might be interesting.

Noseshine 10y ago
Apart from issues of gerrymandering, districts are at least supposed to be based on population. So they would just increase district size. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_district#Apportionment_and_redistricting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_district#Apportionme...

vinay427 10y ago

That 66% includes most of the population of the Midwest as well (all of MI, northern OH, Chicago area, etc.). We're not moving them away from population centers by your evidence. https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-governments-100-mile-border-zone-map https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-governments-100-mile-b...

jdmichal 10y ago
It also excludes some major cities on the Mississippi, which are not isolated despite being neither coastal nor near a border.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Like what Stalin did to Tartars?

saycheese 10y ago
It's Tatars, not Tartars: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_T... ...and no, this is the opposite of deportation and there is no ethnic filter being applied. Please see other comments in this thread for the reasons for deruralizarion.

stephengillie 10y ago

50% of the US population lives east of the Mississippi, on 1/3 of the land. It would make more sense to find why people are so frequently living near the border, and incentivize them to move inland, balancing the population more evenly across the land.

Retra 10y ago

"The border" runs along the great lakes and includes a lot of large cities in the midwest.

sedachv 10y ago

Rural depopulation needs to happen if for no other reasons than environmental. We should be focusing on returning as much land as possible to natural ecosystems. Urban living is more efficient in terms of resource consumption than rural living (http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html), and the possibilities for further efficiency gains are much greater for urban areas.