8 ms·

Why not just create buildings designed to last hundreds of years instead? In many European cities (at least those that avoided becoming battlefields) there are

Why not just create buildings designed to last hundreds of years instead? In many European cities (at least those that avoided becoming battlefields) there are apartment buildings hundreds of years old. I live in a 200 year old building built during the Austrian Empire, which has gigabit fiber amongst all of the other modern conveniences. The interiors are typically redecorated every 20 years and the apartments themselves overhauled (ie. replace the floor, update wiring) about every 50 years. The facades and roofs are periodically maintained by the city. The walls between neighbors are about 50cm of solid brick, so I also have complete silence and isolation.

centimeter 6y ago
One of the tricks of modernity is to constantly lower the standard of living, claim that standard of living is actually based on something like the number of pixels on your TV, and say "look how much cheaper things are getting, and the standard of living is going up!" Durable buildings, good food, and robust societies are all capital-intensive to construct, and huge amounts of capital have been destroyed and/or transferred away from you by certain post-modern political movements, so it's no longer viable for everyone to live in a good solid building with plenty of space. Instead, you have to live in a cheap pod apartment with thin walls. But don't worry, they'll remind you it's more efficient, greener, etc. You may not have a good kitchen, but you can order a bug burger to be delivered by a subliterate third-world indentured servant. Very modern and eco-friendly!
- elric 6y ago
  If you have a plan to house 7+ billion people in "durable buildings", feeding them "good food" living in "robust societies", I'd love to hear it.
  - grenoire 6y ago
    No need to be snide about it, OP simply suggests better standards for us all. These will require making fundamental changes to how we live, build, farm, create. There is no master plan in the end, but an ideal of a reliable and sustainable future is a good place to start at.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - seibelj 6y ago
    The solution is to stop debasing our currencies by printing insane amounts of money, as the parent poster is implying. If the goal was to create higher-quality goods every year rather than cheaper, lower-quality goods then the market would naturally develop this way. But we are constantly forced to reduce quality to maintain profitably in an easy-money world. As an example of how this affects the real world, notice how the prices of good things - high quality meat, cheese, seafood, housing, education, healthcare - continue to rise every year well above the supposed “true” rate of inflation.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    You do realise that it's those very same people who become builders, bakers, etc?
- Phenomenit 6y ago
  I'm even convinced that we actually have a lot of inflation but instead of decrease of the value of money we get decreased value of the base function and durability of our goods. Everything is getting worse because our financial system can't handle durable goods.
  - radicalbyte 6y ago
    Inflation is caused by lots of people having excess money to spend. What we're doing now is we're increasing the money supply but instead of letting the money spread out we've built huge dams around it. With all of the money in big dams, it's not being spent, so we're not seeing inflation increase with money supply.
  - api 6y ago
    I heard the situation since roughly the year 2000 described once as "in-deflation": inflation in everything you need (housing, health care, tuition, food, etc.) and deflation in the wages paid for labor and the cost of manufactured goods (due to deflationary pressure on labor). I think in-deflation is the early 21st century's analogue to "stagflation" in the 1970s. This results in an economy where for example state of the art manufactured goods cost the same or even less than a large grocery store run. The primary cost in a TV, washing machine, air conditioner, or tech gadget is labor, and labor is subject to intense deflationary forces. Food on the other hand is tied to the costs of things like land and energy that have kept up with inflation. It's the result of inflationary monetary policy combined with aggressive labor outsourcing, labor-unfriendly trade policies, union busting, and automation. These latter forces place tremendous downward pressure on wages. Inflation is therefore highly concentrated in things that are not subject to these forces: assets, resources, and things that are really hard to automate or outsource. Housing has inflated to the most insane degree because it's an asset (and thus soaks up surplus dollars), takes a lot of resource inputs, and its manufacture is effectively impossible to outsource. Triple whammy.
- User23 6y ago
  Washing machines are a good example. The old ones are still running 40 years later and the new ones you're lucky if they don't fail the day after the warranty expires.
  - jstanley 6y ago
    This could easily be selection bias. The only 40-year-old washing machines you run into are the good ones, because the bad ones were scrapped a long time ago.
    - jacobr1 6y ago
      Also repairability - if it is easy to acquire or (or even spot manufacture) replacement parts plenty of things can lost quite a long time (in the theseus ship sense).
elric 6y ago
Old bricks and old buildings are fine, they've already been made. But making bricks is pretty energy intensive. Brick laying requires mortar, which requires cement, which results in a lot of CO2. Brick houses are heavy, and require strong foundations. Usually concrete these days, again, lots of CO2. I have no idea at which point it makes sense to grow buildings out of fungi, but if they are a greener alternative to brick & mortar then it seems like an avenue worth investigating at least.
- grenoire 6y ago
  Just to get a frame of reference: How much CO2? I'd assume that building once, and then not having to replace it for hundreds of years is the long con and more energy-efficient, if that's the metric we're going by.
  - cjhveal 6y ago
    Cement production accounts for ~7-8% of all global CO2 emissions. Wikipedia cites sources which claim ~900kg of CO2 is produced for every ton of cement. It's possible that frequent rebuilding could be more emission-efficient.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      This entire debate is silly without numbers, but even worse it's missing the point - 38% of UK CO2 is from heating. Most of CO2 is produced to heat and cool building while the stand, not to build them. Even tiniest improvements in quality of building, it's heating system and insulation will result in dramatic changes. This favours something well built, well insulated, with a heatpump, high thermal mass, and most importantly with heat recovery ventilation. Not hastily constructed crap that goes to shit in 30 years.
      - tachyonbeam 6y ago
        IMO the bigger question are: why does cement produce CO2? Could we use a different kind that doesn't? Could we capture CO2 from the atmosphere to produce cement, making it a closed loop?
sjwalter 6y ago
I visited a friend of mine out in Lancashire in the UK one time after I had just bought a home on the west coast. I mentioned that my home was quite old: It was a craftsman built in 1908. My friend quipped that his home was one of the newest on his street, at 250 years and counting. On the one hand, I absolutely love the idea of creating lasting structures that stand the test of time and can serve many generations of people. That seems reasonable and cost-effective from a long-term perspective. On the other hand, I also visited Japan and I learned that people generally tear down their houses and rebuild from scratch every 20-30 years. I don't know all the details about how this system came to be, but someone told me it was for a few reasons: One, lots of earthquakes meant making housing more cheap and replaceable reduced the impact of the shakes. Two, the financing structures are impacted by the Georgian land-value taxation system Japan implements, meaning almost everywhere the land on which the building sits is 10-1000x more valuable than any building could be. And three, the idea that future generations will have different needs and wants, and so having a house built hundreds of years ago that's perfectly fine structurally but ill-suited to modern living is an outcome to be avoided. That also hearkens to something Joel Salatin said about how he thinks about building capex on his farm: He plans for any given structure to last 20-30 years. If it makes it that long, it's almost certain the farm's needs have changed enough that you'd want to tear it down anyways. I don't think there's an obvious answer here, and maybe it's like most things: The best solution is a variety of solutions.
- ArkanExplorer 6y ago
  Japan is at about the same latitude as California, and completely surrounded by water. The need for thick insulation is much less.
  - maoeurk 6y ago
    Perhaps that's true on average, but there are some very cold places in Japan and the housing is the same there as I understand it: built to last 20-30 years. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahikawa#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahikawa#Climate
  - jbm 6y ago
bobthechef 6y ago
Yes, and this is why American housing, including apartment housing, ticks me off so much. The building materials are crappy and neighbors can typically hear each other ("luxury housing" may not be affected as much when everything is built from concrete, including the floors/ceilings). Cities have laws about how much surface area ought to be covered with rugs to reduce noise for the neighbor below while walking. Yes, please build to last. It will discourage crappy design, it will be more forward thinking because you can't just tear it down or slap it together in 3 months, it will be more economical in the long term (better insulation than the 2x4 cardboard boxes common in the US). Building materials are less toxic. It will also buck the consumerist glut that currently affects every sector of the economy and has led to enormous waste and poor quality. Actually, that's really the way in. To buck consumerism, an ethos of quality and classic style and design needs to be promoted. Anything else should be shunned as cheap and low quality.
dcolkitt 6y ago
The economy grows at a per capita rate of about 2% per annum. The average citizen in 200 years will be approximately 50 times wealthier than we are today. It makes little sense for the comparatively poor consumers of the 21st century to pay extra for housing for the comparatively rich consumers of the 23rd century. Just as it doesn't make sense for a 20 year old to take out a huge mortgage to buy a big house that he won't need until he's 40 with a big family. It makes much more sense for us poor people or the present to save money by building cheaper, shorter-lasting housing, and let the filthy rich people of the future pay for it later.
- fendy3002 6y ago
  > The average citizen in 200 years will be approximately 50 times wealthier than we are today I wish I could share your optimism. If the current wealth gap trend is continuing, the future won't be much different than nowadays. It's even harder to buy a house and/or build it today than let's say 30 years ago.
  - vinay427 6y ago
    The current wealth gap is shrinking, so I'm not sure what trend you're referring to. It may be increasing in your country and many others, but globally the average citizen is far better off today in virtually every material and health metric. A lot of nice plots here: https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality A more direct response: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/its-time-to-totally-change-how-we-think-about-inequality/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/its-time-to-totally-c...
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      That's because poorer countries are becoming less poor It does not prove that an average person in the currently wealthy country will be 50x wealthier
      - vinay427 6y ago
an_opabinia 6y ago
> Why not just create buildings designed to last hundreds of years instead? Because no one can anticipate if the land a home is built on will be valuable in some exact moment in the future. For example, should we build durable homes in Miami at all? There is sunny day flooding in North Beach right now. And yet. A part of town literally not habitable in the far future, but still, its prices are high. If you're so confident you know what land is going to be worth, go buy it.
xwolfi 6y ago
The cost mostly. While we could build very well planned long term buildings, as a owner you care max about 1 or 2 lifetime (you, maybe your kids) so the premium to get it to last 10 generations isnt worth it. Mix with that governments elected to ease ownership access whatever you end up owning and the fact these old houses you talk abt were a sort of dick measuring multigenerational competition between rich bourgeois and you understand why we build what we need rather than what 3 generations down the line would have wanted us to pay the cost of so they dont have to.
phreeza 6y ago
European capitals are probably also the very rare exception of cities that have roughly the same population numbers as they had 200 years ago. You can't do this kind of thing as easily in a city that is growing quickly.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  Population of Copenhagen in 1840: 120,000. Population of Copenhagen today: 795,000. And that's just Copenhagen proper, a relatively narrow geographical definition. The city has expanded to absorb many of the outlying towns, turning them into neighborhoods and suburbs. The population for Greater Copenhagen is 1,335,000. An over tenfold increase in population (and a significant increase in area) can't really be said to be "roughly the same population". Have other cities grown more? Sure. But cities 200 years ago were all tiny compared to today, all over the world.
  - phreeza 6y ago
    Yea I phrased this wrong, you're right of course. What I meant to say was that the highly urbanized areas in which these 200 year old apartment blocks stand were already urbanized back then, while newer apartment blocks are probably in areas that were pastures or villages back then. So it wouldn't have made sense to build high density apartment blocks there 200 years ago. European capitals are some of the few places that had this kind of urbanization 200 years ago.
sagolikasoppor 6y ago
The house I live in was built around the time america was founded and will most likely outlive me as well. Its not an apartment building either, it's simply been taken care of since 1770ish

centimeter 6y ago

One of the tricks of modernity is to constantly lower the standard of living, claim that standard of living is actually based on something like the number of pixels on your TV, and say "look how much cheaper things are getting, and the standard of living is going up!" Durable buildings, good food, and robust societies are all capital-intensive to construct, and huge amounts of capital have been destroyed and/or transferred away from you by certain post-modern political movements, so it's no longer viable for everyone to live in a good solid building with plenty of space. Instead, you have to live in a cheap pod apartment with thin walls. But don't worry, they'll remind you it's more efficient, greener, etc. You may not have a good kitchen, but you can order a bug burger to be delivered by a subliterate third-world indentured servant. Very modern and eco-friendly!

elric 6y ago
If you have a plan to house 7+ billion people in "durable buildings", feeding them "good food" living in "robust societies", I'd love to hear it.
- grenoire 6y ago
  No need to be snide about it, OP simply suggests better standards for us all. These will require making fundamental changes to how we live, build, farm, create. There is no master plan in the end, but an ideal of a reliable and sustainable future is a good place to start at.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- seibelj 6y ago
  The solution is to stop debasing our currencies by printing insane amounts of money, as the parent poster is implying. If the goal was to create higher-quality goods every year rather than cheaper, lower-quality goods then the market would naturally develop this way. But we are constantly forced to reduce quality to maintain profitably in an easy-money world. As an example of how this affects the real world, notice how the prices of good things - high quality meat, cheese, seafood, housing, education, healthcare - continue to rise every year well above the supposed “true” rate of inflation.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  You do realise that it's those very same people who become builders, bakers, etc?
Phenomenit 6y ago
I'm even convinced that we actually have a lot of inflation but instead of decrease of the value of money we get decreased value of the base function and durability of our goods. Everything is getting worse because our financial system can't handle durable goods.
- radicalbyte 6y ago
  Inflation is caused by lots of people having excess money to spend. What we're doing now is we're increasing the money supply but instead of letting the money spread out we've built huge dams around it. With all of the money in big dams, it's not being spent, so we're not seeing inflation increase with money supply.
- api 6y ago
  I heard the situation since roughly the year 2000 described once as "in-deflation": inflation in everything you need (housing, health care, tuition, food, etc.) and deflation in the wages paid for labor and the cost of manufactured goods (due to deflationary pressure on labor). I think in-deflation is the early 21st century's analogue to "stagflation" in the 1970s. This results in an economy where for example state of the art manufactured goods cost the same or even less than a large grocery store run. The primary cost in a TV, washing machine, air conditioner, or tech gadget is labor, and labor is subject to intense deflationary forces. Food on the other hand is tied to the costs of things like land and energy that have kept up with inflation. It's the result of inflationary monetary policy combined with aggressive labor outsourcing, labor-unfriendly trade policies, union busting, and automation. These latter forces place tremendous downward pressure on wages. Inflation is therefore highly concentrated in things that are not subject to these forces: assets, resources, and things that are really hard to automate or outsource. Housing has inflated to the most insane degree because it's an asset (and thus soaks up surplus dollars), takes a lot of resource inputs, and its manufacture is effectively impossible to outsource. Triple whammy.
User23 6y ago
Washing machines are a good example. The old ones are still running 40 years later and the new ones you're lucky if they don't fail the day after the warranty expires.
- jstanley 6y ago
  This could easily be selection bias. The only 40-year-old washing machines you run into are the good ones, because the bad ones were scrapped a long time ago.
  - jacobr1 6y ago
    Also repairability - if it is easy to acquire or (or even spot manufacture) replacement parts plenty of things can lost quite a long time (in the theseus ship sense).

elric 6y ago

Old bricks and old buildings are fine, they've already been made. But making bricks is pretty energy intensive. Brick laying requires mortar, which requires cement, which results in a lot of CO2. Brick houses are heavy, and require strong foundations. Usually concrete these days, again, lots of CO2. I have no idea at which point it makes sense to grow buildings out of fungi, but if they are a greener alternative to brick & mortar then it seems like an avenue worth investigating at least.

grenoire 6y ago
Just to get a frame of reference: How much CO2? I'd assume that building once, and then not having to replace it for hundreds of years is the long con and more energy-efficient, if that's the metric we're going by.
- cjhveal 6y ago
  Cement production accounts for ~7-8% of all global CO2 emissions. Wikipedia cites sources which claim ~900kg of CO2 is produced for every ton of cement. It's possible that frequent rebuilding could be more emission-efficient.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    This entire debate is silly without numbers, but even worse it's missing the point - 38% of UK CO2 is from heating. Most of CO2 is produced to heat and cool building while the stand, not to build them. Even tiniest improvements in quality of building, it's heating system and insulation will result in dramatic changes. This favours something well built, well insulated, with a heatpump, high thermal mass, and most importantly with heat recovery ventilation. Not hastily constructed crap that goes to shit in 30 years.
    - tachyonbeam 6y ago
      IMO the bigger question are: why does cement produce CO2? Could we use a different kind that doesn't? Could we capture CO2 from the atmosphere to produce cement, making it a closed loop?

sjwalter 6y ago

I visited a friend of mine out in Lancashire in the UK one time after I had just bought a home on the west coast. I mentioned that my home was quite old: It was a craftsman built in 1908. My friend quipped that his home was one of the newest on his street, at 250 years and counting. On the one hand, I absolutely love the idea of creating lasting structures that stand the test of time and can serve many generations of people. That seems reasonable and cost-effective from a long-term perspective. On the other hand, I also visited Japan and I learned that people generally tear down their houses and rebuild from scratch every 20-30 years. I don't know all the details about how this system came to be, but someone told me it was for a few reasons: One, lots of earthquakes meant making housing more cheap and replaceable reduced the impact of the shakes. Two, the financing structures are impacted by the Georgian land-value taxation system Japan implements, meaning almost everywhere the land on which the building sits is 10-1000x more valuable than any building could be. And three, the idea that future generations will have different needs and wants, and so having a house built hundreds of years ago that's perfectly fine structurally but ill-suited to modern living is an outcome to be avoided. That also hearkens to something Joel Salatin said about how he thinks about building capex on his farm: He plans for any given structure to last 20-30 years. If it makes it that long, it's almost certain the farm's needs have changed enough that you'd want to tear it down anyways. I don't think there's an obvious answer here, and maybe it's like most things: The best solution is a variety of solutions.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago
Japan is at about the same latitude as California, and completely surrounded by water. The need for thick insulation is much less.
- maoeurk 6y ago
  Perhaps that's true on average, but there are some very cold places in Japan and the housing is the same there as I understand it: built to last 20-30 years. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahikawa#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahikawa#Climate
- jbm 6y ago

bobthechef 6y ago

Yes, and this is why American housing, including apartment housing, ticks me off so much. The building materials are crappy and neighbors can typically hear each other ("luxury housing" may not be affected as much when everything is built from concrete, including the floors/ceilings). Cities have laws about how much surface area ought to be covered with rugs to reduce noise for the neighbor below while walking. Yes, please build to last. It will discourage crappy design, it will be more forward thinking because you can't just tear it down or slap it together in 3 months, it will be more economical in the long term (better insulation than the 2x4 cardboard boxes common in the US). Building materials are less toxic. It will also buck the consumerist glut that currently affects every sector of the economy and has led to enormous waste and poor quality. Actually, that's really the way in. To buck consumerism, an ethos of quality and classic style and design needs to be promoted. Anything else should be shunned as cheap and low quality.

dcolkitt 6y ago

The economy grows at a per capita rate of about 2% per annum. The average citizen in 200 years will be approximately 50 times wealthier than we are today. It makes little sense for the comparatively poor consumers of the 21st century to pay extra for housing for the comparatively rich consumers of the 23rd century. Just as it doesn't make sense for a 20 year old to take out a huge mortgage to buy a big house that he won't need until he's 40 with a big family. It makes much more sense for us poor people or the present to save money by building cheaper, shorter-lasting housing, and let the filthy rich people of the future pay for it later.

fendy3002 6y ago
> The average citizen in 200 years will be approximately 50 times wealthier than we are today I wish I could share your optimism. If the current wealth gap trend is continuing, the future won't be much different than nowadays. It's even harder to buy a house and/or build it today than let's say 30 years ago.
- vinay427 6y ago
  The current wealth gap is shrinking, so I'm not sure what trend you're referring to. It may be increasing in your country and many others, but globally the average citizen is far better off today in virtually every material and health metric. A lot of nice plots here: https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality A more direct response: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/its-time-to-totally-change-how-we-think-about-inequality/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/its-time-to-totally-c...
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    That's because poorer countries are becoming less poor It does not prove that an average person in the currently wealthy country will be 50x wealthier
    - vinay427 6y ago

an_opabinia 6y ago

> Why not just create buildings designed to last hundreds of years instead? Because no one can anticipate if the land a home is built on will be valuable in some exact moment in the future. For example, should we build durable homes in Miami at all? There is sunny day flooding in North Beach right now. And yet. A part of town literally not habitable in the far future, but still, its prices are high. If you're so confident you know what land is going to be worth, go buy it.

xwolfi 6y ago

The cost mostly. While we could build very well planned long term buildings, as a owner you care max about 1 or 2 lifetime (you, maybe your kids) so the premium to get it to last 10 generations isnt worth it. Mix with that governments elected to ease ownership access whatever you end up owning and the fact these old houses you talk abt were a sort of dick measuring multigenerational competition between rich bourgeois and you understand why we build what we need rather than what 3 generations down the line would have wanted us to pay the cost of so they dont have to.

phreeza 6y ago

European capitals are probably also the very rare exception of cities that have roughly the same population numbers as they had 200 years ago. You can't do this kind of thing as easily in a city that is growing quickly.

KozmoNau7 6y ago
Population of Copenhagen in 1840: 120,000. Population of Copenhagen today: 795,000. And that's just Copenhagen proper, a relatively narrow geographical definition. The city has expanded to absorb many of the outlying towns, turning them into neighborhoods and suburbs. The population for Greater Copenhagen is 1,335,000. An over tenfold increase in population (and a significant increase in area) can't really be said to be "roughly the same population". Have other cities grown more? Sure. But cities 200 years ago were all tiny compared to today, all over the world.
- phreeza 6y ago
  Yea I phrased this wrong, you're right of course. What I meant to say was that the highly urbanized areas in which these 200 year old apartment blocks stand were already urbanized back then, while newer apartment blocks are probably in areas that were pastures or villages back then. So it wouldn't have made sense to build high density apartment blocks there 200 years ago. European capitals are some of the few places that had this kind of urbanization 200 years ago.

sagolikasoppor 6y ago

The house I live in was built around the time america was founded and will most likely outlive me as well. Its not an apartment building either, it's simply been taken care of since 1770ish