3 ms·

> maybe involving terraforming other planets This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here. Have you guys considering the radical idea of bu

• 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.
  • imtringued 7y ago
    You're not solving the problem. There is no shortage of space for the future 11 billion humans. The big problem is the centralization of companies within few top tier cities without a corresponding increase in housing for the (locally) growing population.
    • esotericn 7y ago
      I agree. It's fundamentally ridiculous to just have everyone that "matters" live in the same city or small group of cities. That's what people seem to be talking about here. In the UK it's London, in the US it's SF, NYC and a few others. If "pack everyone into skyscrapers and have them rent their Logan's Run existence" is the model for the entire economy I'm honestly quite sad about that.
    • CydeWeys 7y ago
      Network effects are real. You can't wish them out of existence; it simply doesn't work that way. Inevitably some cities will be better at some things than other cities, and that advantage snowballs.
• nostrademons 7y ago
  It's easier to colonize Mars. No planning board.