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Because unskilled workers (and their children) fare better when uprooted and transplanted into cities??? Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agricul

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.
  - mapt 10y ago
    SF has 121km^2 of land area within the city proper. This may be a little low - I was hoping to use the area-including-water of 601km^2 within the city limits. Kowloon Walled City was put together with little central planning, ruled by gangs, located directly under the approach path of an airport landing strip, and relied on a near-zero-public-infrastructure model. It was limited to ~15 stories. It housed ~50k people on 6.5 acres. Most importantly, it was built for people in the developing world, for a lot less than $2M per dwelling - residents accepted about $10k per person in remuneration during the eviction/demolition process; If we take this as a fair value of the housing construction, we have perhaps 50x the resources as Kowloon had. That density at 121km^2 is 230 million people in the city landmass of SF; At 601km^3 it rises to 1.14 billion. For 50x the resources, in a streamlined design-build process rather than an ad-hoc "does the roof break? No? Build higher" manner, with an indefinite height limit and modern technology and a large degree of central planning (absolutely necessary for a 3D construction+utilities grid), I assert we could comfortably house the vast majority of the world in 601km^2 if we absolutely had to at 6x the density of Kowloon. 50x the resources pays for a lot of complexity. Right now, that money (an enormous quantity of the urban economy) is draining into land values & the financial system, but the city is enduring that money sink because the city (and large cities, in general) has found things it is fantastically more productive at, than 100 large towns each 1% of the size.
  - mapt 10y ago
    As a general principle, when a city finds something it's really good at, something it's the best in the world at, and there's room to grow this thing? It is entirely natural for the city to balloon in size. It is ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to direct money into the city, without the city employing more people in this industry (and thus more people in general), and thus needing to house more people overall. That is what economic growth is, and an area of labor migration (where someone in an economic backwater can move to a thriving new boomtown) is a large part of what a functioning economy is. SF desperately needs coders; But as it adds coders, it also needs to add yoga instructors, bank tellers, retail sales clerks, and dentists to serve the coders, or to serve each other while sponging off the excess money flowing into the pocket of the coders.
taxicabjesus 10y ago
> Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agriculture that minimize labor inputs [...] I once had a passenger who'd been tapped to work in her bank's "wealth management" department (>$10 million portfolio, iirc). One of her clients was the "sweetest" old lady. Farms were part of the portfolio - they'd analyze the productivity of the various properties, and decide to keep or to sell. I said to myself, "that is NOT farming."

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.
- mapt 10y ago
  SF has 121km^2 of land area within the city proper. This may be a little low - I was hoping to use the area-including-water of 601km^2 within the city limits. Kowloon Walled City was put together with little central planning, ruled by gangs, located directly under the approach path of an airport landing strip, and relied on a near-zero-public-infrastructure model. It was limited to ~15 stories. It housed ~50k people on 6.5 acres. Most importantly, it was built for people in the developing world, for a lot less than $2M per dwelling - residents accepted about $10k per person in remuneration during the eviction/demolition process; If we take this as a fair value of the housing construction, we have perhaps 50x the resources as Kowloon had. That density at 121km^2 is 230 million people in the city landmass of SF; At 601km^3 it rises to 1.14 billion. For 50x the resources, in a streamlined design-build process rather than an ad-hoc "does the roof break? No? Build higher" manner, with an indefinite height limit and modern technology and a large degree of central planning (absolutely necessary for a 3D construction+utilities grid), I assert we could comfortably house the vast majority of the world in 601km^2 if we absolutely had to at 6x the density of Kowloon. 50x the resources pays for a lot of complexity. Right now, that money (an enormous quantity of the urban economy) is draining into land values & the financial system, but the city is enduring that money sink because the city (and large cities, in general) has found things it is fantastically more productive at, than 100 large towns each 1% of the size.
- mapt 10y ago
  As a general principle, when a city finds something it's really good at, something it's the best in the world at, and there's room to grow this thing? It is entirely natural for the city to balloon in size. It is ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to direct money into the city, without the city employing more people in this industry (and thus more people in general), and thus needing to house more people overall. That is what economic growth is, and an area of labor migration (where someone in an economic backwater can move to a thriving new boomtown) is a large part of what a functioning economy is. SF desperately needs coders; But as it adds coders, it also needs to add yoga instructors, bank tellers, retail sales clerks, and dentists to serve the coders, or to serve each other while sponging off the excess money flowing into the pocket of the coders.

taxicabjesus 10y ago

> Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agriculture that minimize labor inputs [...] I once had a passenger who'd been tapped to work in her bank's "wealth management" department (>$10 million portfolio, iirc). One of her clients was the "sweetest" old lady. Farms were part of the portfolio - they'd analyze the productivity of the various properties, and decide to keep or to sell. I said to myself, "that is NOT farming."