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Make More Land
- choeger 7y agoThe more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? How long would it take until the last judge has dismissed the plea to save the nearly extinct Californian Pink Stink Beetle that by circumstance breeds in that area? How much more expensive would the project become over its ever longer runtime? What will happen when the seemingly inevitable corruption scandals are brought to daylight?
- thrower123 7y agoI would not want to take a wager on whether this sort of project could be done in San Francisco. China, I am certain, could do it. If it were an Army Corps of Engineers project on the Mississippi or the deep South, I'd give it 50-50 odds. We do seem to have no ability to do any sort of large scale projects. They built the Empire State Building in under a year in the 1930s, and meanwhile it's taken ten and counting to replace a bridge where I live today. The technical ability is there, there's just no will to get anything done.
- dougweltman 7y agoI agree with your general point, but it's worth mentioning 2 points on the Empire State Building example: 1) Depending on where you draw the line for starting the ESB, it was 16 months. 2) Look at building sites in NYC today (which can still build skyscrapers effectively), and compare them with pictures from the 30s. MUCH better health and safety, both for workers and nearby pedestrians. At least 5, and as many as 14, people died during construction. Some of the reasons things take longer today are actually good!
- thrower123 7y agoFourteen people dying to lay ten and a quarter million bricks and thousands of tons of steel is not much of a butcher's bill. I'd bet that more people would die in car accidents getting to the work site over the extended construction time today.
- admax88q 7y agoEven if that were true, perhaps the answer is to reduce vehicle deaths rather than increase construction deaths. Just so you can get your bridge sooner.
- lazyjones 7y agoIs the situation actually much better today? > 21% / 991 of 4693 Work Deaths In The US Were In Construction (2016) http://www.imectechnologies.com/2018/07/30/construction-safety-21-of-all-work-deaths-in-the-us-were-in-construction/* http://www.imectechnologies.com/2018/07/30/construction-safe...
- mlyle 7y agoYes. Tens of thousands of people died per year in construction and industrial deaths in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, with a much smaller population. Yes, construction is still disproportionately risky, but... Two deaths to build 1 WTC, vs 60 deaths to build the Twin Towers (4x the square footage), vs 5-14 deaths to build the Empire State Building (80% the square footage). Most ordinary skyscrapers have zero, which wasn't the case 100 years ago.
- BurningFrog 7y agoI seriously doubt any substantial part of the slowdowns are caused by improved worker safety. Yes there is a correlation between those two trends, but as we all know, that doesn't prove causation. We have enormously better technology today than in the 30s, and should be able to put of a skyscraper in 1/4 of the time. I understand that's more or less what China does.
- imgabe 7y agoBut sometimes China has things like this happen: https://failedarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/22s5AXG-1500x750.png https://failedarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/22...
- teshier-A 7y agoThe parallel with Mauna Kea is too tempting to not be mentioned!
- 205guy 7y agoBut apparently not tempting enough to give details or show how it is in fact parallel.
- derefr 7y agoI think we still do these projects all the time, in cities of a certain development level, for the same reason we always did them: industry lobbying. This land was, almost always, reclaimed by heavy industry, for industrial use; and only later, once that industry no longer had need of it (and was being gentrified out of the area entirely) was the land re-zoned for other uses and “finished off” as a public works project. Residential or commercial developers have never been given authorization to reclaim coastline, AFAIK. And governments very rarely do it themselves, save for when they’re essentially serving the role of an infrastructure provider to some later industry (e.g. an airport.)
- eru 7y agoSingapore does it. But they are special in so many other regards, too. (Oh, and the Dutch of course.)
- beerandt 7y agoNew Orleans lakefront and parts of New Orleans East were massive land building projects, specifically for neighborhoods. Lakefront Airport (KNEW) was also included in these projects. The land was sold to finance the levees before federal law put the Army Corps of Engineers in charge of levee building, ~1965. http://richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/Picayune_Cityscapes_2018_04_13_Lakefront%20Project.pdf http://richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/Picayune_Cityscapes_201... https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/603 https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/603 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Orleans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Or... Edit: I can't find the source, but the levee board still has title and standing permission from the state to fill-in something like an additional 2 miles out into Lake Pontchartrain.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nck4222 7y ago>The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? I sure hope not. Two sentences by the author dismissing environmental concerns isn't sufficient. They also list Boston as an example, but Boston's land creation projects ran over cost back in the 1800's, which most people seem to think is only a modern day issue for some reason. The Back Bay was filled-in because the city had already created an environmental disaster out of it. A dam was built which caused the bay to stagnate, and fill with sewage. Maybe a judge should've ordered an environmental impact study be done before the dam was built, which would've caught this. https://historyofmassachusetts.org/how-boston-lost-its-hills/ https://historyofmassachusetts.org/how-boston-lost-its-hills... You don't need to create land in order to have a functioning public transit system, which would address several of the problems the author brings up, without introducing a plethora of new issues.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y agohow do you have a transit system to get people 80 miles to work? The imbalance of where work and residential areas are in the bay area is so horrendous, there's 1 residential place to live for every 4 jobs on the peninsula. The only way to balance it out is either get rid of the jobs or build lots lots more residential
- CharlesColeman 7y ago>> The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? > I sure hope not. Two sentences by the author dismissing environmental concerns isn't sufficient. That's typifies a problem I have with internet pseudo-"rationality." The world is messy and and composed of lots of legitimate, competing political interests. The only way you can hope to offer a simple, "rational" solution in a pithy blog post is by ignoring or handwaving away a huge amount alternate perspectives and history, which actually isn't rational at all. [1] The reason I bring this up is because the article is a blog post on LessWrong, which describes itself as "a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems."
- asdfman123 7y agoThat attitude drives me crazy. Each new high rise built in San Francisco prevents a few several blocks of nature being paved over for suburbs somewhere else. I had this debate with an environmentalist who supported urban farming. Sure, urban farming is cool and a nice hobby, but it would be far more environmentally friendly to build a high rise. New high rises drive down the costs of urban living, more people move to the city, and whole tracts of nature are saved from destruction.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago> but it would be far more environmentally friendly to build a high rise. Absolutely Right! And, it would decrease pollution and global warming because people's commutes would be much much shorter, as they wouldn't be forced to commute from 80 miles away, like it currently is in the Bay Area.
- pyrale 7y agoFood and building material would still need to commute, and the amount of energy it represents probably can't be decreased enough to make dense cities a good thing for climate change.
- bluGill 7y agoFood needs to be transported either way. Dense cities are better because the trucks need to make less stops on the delivery end.
- pyrale 7y agoThe number of stops is probably less important than the distance traveled by food. Towns or small cities can have food produces locally. In large cities, food has to travel across the city, and on top of that it has to travel across the space required for farming. This is a non-concern now of course, but in a world where we want to reduce transportation at scales serious enough to fight climate change, large cities will be a liability.
- hprotagonist 7y agoFun fact, the seaport district regularly floods in storms, and the flood waters are salty.
- seibelj 7y agoIf you mean in Boston, they actually built all the new buildings in the Seaport on the assumption of floods. Everything on the first floor can be full of salt water and the building will be OK.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hprotagonist 7y agothat will come as a surprise to all the first floor restaurants i have lunch at in those buildings.
- melling 7y ago“... allowing people to live closer in is the most powerful way to address sprawl.” “ The second biggest is that BART doesn't have enough coverage to make living without a car practical in most of the area. ” I don’t know about the land, maybe it’s a good idea. However, this really comes down to building better mass transit. “Closer” doesn’t need to mean distance, it could also mean time. Could Oakland be turned into “Manhattan“ with better mass transit?
- bluGill 7y agoBetter mass transit needs straight lines to run on more than density. When the bus has to go down every long cul-de-sac nobody will ride because the bus takes so long, when it doesn't few people ride because of the long walk to the bus. If developments has more long straight streets down the middle there wouldn't be a long walk to a bus that runs a reasonable route. As you said, closer isn't a measure of only distance it is also a measure of time. If the transit system can isn't too far to walk to, runs often enough that people don't worry about when it comes, and doesn't waste time going places the rider don't want to go: people will take it. When transit is inconvenient to get to, doesn't run when/were individuals want to go, or takes too long to get there: people won't take it. Fixing that isn't easy though. Roads/streets need to be designed for transit. Enough people need to ride that the system isn't mostly empty. It needs to go more or less direct routes to where people want to go, not take long detours to other destinations. Only the middle depends on density at all, if you fail the other two density won't give your transit systems many riders. Pass the other two and you can still get a lot of riders despite not being very dense.
- Udik 7y agoIt's hard when American culture seems obsessed with houses rather than flats. You can build in straight lines, but if each 4 people dwelling takes up 400 square metres of horizontal space, there is no way distances will ever be walkable- often not even those between two bus or tram stops.
- jdhn 7y ago
- cco 7y agoSeems easier to move companies elsewhere no?
- smileysteve 7y agoOr increase remote work.
- Kalium 7y agoBoth moving companies elsewhere and increasing remote work are highly practical approaches! Is it perhaps possible that there may be reasons that public policy has not favored these approaches, and neither has the labor pool as a whole? For my own part, I find the benefits of living in a major point of economic agglomeration to be quite nice and not something that can be replicated by remote links.
- BurningFrog 7y agoHow, concretely, would you do this "easy" thing?
- dickeytk 7y agoSounds like the author hasn’t heard of liquefaction
- smileysteve 7y agoCheaper solutions; - High speed rail through the mountains to places like Modesto, Keyes etc. - More building up in Oakland, Richmond - Allow more remote work - Second headquarters in other major cities
- carapace 7y agoOr build things on anchored floating barges?
- AtlasBarfed 7y agoThat will at least be earthquake proof (assuming we are still discussing SF bay)
- thedaemon 7y agoSeems to me to be the usual un-environment friendly corporate drivel. We don't need more people in San Francisco. They are the 13th ranked city by density in the USA. "The world is very large, and cities are a very small portion of it. The land we set aside for animals should be outside of cities, where far more land is available at far less impact to people."
- bryanlarsen 7y agoA million dollars will buy a few square feet of land in San Francisco. In the middle of nowhere it can buy a square mile. Humans might prefer the former, but most other species would prefer the latter.
- telharmonium 7y agoUnfortunately habitats are not fungible. A square mile of dry land is unlikely to be suitable for the species which live in the wetlands of a tidal estuary.
- bryanlarsen 7y agoAnd industrial wasteland is suitable for neither.
- whatshisface 7y agoWhy not make some additional wetlands too? Land is so expensive in SF that doubling the construction cost of this project won't really change anything.
- eru 7y agoWe do need more people in San Francisco. It's one of the most productive cities in the world. But there's plenty of space there already: upwards. It's just illegal to use.
- daxorid 7y agoGDP per capita is a poor measure of productivity, and doesn't consider externalities. SF is pretty good at producing emotionally manipulative adtech to opt every Internet and smartphone user into a global panopticon, and also quite prolific at social media that turns our lives into perpetually distracting hedonic treadmills. Time will tell whether the "productivity" of SF was a net benefit to Civilization.
- kaffeemitsahne 7y agoThe Dutch made about 1400 km^2 of new land in the previous century: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland
- Goz3rr 7y agoFor reference, almost 10% of the Netherlands consists of polders (reclaimed land)
- eru 7y agoSingapore grew by 22% since independence in 1965 thanks to land reclamation. And they started reclaiming before that already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_Singapore
- neoeldex 7y agoNot only flevoland, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieringermeer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieringermeer. But we also have to give back some land for nature: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder#cite_note-2 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder#cite_no... (only dutch though)
- ninth_ant 7y agoThat’s a pretty big project to propose to protect the “character of neighborhoods” for the benefit of the already wealthy! How about instead just build densely on the land that already exists in cities? And not pave over the bay?
- dogsgobork 7y agoGetting residents to agree to higher density developments is a hard political problem, but bulldozing a national wildlife refuge? Easy!
- jupp0r 7y agoBecause that plan has not been working so well.
- romwell 7y agoYeah, but this one surely will real soon now.
- lkbm 7y agoHow's that plan going? Political feasibility is relevant when deciding what to do. It doesn't matter which solution is best. It matters which solution we can actually make happen is best. Personally, I doubt the political feasibility of paving over the bay, but it seems like telling rich people to get over their selves isn't working either.
- drewcon 7y agoThis. Telling that it’s arguably less of a lift to fill in 50 square miles of the bay vs. rewrite zoning with some practical common sense updates.
- zackbloom 7y ago> This part of the Bay is primarily industrial salt ponds. For the record, the industrial salt ponds are actually very beautiful. The fact that they are salt ponds is not actually a refutation to the 'but you're destroying beauty' argument.
- derefr 7y agoNo, but it is an argument against that part of the bay being, say, a valuable fishery, or valuable marshland for birds, or anything else people might think they’re protecting. Industrial salt ponds aren’t “nature” in the same sense you’d expect a water body to represent. They’re essentially already a sterile, man-made structure.
- kragen 7y agoThey're not sterile; their brilliant colors are produced by halophile archaea and in some cases bacteria and algae that flourish in environments that would kill anything else.
- l1n 7y agoIf you're interested in reading more about the value of studying halophilic achaeons: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/extreme-microbes https://www.americanscientist.org/article/extreme-microbes
- tomatotomato37 7y agoIf a piece of industrial environment is so fucked that only extremophile bacteria can live there than it is sterile for all societal purposes.
- kragen 7y agoI don't know what you mean by "sterile for all societal purposes". A salt pond is not a good place to carry out a surgery, even though the archaea (more common than extremophile bacteria, and also more extremophilic) aren't pathogenic. It isn't poisonous, just dry and salty.
- zarro 7y agoI wonder sometimes, is selling existing land that just happens to fall within a certain "political" border so out of the question? Example: It feels like Japan is trapped and can't grow where it is anymore. Is it so out of line for them to offer to Russia or Brazil like $10B over 10 years for like 1000 sq KM?
- derefr 7y agoSeems like certain pieces of land are valued low enough that they get sold between different countries repeatedly. Greenland, for example. I wonder what the buy-price would be for one of the small pacific islands currently owned by the US/Britain/France? I wonder if their lack of a price is just because nobody has offered who these countries would be okay with owning them? (And Japan is probably such a country, given their arrangements with the US military.)
- Kiro 7y ago> Building dikes to keep the water out is very practical. Yeah, good luck with that when sea levels rise 20 meters.
- bryanlarsen 7y agoFar easier to raise existing dikes 20m than to build new seawalls to protect all other coastline.
- eranima 7y agoYou're ignoring the fact that the water has to go somewhere. Where is it going to go? Are you willing to flood your neighbors? Are your neighbors going to let you?
- pjscott 7y agoSuppose that SF became 20 meters under sea-level (!), and was protected by a giant sea wall. The city's area is about 122 square km, so the total volume of water displaced by it would be around 2.5e12 liters. The ocean's surface area now is about 362 million square km, so (if I'm calculating this right) the displaced water from SF can be expected to raise the water level by about 7 micrometers. I'm not sure I see the problem here?
- eranima 7y agoI'm not talking about global sea level, I'm talking about flooding outside of the dikes. This happens all the time in the Mississippi river.
- bryanlarsen 7y agoThe oceans are 1.35 billion cubic kilometers. If you dike off a square kilometer with an average depth of 10 meters you've added 0.01 cubic kilometers. Spread out over the ocean's 361 million square kilometers that will raise the ocean level 30 picometers. I don't think my neighbors would care.
- hnruss 7y ago”Making more land” requires destruction of relatively rare marine habitats. Sure, there’s a lot of ocean out there, but many species thrive where the land naturally meets the sea. Bays and estuaries are treasures, not just bits of water waiting to be paved.
- BurningFrog 7y agoLand would still meet the sea. Just in a different location.
- hnruss 7y agoIt is not equivalent. Ecosystems take many years to develop and often host unique species that don’t just pack up their bags and move where we want them to. When habitat is lost, extinction occurs— maybe not all at once, and maybe not species that we know of, but habitat loss contributes significantly to extinction.
- generalpass 7y agoThe Seastead Institute promotes that newly created flotillas in the open ocean create habitat that was previously non-existent.
- hnruss 7y agoThat’s not the topic of the article and not what I’m arguing against, just to be clear.
- tengbretson 7y agoThere seems to be no such thing as a marine habitat that is not rare.
- eranima 7y agoThat's simply false. There are many different kinds of marine habitats, and as the above comment points out, this one is rare.
- seiferteric 7y ago> The world is very large, and cities are a very small portion of it. The land we set aside for animals should be outside of cities, where far more land is available at far less impact to people. Wetlands in particular are pretty rare and environmentally valuable places though. The fact that you would fill them in and "set aside" some probably less valuable land somewhere else is not very reassuring.
- ummonk 7y agoRight, especially when practically every major ever delta is populated by a large city due to historical ports.
- twic 7y agoThis is where i cringed hardest. Wetlands are, as you say, disproportionately valuable in ecological terms. Not just for wildlife, but for nutrient recycling. Wetlands are mostly found around bays and estuaries. Now, where are major cities found? That's right, around bays and estuaries! Because that's where you can build ports and lowest bridging points, and those are fundamental drivers of the development of cities. There's something about this failure to consider basic geography and ecology that complicates an otherwise shockingly bold and simple plan that is characteristically LessWrong.
- jschwartzi 7y agoMe too. I stopped reading the article after that "who cares, the birds can just move somewhere else" kind of thinking. It's supremely ironic that the author copped this attitude about land use in the Bay Area, of all places.
- gfodor 7y agoI mean, you either accept the plan or not. The author clearly accepts the plan. Instead of writing reams of text about how much they care about the birds, they state clearly that's one negative characteristic of the plan: the birds are fucked. You may disagree, but you have to commend the honestly and lack of trying to weasel out of it as we've come to expect. And frankly, the behavior of stopping reading of a proposal when you get to a point of disagreement is the root cause for why people have to do such weaseling: otherwise, people who do that would just stop listening or leave the room. So what we get are leaders who are forced to come up with ornate, wishy-washy language to lead people to the end of the argument so they can, maybe, digest the whole thing at the end.
- gfodor 7y agoThis should take 5 years and cost a few tens of billions. In California, it would take several generations and ultimately bankrupt the state.
- roflchoppa2 7y agoIts a good think Clark Kerr helped prevent this from happening in the 60's. https://bcdc.ca.gov/planning/reports/TheSavingOfSFBay_1972.pdf https://bcdc.ca.gov/planning/reports/TheSavingOfSFBay_1972.p... This idea is dumb, we can build more tech hubs in other spaces, we don't need to destroy the gorgeous wetlands of the South Bay.
- karl11 7y agoGorgeous?
- llamataboot 7y agoMaybe we could start by not incentivizing-vordering-on-requiring single family homes everywhere in the US. US city density is so much less than nearly every other city on the planet. You don't need more land to build up.
- beerandt 7y agoWe've already been doing that since Dodd-Frank was passed. It's part of the reason we're having housing crisis' at all.
- smacktoward 7y agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
- driverdan 7y ago> The world is very large, and cities are a very small portion of it. The land we set aside for animals should be outside of cities, where far more land is available at far less impact to people. Absurd. Just because a city happens to be there doesn't mean we should destroy the surrounding environment with impunity. Want to increase available housing in the bay? Get rid of NIMBY zoning that prevents building up.
- troutwine 7y agoHard agree. Also, realistically, what is this proposing? Should cities be totally artificial environments with bounded growth rings to demarcate human/animal boundaries? Even a totally paved artificial environment is an ecosystem: which animals are okay? If cities are not bounded, how do we justify expansion into "animal" areas? To be clear, I'm fully onboard with no-build nature areas in countries like the US where we have lots and lots of sparsely populated land. But, environmentally integrated building is almost surely the best way forward for preserving human health and in terms of long-term maintenance of an industrial civilization.
- srmatto 7y agoAlso wetlands the biome targeted for infill in the example are an especially important type of biome and are also comparatively rare.
- jefftk 7y ago(author here) I'm also strongly in favor of abolishing the restrictive zoning that prohibits building up, but in many ways it's less politically practical to increase density in built-out areas than build new dense areas. If we don't use small amounts of land close to cities to build new housing we'll continue with our default of using large amounts of land far from cities. This destroys more of the environment, pollutes with more driving, and wastes more time commuting.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoWhy not extend the development in a direction that's already dry?
- rhacker 7y ago> You do need to take fill into account to build in an earthquake-safe way, but modern engineering is well up to the task. That's pretty hand-wavy. I'm sure the guys in 1970 said the same argument. The word modern has been around for thousands of years.
- beerandt 7y agoSoil liquefaction is better understood, in the sense that we know better than to use certain soils for fill. A lot of these soils happen to be the ones dredged from water bottoms.
- greggman2 7y agoEven Japan doesn't handle earthquakes (according to an NHK special on quakes). They built all these earthquake proof buildings and then the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake came along with new behavior that none of the buildings in Japan are built for. They did come up with new ways to build to handle this new type of quake but of course that's only for buildings since 2016 (probably more like 2018 when they figured out what to do) so slowly new buildings will get build with the new mitigations and we'll cross our fingers the next quake isn't yet another different kind. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/documentary/20180617/4001282/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/documentary/20180617/4...
- EdwardDiego 7y agoQuestion is, did people get out of those buildings alive?
- EdwardDiego 7y agoYep, you definitely don't want to be building on uniformly graded soils, especially not unconsolidated fine-grained soils. Which is pretty much why we got "residential red zones"[1] in Kaiapoi and Christchurch in the 2010 Greendale earthquake and subsequent aftershocks - suburban areas built on large unconsolidated deposits of fine alluvial silts left by the Waimakariri River in its long wanderings across the Canterbury Plains[2] suffered massive liquefaction, repeatedly. IIRC liquefaction has even been observed in uniform gravels. [1]https://www.linz.govt.nz/crown-property/types-crown-property/christchurch-residential-red-zone/residential-red-zone-areas https://www.linz.govt.nz/crown-property/types-crown-property... [2]https://www.ecan.govt.nz/get-involved/news-and-events/zone-news/waimakariri/shifting-role-of-the-waimakariri-river/ https://www.ecan.govt.nz/get-involved/news-and-events/zone-n...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ummonk 7y agoI was once with a map of areas that, in the absence of dikes, would get flooded by rising sea levels. Outside places in Florida / Louisiana / Southeast Texas, the only major city I saw that would experience significant flooding was Boston. Now I know why. Of course, as the author mentions, dikes work perfectly fine (especially in an area like the Bay Area that isn't prone to hurricanes).
- marvin 7y agoHere's the biggest objection, that would hold true for many expensive areas of the Western world, and any policy that will dramatically increase the supply of real estate: "I own property here, and if we do this, the value of my property will fall. Therefore, we shouldn't do it". This is the real motivation, but bring up some environmental concerns, something about retaining the character of the area, something about ensuring that the area won't be mobbed by new inhabitants, just to make the argument plausible. Then vote.
- leetcrew 7y agoI tend to lean libertarian on most issues, but I am starting to think it just doesn't make very much sense for people to own land privately. it's one of the only things in the world that is truly scarce (ie, you can't make more plots in the upper east side), and the value of land tends to be based much more on improvements to the surrounding area than improvements to the land itself. also, land ownership seems to lead to all sorts of perverse incentives to lobby for laws that distort the housing market. sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to take a snapshot of all property values at a certain point in time, pay out the owners at the current value, and switch land over exclusively to long term leases from the government (where the lessee is allowed to sublet).
- amalcon 7y agoI've heard the argument that this is what property taxes are (usually as means to oppose property taxes). What practical thing would you expect to change, that's different from just raising property taxes?
- leetcrew 7y agoyou don't get to resell the land when you're done with it, so it loses its value as a speculative investment. also the government gets a window whenever the lease ends to decide to do something else with the land (eg, build a train station).
- 7y ago
- papreclip 7y agoMake fewer people
- gnode 7y agoI don't think the problem trying to be solved is: allow more people to exist. Rather: cluster more people in one geographic location. The way to avoid the problem would be to not require everyone move to the bay area to be economically prosperous.
- dr_dshiv 7y agoAmerica has an attitude problem. It thinks it is already developed. Like, there is nothing left to do. That is the single biggest difference between the America of today and the America of the last century. The Netherlands feels more like India, in that everything is under a state of continual improvement all the time. The Netherlands is fantastically futuristic, though, and super nice (much more developed than most of America). That's because they don't think they are "done". Here is a map of the parts of the Netherlands that are under water. https://images.app.goo.gl/c5E11LJfLETAFFBy9 https://images.app.goo.gl/c5E11LJfLETAFFBy9
- davidw 7y agoYour comment reminds me of the Strong Towns concept of "built to a finished state". The idea that, say, a suburb gets built and it must stay in the form it was built in forever and ever, rather than, say, gradually gaining a few businesses, or some denser housing in more desirable locations.
- beerandt 7y agoI mean, this is basically what zoning was designed to do. For the most part, it's working as intended.
- tony_cannistra 7y ago"The world is very large, and cities are a very small portion of it. The land we set aside for animals should be outside of cities, where far more land is available at far less impact to people" Perform a thought experiment in which human systems are part of nature, not separate from it; that land isn't set aside for nature, but that nature is everywhere. This frame will encourage systematic thinking of the sort that at least more realistically contextualizes this land-filling exercise, and at most entirely invalidates the ideas underlying the practice. To decimate such productive, sustaining landscapes is reckless, short-sighted, and perhaps even cruel––not only to natural systems which depend on them, but to us, who in turn depend on those systems. Read Wendell Berry's "Wild and Domestic" on this, if you'd like: https://orionmagazine.org/article/wild-and-domestic/ https://orionmagazine.org/article/wild-and-domestic/
- carapace 7y agoIndeed! Combine C. Alexander's Pattern Language and "Living Neighborhoods" with Permaculture. Build arcologies. Use biomimetic technology like the New Alchemy Institute's "Living Machines" bioreactors. https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Alchemy_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Alchemy_Institute https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-new-alchemy-institute-d0992ce33a68 https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-new-alchemy-institut... http://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu16se/uu16se0d.htm http://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu16se/uu16se0d.ht...
- ergothus 7y agoI'm not qualified to discuss the details, but I WILL say I moved to Seattle,WA 7ish years ago and was amazed at how green everything is (like, because there are trees everywhere). I've heard Portland, OR is the same. Despite this, travel times to points of interest (theaters, stores, restaurants, etc) are LESS than I've found in other non-major cities in the US, such as Richmond, VA or Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, PA. Hard to compare to places like Boston, MA or New York City, NY.
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- jackcosgrove 7y agoThere are people who dream of terraforming Mars, and there are people who object to filling in the southern end of San Francisco bay. And I wouldn't be surprised if there is some overlap between the two groups.
- eranima 7y agoThat's not really a fair comparison.
- beerandt 7y agoIsn't it? When the US surveyed (PLSS) its lands for the express purpose of selling it to citizens and immigrants, they didn't even bother to survey most wetlands, because they were thought to be entirely worthless and of no value. Certainly not anything worth saving or preserving. It sounds a lot like the attitude people currently have for the existing environment on Mars.
- twic 7y agoOkay, so what if we abandon the idea of making first stages reusable, and just make sure they all splash down in the south-east bay, until it's sufficiently filled up to build on? I mean, worst case, you hit Fremont, right?
- jzunit 7y agoMakes too much sense to work in California. If something so sensical could be accomplished, SF would have built more housing by now.
- jelliclesfarm 7y agono. make less humans. protect habitat.
- strstr 7y agoI’ve always sort of wondered why we don’t also manufacture more of the rare types of environments. Wetlands are hard to come by and getting more rare. Why not make more? Seattle’s Union Bay Natural Area was previously underwater, then exposed by changing lake levels, then a dump, and now a natural area [0]. It’s partially wetland, partially forest. It’s a popular spot for birders now. Green Herons (rare-ish find in WA) took up the area recently. It seems like we could, at least to an extent, compensate for clear environmental harm (paving over estuaries) by building up more elsewhere. Obviously not an easy task. Not even obviously possible (there are only so many places substantial freshwater meets the sea). But at the moment we have substantial suffering in the Bay due to housing availability. We have clear suffering in nature due to habitat destruction (more broadly). Seems like we should at least try to engineer more interesting solutions than “build taller” or “build nothing”. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Bay_Natural_Area https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Bay_Natural_Area
- schoen 7y agoI met an environmental engineer who worked on the Hamilton project in the North Bay. This is a disused military airport that was turned back into a wetland, apparently successfully from a number of points of view. https://hamiltonwetlands.scc.ca.gov/ https://hamiltonwetlands.scc.ca.gov/
- NegativeLatency 7y agoWhat you're describing happened accidenally outside of Anchorage at Potter Marsh. It's now a great spot to go birding and see other wildlife. > Potter Marsh was formed when construction of the Alaska Railroad embankment limited tidal ingress to a bridge over Rabbit Creek. This embankment impounded the creek and consequently formed the marsh. http://dnr.alaska.gov/parks/plans/pottermasterplan.pdf http://dnr.alaska.gov/parks/plans/pottermasterplan.pdf
- beerandt 7y agoThis is happening more and more as mitigation banks are running out of same-kind habitat. It's also being used as a way to clean city runoff and post-treatment wastewater effluent. It's not really rare. Just not usually newsworthy.
- darksaints 7y agoHow about stop pretending like we don't have enough land in the Bay Area. The entire population of the bay area could live within the borders of San Jose, with room for a million more, if it were built at the density of Paris. Land Use is the problem, not quantity.
- NegativeLatency 7y agoI read a really interesting article about how Paris was transformed to how it looks today > Baron Haussmann was the man responsible for the city’s new look. The Paris prefect had no background in architecture or urban planning when he started his project in 1852 under Napoleon III. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/old-paris-no-more/ https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/old-paris-no-mor...
- siruncledrew 7y agoYea, it’s pretty stupid that filling in 50mi^2 of water bodies with soil, retaining all of that land, and then building on top of it is the smarter thing to do than re-developing current land to fit changing needs. The Bay Area could also just build taller buildings with more living space on land they already have in a denser area. Also, I like that the article complains about how bad sprawl is, and then their solution is basically create sprawl from new land.
- raldi 7y agoOr even allow apartments within existing height limits in the places where only 40' single-family houses are allowed.
- Liron 7y agoI suspect you're suffering from status quo bias. Try flipping the situation around: imagine we have this same area as undeveloped land, with a button that magically converts it into the current Bay. Would you prefer to develop the land or not?
- Eugeleo 7y agoThis is mostly tangential, but the (I pressume) owner of the site, Eliezer Yudkowski, is the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is a great book about rationality, cognitive biases and the scientific method as applied in day to day life. It’s free to read on the web and has a podcast version as well! I’m not affiliated in any way, just a big fan of the book.
- darth_avocado 7y agoHow about instead of trying to create land, use the land we already have in a less wasteful manner? Most of the bay area is horizontal and refuses to build vertical. And most of bay area also refuses to participate in public transit reform. Just those two items can fix most of the problems with a much less economical and ecological cost.
- romwell 7y agoNo way the thing that works literally in every other country on Earth will work (or is possible) in the Bay Area. No, we should fill the Bay, build more single-family units, and hope that whatever reasons we have for not having functional transit magically won't apply in the newly-minted suburb.
- jefftk 7y agoI'm very much not proposing building single-family units. See the discussion about density starting at "Wait, how many people are you saying would live there?"
- romwell 7y agoAlright! We can't build multi-story, multi-use, walkable neighborhoods in San Jose now. Is the proposition then to create more land to work around these restrictions? Why wouldn't the same forces apply on the new land? What I am saying is that there's enough land already for the vision you have for the infilled areas. Your post is implicitly saying that it's easier to literally create land than change zoning laws. And it might be, but let's be clear on what the problem actually is -- and the lack of land it is not. EDIT: just to emphasize: Brooklyn has 2.5x population on (1/2.5)x area, and is growing -- all within the confines of an island.
- car 7y agoThis is unfortunately an ongoing struggle, as outlined in this article. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/The-latest-battle-to-save-San-Francisco-Bay-14462562.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/The-latest-battl...
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- babyslothzoo 7y agoOr you could incentivize building up? That'd be a lot easier and wouldn't create more hideous sprawl.
- jefftk 7y ago(author here) Building up is already strongly incentivised: new units would sell for far above the costs of construction. But NIMYS use zoning and other restrictions to prevent it. I'm strongly in favor of fixing this, but building dense housing in places with no neighbors is another way to approach the problem.
- headcanon 7y agoWetlands are some of the most ecologically valuable land around, not just for local wildlife but for humans too, since they keep the surrounding water and ground healthy, and act as a buffer against flooding. So you can't build condos on it, but the condos surrounding it are in a much better spot overall with the wetland than without it. Any modern land management solution needs to include wetlands. We should be building more of them, not less.
- kyledrake 7y agoThis isn't a bad idea and I would vote for it, but I can't imagine the political battle to build this would be any less hard than the one to fix density and transit issues with the land already there. Americans don't love to hear this but the political battle here is fundamentally a class war between the people that own property in California and the people that don't. The haves will also fight this proposal for the same reasons they are financially incentivized to fight the proposals to improve the existing land. You can technology your way out of some political problems but probably not this one.
- aaron695 7y agoLand is cheap as dirt. Why are we filling in the sea? Because it's next to prime real estate I suspect. Which to me means you're stealing part of it's value and a bit from all the zip codes on the way out of town to add to yours. Given the massive expense of terraforming, society would be worse off. Building up is different, it's adding a 3rd dimension, so increasing density which is adding value due to efficiencies of compact societies. Increasing coast line length also value adds, because humans enjoy being near water. This seems to be decreasing coastline... which depends if the current coast line is usable or not by the citizens.
- dang 7y agoUrl changed from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vKErZy7TFhjxtyBuG/make-more-land https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vKErZy7TFhjxtyBuG/make-more-..., which points to this.