11 ms·
The nearly 5M US Census Blocks with zero population (2014)
- eknight15 9y agoDespite having a population of more than 310 million people, no one calls 47 percent of the USA "home". Wow wouldn't have guessed it was that high. I'd like to see the same map but excluding national parks/public spaces.
- thriftwy 9y agoThis reminds me how SF writers were expecting that people will colonize other planets, 50 years ago. We'll somehow go all the way over there and find a way to live in those hostile conditions. Guess what, fast forward, people don't just want to stay on Earth, but will also prefer SF proper, Manhattan and/or Paris within 20 arrondissements. Even smaller cities are losing population. I guess that Spengler's narrative lives on.
- tlrobinson 9y agoTook me a second to figure out your first use of "SF" was "science fiction" and the second was "San Francisco"
- aqzman 9y agoI'm glad I wasn't the only one. I was very confused for a moment after reading that comment. Never seen the acronym "SF" used for science fiction before.
- __s 9y agohttps://google.com/search?q=SF+writer https://google.com/search?q=SF+writer doesn't list writers from San Francico SF straight in the title of https://www.amazon.com/Other-Worlds-SF-Human-Imagination/dp/0307741761 https://www.amazon.com/Other-Worlds-SF-Human-Imagination/dp/... SF also serves to include both 'science fiction' and 'speculative fiction' but that's a whole other debate
- ptaipale 9y agoI've seen it a lot, and the first use of SF was naturally right to me. That's why the second one was so confusing.
- JCharante 9y agoIt took you for me to realize that op didn't mean San Francisco. It made sense for me either way.
- ajmurmann 9y agoI'm curious how improved telepresence will change the desire/need to live in major metro areas.
- thriftwy 9y ago...or basic income.
- ajmurmann 9y agoI could see that that might have an impact as well. It will be interesting to see to what degree people move to metro areas because that's where the jobs are and to what degree they move there because it's a more interesting place to live. While I'd love to have a little more space and pay less for housing I'd get pretty depressed living outside a metro area. If that's what I wanted I could move back to the visit where my parents live, live in their second house or in-law unit and live off a few hours months of remote consulting work. Curious to see how that's the case for others.
- brianwawok 9y agoI think Chicago is the only big city to lose people in the US in the last 10 years.
- goodcanadian 9y agoDetroit has lost something like 60% of its population since 1950 . . . though it might be growing again, now.
- meric 9y agoIt's not a big city, anymore.
- maxerickson 9y agoIt's just a ridiculously massive urban area spanning about 1.5 counties. I guess you can say it isn't highly populated anymore.
- adamgray 9y agoA lot of Chicago's population loss is on the South Side where violence is high. Also the elimination of the projects has moved a lot of Section 8 housing to the suburbs, as it gives low income families a chance at a better life in a less dire situation. Investment in new infrastructure is at an all time high in the Loop / North / West sides. Young people are moving out the suburbs and into the core. Chicago's population isn't increasing at the rate of places like Houston because of the lack of annexation, the suburbs in Cook County generally don't want to join the city.
- pilsetnieks 9y agoNot all people. No one expects everyone to drop everything and move to Mars but there will be some pioneer types who would probably want that kind of endeavor. If comfort was everything, people would have remained in Africa.
- bbcbasic 9y ago> Guess what, fast forward, people don't just want to stay on Earth, but will also prefer SF proper, Manhattan and/or Paris within 20 arrondissements. Yet people live on the ISS, where there are no fancy cafes. How do you explain that?
- vacri 9y agoThey return home after a brief period.
- Robotbeat 9y agoA lot of people /don't/ want to stay on Earth. (And people also want to go to Antarctica... There are multiple "colonies" there, by Chile and Argentina, thousands live there in the summer, and about a thousand people winter over there, and tens of thousands of tourists travel there annually... All this in a place that is illegal to mine, illegal to claim nationally, and even illegal to build new permanent structures by international treaty, thus essentially illegal to build a city or anything like a real economy, which would require mining at least for gravel.) The interesting thing about people is that there are many different kinds with many different motivations. Although I do suspect that space settlements will be even more urbanized and centralized than Earth cities. The extra costs associated with living in space are reduced by living in larger settlements/cities (think surface area to volume ratio), and just like on Earth, economic productivity will increase with increasing population density.
- vacri 9y agoI think most people who want to live off-planet have a very romanticised notion of what that entails. Mars isn't going to be terraformed within our lifetimes, even if it was possible. Living on Mars = living permanently in a tunnel. And if you don't get along with the small community you'll be living with, you'll be screwed. And if you don't like living a fairly regimented lifestyle, you'll be screwed as well; there'll be no equivalent of "let's see what cafes are down this alleyway!". I think far more people actually want a 'holiday' off-planet, than actually live off-planet.
- Robotbeat 9y agoAs far as the latter point, that's fine & perhaps expected. That's why we need to make transport cheap enough so people can come and go. I know what it's like to live life in a tunnel. That's the Twin Cities in Minnesota during the winter. Minnesota is where the modern indoor shopping mall was invented. The entire downtown of Minneapolis is still walkable in the middle of the winter because all the buildings are connected by temperature controlled skyways and tunnels. No reason you can't see what cafes are in the next building or indoor level.
- 9y ago
- Spooky23 9y agoI haven't met many people who have knowledge beyond watching Friends reruns who actually want to live in Manhattan. The highest population growth places in the US are places like Dallas, TX and Greenville, SC. That's been the case for a long time. NYC and SFO are treading water and are at risk as their economies have de-diversified over the last 40 years.
- ptaipale 9y agoOr how Asimov's "The Caves of Steel", from 1953, was set on an Earth of 3000 years from now, and that was overpopulated, horribly full of people, living on contiguous, adjoining underground cities covering entire continents. And had 8 billion people (which we are actually about to reach in about 7 years from now, somewhere around 2024).
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoChina is very similar, more amazing even, check out: http://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/42/105242-004-D8DEDBD1.gif http://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/42/105242-004-D8DEDBD1... That's a lot of area with less than one person per km2. Of course, even the US and China can't beat Canada and Russia, or even Australia probably.
- grenoire 9y agoThat's partially due to the fact that the less inhabited areas are mostly uninhabitable or simply very inconvenient. See this height map of China and see how the less populated areas are simply too high: http://chinatoursandholidays.com/sites/default/files/styles/albatros_colorbox/public/inline/map_china.jpg?width=500&height=500&iframe=true http://chinatoursandholidays.com/sites/default/files/styles/... I'm guessing that there are a lot of inhabitable places in the US that are just... not.
- madeofpalk 9y agoAustralia is like mostly one very large desert. All our population centres are on the coasts.
- bpicolo 9y agoTo be fair, population centers are concentrated on coasts worldwide, if less dramatically
- thriftwy 9y agoBut what's interesting, most of historic capitals happen to be not coastal, and often a bit more to the north than you would expect of comfort zone. Beijing, Paris, Moscow, Berlin. For some reason, coastal cities don't have this push to form a state.
- bpicolo 9y agoMaybe because boats didn't used to be particularly good at seafaring? Dunno!
- repiret 9y agoThere are 172 million acres of land in Texas. That means you could give every American man woman and child a half an acre of land to themselves in Texas, with land to spare. The US is really big.
- baddox 9y agoYou could also (in theory) put every human on Earth in Texas with a population density of only 26,000 people per square mile, about the same density as New York City.
- madengr 9y agoI read you could pile all the 5 billion human bodies on earth in a pyramid and it would only be 1 km square base.
- sulam 9y agoErr, there are over 7B people on the planet right now.
- InitialLastName 9y agoI'm pretty sure that one crosses a comfort vs density threshold.
- privong 9y ago> I'd like to see the same map but excluding national parks/public spaces. This is a major aspect, I think. A lot of land in the west is federally owned. This NY Times article[0] states that 47% of the land in the western US is owned by the Federal Government. It doesn't look like there's 1-1 overlap between the empty census blocks and the federal land ownership, though. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/upshot/why-the-government-owns-so-much-land-in-the-west.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/upshot/why-the-government...
- Shivetya 9y agohttps://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state Well twenty eight percent is just in Federal lands. So throw in state, city, and local, properties and we can cover a lot. I wonder how much is considered water way? Not sure if that is defined as federal land, but lakes and rivers eat up a bit too. Top it all off with places no one wants to be Its an odd article that seems to be more sensational than necessary.
- brewdad 9y agoI think it's meant as a response to the election maps that show Trump favorable areas covering about 90% of the US. The fact is very few, if any, people live in much of the US so the map doesn't show what some people think it does.
- derefr 9y agoAnd agricultural land (farms + pastures.)
- frumiousirc 9y ago> Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, no one calls 47 percent of the USA "home". It's a fairly meaningless number resulting in an arbitrary choice of binning. If I defined "home" as "home is where the heart is" and used bins about the size of a human heart then I could say that no one calls 99.999968 percent of the USA "home".
- Bjorkbat 9y agoI grew up in Eastern New Mexico, sparsely populated but also remarkably scant in public land. Noticed a lot of those green spots fell there. Wasn't for lacking of trying, you drive through and occasionally you'll see the remains of old buildings. Mostly schools I think. For some odd reason the schools were always built with rock while everything else was made out of wood. Basically what happened is that people came in after the Homestead Act to try and settle, found out that despite all the grasses it's still basically a desert, and gave up after the Depression. There's also the town of Tolar, New Mexico. That one's special. It got leveled during WWII when a train carrying bombs derailed. Nowadays I think most of the land between Clovis and Roswell is privately owned by ranchers.
- swayvil 9y agoI know where I'm moving
- terminado 9y agoIt'd be interesting to see an overlay of areas that are inhospitable to wild animals, perhaps excluding birds. Mostly because that would be a useful indication of how much inhabitable land is monopolized by humans.
- chrismeller 9y agoWhat does that even mean? Even in the Arctic, Antarctic, and Sahara there are wild animals that can survive. Just because there's no room for a house on the side of the Rockies in Colorado doesn't mean people don't hike it or animals don't inhabit it.
- brewdad 9y agoExactly what wild animals would we be considering? Pigeons live in the wild in virtually every temperate city on earth. I think there are coyotes in New York's Central Park.
- bagacrap 9y agoMammals that are at least as big as humans perhaps.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cleaver 9y agoIf you go to a random spot anywhere in the world, there's a good chance there's not a lot of people there. The site http://confluence.org/ http://confluence.org/ catalogs visits to intersections of latitude and longitude. Drill down into one of the maps and you'll probably find mostly empty spaces. Map of USA: http://confluence.org/country.php?id=1&showmap=true http://confluence.org/country.php?id=1&showmap=true
- mike-cardwell 9y agoThe USA is about 40 times larger than the UK in land mass, but only has a population 5 times larger. You would need to increase your population from 320 million to 2.6 billion to have the same population density as us. You have so much free space you could absorb the entire population of Europe. Logistics aside. Which makes some US citizens fear of immigration even more laughable.
- chii 9y agoThe fear isn't due to space, but jobs and the perceived toll on social welfare and other facilities.
- snthd 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_fallacy
- thriftwy 9y agoBut come to think of that, immigration doesn't target flyover areas - not so many immigrants come to middle of nowhere places. Instead the (desirable) coast areas get packed. Maybe the fears of immigration are laughable, maybe not, but your argument doesn't hold water.
- Robotbeat 9y agoThat's false. There are lots of immigrants to Minnesota, from places like Laos, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Heck, Minneapolis/St.Paul is one of the largest groupings of the Somali diaspora. Immigrants don't just live in the cities but also small towns. But anyway, who makes the mort stink about immigrants? The exact place you say immigrants aren't coming: flyover country.
- Robotbeat 9y agoBy the way, Minnesota is historically fairly welcoming to immigrants. Blame Lutheran, Gerrison Keiller type values, I guess.
- ransom1538 9y agoIf you can, take a ride on a smaller aircraft over California. The first thing I noticed was almost everything is uninhabited. US Forest Service manages 20 million acres of National Forest land in California. Another large portion is state park systems. California State Parks began the 1990s with over 260 park units, 280 miles of coastline, 625 miles of lake and river frontage, nearly 18,000 campsites, 3,000 miles of hiking, biking and equestrian trails, and 450 miles of off-highway vehicle trails on nearly 1.3 million acres. [ii] https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=940 https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=940
- brndnmtthws 9y agoLet's hope it stays this way.
- maratd 9y agoWhy wouldn't it? Humans prefer living next to each other, creating dense clusters.
- brndnmtthws 9y agoWell, for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-signs-order-at-the-epa-to-dismantle-environmental-protections/2017/03/28/3ec30240-13e2-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump...
- dublinclontarf 9y agoThe Trump EPA is going to force people to live in the badlands?
- closeparen 9y agoThe worry is that the land will transition from public recreation to business resource extraction uses.
- armenarmen 9y agoSo census blocks include federally owned land? That would account for the emptiness, as most of the west is government owned and not open to settlement
- brm 9y agoThe fear is due to racism, scapegoating, and a general inability to cope with a changing population... https://thinkprogress.org/poll-americans-anti-immigrant-attitudes-are-fueled-by-racism-30968b83a908 https://thinkprogress.org/poll-americans-anti-immigrant-atti... http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1368430216677304 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/136843021667730... http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/spcl/documents/Craig_RichesonPS_updatedversion.pdf http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/spcl/documents/Craig_Ri... http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10516.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10516.html
- theparanoid 9y agoPeople really are concerned about /jobs/. Most of the US is exactly zero percent richer than 20 years ago. Wages are stagnate. Nobody knows a solution.
- ChristianBundy 9y agoMany people know the solution, but it requires dismantling the system that got us into this scenario: capitalism.
- arcbyte 9y agoWhat? Dismantling welfare maybe is the solution that "everybody" knows, but it sure as shit isnt dismantling the only economic system that hasn't turned out to be bullshit within a century of trying jt.
- merpnderp 9y agoI don't know how anyone can look at China's transformation over the last 30 years and think capitalism is a problem. When China altered its policies form socialist to free market, it brought a billion people out of abject poverty in less than 20 years. The data doesn't show that there's a better solution to innate human corruption than capitalism.
- mindcrime 9y agoYes, let's discard capitalism so we can live in a socialist utopia like Venezuela.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dlhavema 9y agoMaybe its just my phone buy i couldnt read the article. The end of every line was chopped off, and it wouldnt let me scroll to see more...
- seltzered_ 9y agoSomewhat related, a reminder that the US Census for 2020 is in a state of hiatus - the US Census director resigned 20 days ago - https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/us-census-director-resigns-amid-turmoil-over-funding-of-2020-count/2017/05/09/8f8657c6-34ea-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/us-census...