7 ms·

I've noticed an increasing trend in West Coast cities where people complain that there's "just too many people". "Tell them to move elsewhere, we're full". It's

I've noticed an increasing trend in West Coast cities where people complain that there's "just too many people". "Tell them to move elsewhere, we're full". It's as if the lessons of Malthusian limits were lost on us. For humanity to continue growing as a species we have to become more efficient with land use.

CPLX 7y ago
I mean if they really mean they don't want to build anything then let's talk. It's a policy that can work, it's worked great in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for example. But they'll have to stop building massive office buildings if so.
esotericn 7y ago
> For humanity to continue growing as a species I'm pretty young. Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius. The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it. We can't go on like this.
- Karrot_Kream 7y ago
  > We can't go on like this. What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point? > The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something. Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.
  - CPLX 7y ago
    > maybe involving terraforming other planets This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here. Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead? I mean, seriously.
    - Karrot_Kream 7y ago
      No that's exactly what I mean, you read "terraforming" and took it too far. The parent was saying that, the general conclusion is making housing smaller and smaller. Today's apartment buildings will be too big as the population grows and we'll have to fit more people in more limited amounts of space. This is assuming several things, that we won't be able to build tall buildings, that we won't be able to go on another planet, or one of the many other things that can come in the far future. The solution right now is to build medium density housing and disincentive individuals from driving their cars alone to work.
      - esotericn 7y ago
        Whatever "solution" you come up with would obviously be better if shared amongst a reasonable number of humans. That's my main point, not what the solution looks like. Tall buildings are inherently communal. Terraforming is an idea so absurd I'm not sure where to start - the dream of a 16 year old science fiction reader. We have a solution for housing. It's called houses. This breaks down when you get millions of people and stuff them in the same small coastal region. A good start would be to, well, just not do that. My home town of 200,000 can be cycled across in 20 minutes. It has very few apartments and is primarily made up of terraced or semi detached housing.
        Karrot_Kream 7y ago
        > Tall buildings are inherently communal. Sure and that's _your_ view of the matter (where I'm reading "communal" as "undesirable" here). Hundreds of thousands of people continue to view high-rise apartments as desirable places to live, as evidenced by housing demand in Manhattan, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and other world cities. The Bay Area has created bureaucratic and legal roadblocks from allowing these high-rise apartments. If people really didn't want them, then folks would be moving out of these high-rise cities instead of moving into them. There's no need to mandate low-rise by law as the Bay Area has done.
        CPLX 7y ago
        > Tall buildings are inherently communal. Cool so stop building them. You can't make the workplaces incredibly dense and the housing incredibly sparse in a geographically constrained area though and expect things to be OK. For every Salesforce tower build a giant apartment skyscraper. For every Google campus build a major apartment complex campus.
- tmh79 7y ago
  "We can't go on like this." There is a huge HUGE difference between "you must own 1/3 of an acre of land to live within an hour commute of your job" and "microscopic communal living spaces", if you haven't looked at a map recently we are much much closer to the prior than the latter.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Mmm. I live in the UK. London is somewhere in-between; so are most of our towns and cities, really. Tons of semi-detached or terraced homes, well served by public transport, which provide a decent balance. We still can't just increase the population in those commutable areas without bound though.
- jdavis703 7y ago
  A huge amount of US crop land is dedicated to livestock feed. I'm usually skeptical of market based solutions, but an omnivorous diet will probably become a luxury (middle-class people will have a generally herbivorous diet, with occasional meat for special occasions) before factory farming becomes the only way to feed the masses. Here's a great visualization of how we use our land: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
- swsieber 7y ago
  Don't worry, we're not. Human population growth is slowing down at a remarkable rate.
- sien 7y ago
  Look at this map of total fertility : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/media/File:2013_Fertility_per_woman_world_map.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med... If fertility is below 2.1 it's below replacement. There are not many rich countries with replacement level fertility rates. Japan's population is decreasing at ~300K a year because they don't allow much immigration. As countries become rich people leave in lower numbers. There are quite a few countries in the world that are already experiencing population decline : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline
closeparen 7y ago
The intuitions about Malthusian limits are basically correct within car culture. Further scalability is of course possible, but it requires lifestyle changes and a lot of expensive infrastructure building, sacrifices incumbents would rather not make.
xster 7y ago
While simultaneously snidely implying that these unwashed peasants will never understand our progressive ways while forcing them to live in environments that needs fossil fuel fueled AC and heating instead of somewhere like the coast which needs neither.
rb808 7y ago
Its true though. Yes we could turn the Bay Area and LA into something like Tokyo or NYC but its better the way it is, even if its unaffordable.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
  Personally, I'd rather live in NYC or Tokyo than the Bay, and indeed that is the choice I eventually made.
- fredophile 7y ago
  What about the way that it currently is makes it better? I've lived in the Bay area and visited NYC several times and would vastly prefer to live in a city designed like NYC but with a Bay area climate. For some concrete examples: NYC has far better public transit than the peninsula. The block layout of NYC means you can live on a purely residential block but generally never be farther than a few short blocks from a busy commercial area with small shops and restaurants.
foobiekr 7y ago
Maybe the unrestrained growth is not a good idea.
at-fates-hands 7y ago
> For humanity to continue growing as a species we have to become more efficient with land use. This is an interesting contradiction. I agree we need to be more efficient with land use, but listening to some of the climate change predictions, we're going to need as much land as possible to sustain a population living in areas where agriculture may be limited or impossible.
ctdonath 7y ago
I just spent 3 weeks in the US Midwest. There is plenty of land to use, thousands of square miles of empty rolling grassy plains. (Ex.: South Dakota averages 11 people per square mile.) Apply a little modern technology (solar/wind, water storage/purification, insulation, Starlink satellite internet) and nobody need complain of population density. There's a startup waiting to happen: self-sufficient high-tech prefab homes plus easy land purchase, organized for instant technocommunities; there are many of us "work from anywhere" types who would jump at the chance made easy.
- floren 7y ago
  Roll it out in say Rugby, ND and you'll even have an Empire Builder stop right there, with service to Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago!
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    Looked. Prolific lakefront opportunities, lots of suitable roads in place. Base town already there. LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). Just need someone to (profitably!) take on making it easy to move there.
    - floren 7y ago
      > LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). They don't even have to be in the state, right? Because the core concept was that a remote-working code-slinger could live anywhere. Another neat point about Rugby: it's apparently got gigabit ethernet service through North Dakota Telephone Co, although you'll pay $220/mo for that service.
      - ctdonath 7y ago
        I gave in-state jobs to show there is a tech environment. Indeed, the goal is to promote remote work, make living there point-and-click easy, and attract a critical mass of introverts who want open spaces and who, by simply being there en masse, attract a growing population.
throwawaysea 7y ago
Why does humanity need to grow in population? That doesn't make sense and is an invalid assumption underlying what you're asking for here.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  Because someone is going to have to care for an aging population. You can look at Japan for what happens when you have zero or negative population growth.
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    Again, why does it need to grow? There seem to be people in this thread expecting that unchecked human population growth is a sure sign of progress. It isn't. And our current population levels are also unsustainable.
    - pcwalton 7y ago
      Because otherwise the social safety net--Medicare and Social Security included--will collapse. Maybe we shouldn't have those programs structured as they are now. But we do, and a shock to the system will result in unprecedented economic misery and social instability. If we want to talk about how to deal with demographic change, there's an important long-term conversation to be had about preserving the social safety net. But any solution that wants to avoid a potentially-catastrophic economic crisis must have a serious, realistic answer for this. Not building housing is a fundamentally unserious policy, driven by a preference for the suburban lifestyle and the fear of change more than any realistic concerns about sustainability.
  - topmonk 7y ago
    A giant ponzi scheme then? When it finally hits a brick wall, there are going to be that many more people on the earth to suffer the consequences. There has to be another way.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    Exactly why student loan debts, insufficient housing, and the gig economy are larger problems than they appear at first glance. Indebted, underemployed people with just a rented bedroom and dysfunctional social safety nets are, for some odd reason, less eager to procreate. If you don't have enough grandkids, there won't be enough able-bodied people around to wipe the drool off your generation's collective chin and push your age cohort's wheelchair out to the common room. That's the real cost of pulling up the ladder after yourself. You break the generational compact by denying opportunities to young folks, and they not only won't take care of you in your sunset years, but they won't even exist to do anything for you at any price.
pcwalton 7y ago
Not only that, the people who say that fail to realize that population control will simply replace a housing crisis with a demographic crisis. We're going to need a lot of people to care for the aging boomers as they enter their retirement years. The boomers don't realize that one of the groups most hurt by their policies will be themselves.
- hnaccy 7y ago
  The population physically cannot grow limitlessly so there must be a point at which you level off. If you wait longer you're increasing the number of people that have to suffer during the transition period and increasing the ecological load of the stable population's lifestyle.
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    I don't think people fully understand just what failure of the social safety net actually means. Without population growth, Social Security and Medicare collapse. Even worse, government pensions in the United States are near insolvent already. A steep decline in population growth will bankrupt many states and municipalities.
    - hnaccy 7y ago
      Then they will inevitably collapse...
  - snuxoll 7y ago
    Signs point to the 10 billionth (concurrently living) human being never being born, birth rates have begun to stabilize worldwide as more countries modernize. Remember, more educated populations with better health care reproduce less. It’s not an issue of limitless growth of the population, it’s an issue of the population consolidating into a smaller footprint (which from an ecological perspective is a Good Thing) and stupid policies blocking it from happening.
    - hnaccy 7y ago

CPLX 7y ago

I mean if they really mean they don't want to build anything then let's talk. It's a policy that can work, it's worked great in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for example. But they'll have to stop building massive office buildings if so.

esotericn 7y ago

> For humanity to continue growing as a species I'm pretty young. Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius. The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it. We can't go on like this.

Karrot_Kream 7y ago
> We can't go on like this. What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point? > The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something. Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.
- CPLX 7y ago
  > maybe involving terraforming other planets This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here. Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead? I mean, seriously.
  - Karrot_Kream 7y ago
    No that's exactly what I mean, you read "terraforming" and took it too far. The parent was saying that, the general conclusion is making housing smaller and smaller. Today's apartment buildings will be too big as the population grows and we'll have to fit more people in more limited amounts of space. This is assuming several things, that we won't be able to build tall buildings, that we won't be able to go on another planet, or one of the many other things that can come in the far future. The solution right now is to build medium density housing and disincentive individuals from driving their cars alone to work.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Whatever "solution" you come up with would obviously be better if shared amongst a reasonable number of humans. That's my main point, not what the solution looks like. Tall buildings are inherently communal. Terraforming is an idea so absurd I'm not sure where to start - the dream of a 16 year old science fiction reader. We have a solution for housing. It's called houses. This breaks down when you get millions of people and stuff them in the same small coastal region. A good start would be to, well, just not do that. My home town of 200,000 can be cycled across in 20 minutes. It has very few apartments and is primarily made up of terraced or semi detached housing.
      - Karrot_Kream 7y ago
        > Tall buildings are inherently communal. Sure and that's _your_ view of the matter (where I'm reading "communal" as "undesirable" here). Hundreds of thousands of people continue to view high-rise apartments as desirable places to live, as evidenced by housing demand in Manhattan, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and other world cities. The Bay Area has created bureaucratic and legal roadblocks from allowing these high-rise apartments. If people really didn't want them, then folks would be moving out of these high-rise cities instead of moving into them. There's no need to mandate low-rise by law as the Bay Area has done.
      - CPLX 7y ago
        > Tall buildings are inherently communal. Cool so stop building them. You can't make the workplaces incredibly dense and the housing incredibly sparse in a geographically constrained area though and expect things to be OK. For every Salesforce tower build a giant apartment skyscraper. For every Google campus build a major apartment complex campus.
tmh79 7y ago
"We can't go on like this." There is a huge HUGE difference between "you must own 1/3 of an acre of land to live within an hour commute of your job" and "microscopic communal living spaces", if you haven't looked at a map recently we are much much closer to the prior than the latter.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Mmm. I live in the UK. London is somewhere in-between; so are most of our towns and cities, really. Tons of semi-detached or terraced homes, well served by public transport, which provide a decent balance. We still can't just increase the population in those commutable areas without bound though.
jdavis703 7y ago
A huge amount of US crop land is dedicated to livestock feed. I'm usually skeptical of market based solutions, but an omnivorous diet will probably become a luxury (middle-class people will have a generally herbivorous diet, with occasional meat for special occasions) before factory farming becomes the only way to feed the masses. Here's a great visualization of how we use our land: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
swsieber 7y ago
Don't worry, we're not. Human population growth is slowing down at a remarkable rate.
sien 7y ago
Look at this map of total fertility : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/media/File:2013_Fertility_per_woman_world_map.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med... If fertility is below 2.1 it's below replacement. There are not many rich countries with replacement level fertility rates. Japan's population is decreasing at ~300K a year because they don't allow much immigration. As countries become rich people leave in lower numbers. There are quite a few countries in the world that are already experiencing population decline : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline

closeparen 7y ago

The intuitions about Malthusian limits are basically correct within car culture. Further scalability is of course possible, but it requires lifestyle changes and a lot of expensive infrastructure building, sacrifices incumbents would rather not make.

xster 7y ago

While simultaneously snidely implying that these unwashed peasants will never understand our progressive ways while forcing them to live in environments that needs fossil fuel fueled AC and heating instead of somewhere like the coast which needs neither.

rb808 7y ago

Its true though. Yes we could turn the Bay Area and LA into something like Tokyo or NYC but its better the way it is, even if its unaffordable.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
Personally, I'd rather live in NYC or Tokyo than the Bay, and indeed that is the choice I eventually made.
fredophile 7y ago
What about the way that it currently is makes it better? I've lived in the Bay area and visited NYC several times and would vastly prefer to live in a city designed like NYC but with a Bay area climate. For some concrete examples: NYC has far better public transit than the peninsula. The block layout of NYC means you can live on a purely residential block but generally never be farther than a few short blocks from a busy commercial area with small shops and restaurants.

foobiekr 7y ago

Maybe the unrestrained growth is not a good idea.

at-fates-hands 7y ago

> For humanity to continue growing as a species we have to become more efficient with land use. This is an interesting contradiction. I agree we need to be more efficient with land use, but listening to some of the climate change predictions, we're going to need as much land as possible to sustain a population living in areas where agriculture may be limited or impossible.

ctdonath 7y ago

I just spent 3 weeks in the US Midwest. There is plenty of land to use, thousands of square miles of empty rolling grassy plains. (Ex.: South Dakota averages 11 people per square mile.) Apply a little modern technology (solar/wind, water storage/purification, insulation, Starlink satellite internet) and nobody need complain of population density. There's a startup waiting to happen: self-sufficient high-tech prefab homes plus easy land purchase, organized for instant technocommunities; there are many of us "work from anywhere" types who would jump at the chance made easy.

floren 7y ago
Roll it out in say Rugby, ND and you'll even have an Empire Builder stop right there, with service to Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago!
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Looked. Prolific lakefront opportunities, lots of suitable roads in place. Base town already there. LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). Just need someone to (profitably!) take on making it easy to move there.
  - floren 7y ago
    > LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). They don't even have to be in the state, right? Because the core concept was that a remote-working code-slinger could live anywhere. Another neat point about Rugby: it's apparently got gigabit ethernet service through North Dakota Telephone Co, although you'll pay $220/mo for that service.
    - ctdonath 7y ago
      I gave in-state jobs to show there is a tech environment. Indeed, the goal is to promote remote work, make living there point-and-click easy, and attract a critical mass of introverts who want open spaces and who, by simply being there en masse, attract a growing population.

throwawaysea 7y ago

Why does humanity need to grow in population? That doesn't make sense and is an invalid assumption underlying what you're asking for here.

pcwalton 7y ago
Because someone is going to have to care for an aging population. You can look at Japan for what happens when you have zero or negative population growth.
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  Again, why does it need to grow? There seem to be people in this thread expecting that unchecked human population growth is a sure sign of progress. It isn't. And our current population levels are also unsustainable.
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    Because otherwise the social safety net--Medicare and Social Security included--will collapse. Maybe we shouldn't have those programs structured as they are now. But we do, and a shock to the system will result in unprecedented economic misery and social instability. If we want to talk about how to deal with demographic change, there's an important long-term conversation to be had about preserving the social safety net. But any solution that wants to avoid a potentially-catastrophic economic crisis must have a serious, realistic answer for this. Not building housing is a fundamentally unserious policy, driven by a preference for the suburban lifestyle and the fear of change more than any realistic concerns about sustainability.
- topmonk 7y ago
  A giant ponzi scheme then? When it finally hits a brick wall, there are going to be that many more people on the earth to suffer the consequences. There has to be another way.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  Exactly why student loan debts, insufficient housing, and the gig economy are larger problems than they appear at first glance. Indebted, underemployed people with just a rented bedroom and dysfunctional social safety nets are, for some odd reason, less eager to procreate. If you don't have enough grandkids, there won't be enough able-bodied people around to wipe the drool off your generation's collective chin and push your age cohort's wheelchair out to the common room. That's the real cost of pulling up the ladder after yourself. You break the generational compact by denying opportunities to young folks, and they not only won't take care of you in your sunset years, but they won't even exist to do anything for you at any price.

pcwalton 7y ago

Not only that, the people who say that fail to realize that population control will simply replace a housing crisis with a demographic crisis. We're going to need a lot of people to care for the aging boomers as they enter their retirement years. The boomers don't realize that one of the groups most hurt by their policies will be themselves.

hnaccy 7y ago
The population physically cannot grow limitlessly so there must be a point at which you level off. If you wait longer you're increasing the number of people that have to suffer during the transition period and increasing the ecological load of the stable population's lifestyle.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  I don't think people fully understand just what failure of the social safety net actually means. Without population growth, Social Security and Medicare collapse. Even worse, government pensions in the United States are near insolvent already. A steep decline in population growth will bankrupt many states and municipalities.
  - hnaccy 7y ago
    Then they will inevitably collapse...
- snuxoll 7y ago
  Signs point to the 10 billionth (concurrently living) human being never being born, birth rates have begun to stabilize worldwide as more countries modernize. Remember, more educated populations with better health care reproduce less. It’s not an issue of limitless growth of the population, it’s an issue of the population consolidating into a smaller footprint (which from an ecological perspective is a Good Thing) and stupid policies blocking it from happening.
  - hnaccy 7y ago