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Are we still ignoring the ecological collapse that is caused by urban sprawl? We must increase the density of our cities. If you believe that the climate cri

Are we still ignoring the ecological collapse that is caused by urban sprawl? We *must* increase the density of our cities. If you believe that the climate crisis is a problem and a big one, then you could be for a rude awakening as most experts now consider the collapse in biodiversity to have far bigger impacts on human lives and living conditions than climate change[0]. The only reason why there are fewer headlines about that on on climate change is that the IPBES was founded decades after the IPCC. I'm afraid that many will finally take a few steps to reduce their carbon footprint and use this to justify expanding their footprint on ecosystems ("clean" but larger houses, "organic" but wider lawn areas, "clean" but more frequent transportation that break natural habitats, etc). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assessment_Report_on_Biodiversity_and_Ecosystem_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assessment_Report_on_Bi...

AlanSE 6y ago
I'm extremely sympathetic to this view. Habitat destruction is the #1 or #2 way we're screwing over the planet. However, this looks like an area where environmentalists risk getting themselves into trouble. Global warming is a defined and solvable task, but the messaging keeps changing to something more like an open-ended commitment. That has huge risks for the public to tune it out, and perhaps further procrastinate on the carbon emissions problem. Average people do not have the emotional energy for a perpetual guilt machine. > We must increase the density of our cities. I kind of don't feel like we can afford to. The housing price increases since 2020 have an atrocious human cost. These rising costs of living are not sustainable. There are some good (tech) jobs that compensate sufficiently for this type of development to work... but no where near enough. On a macroeconomics sense, I'm inclined to think it just doesn't work at all. I'm also skeptical that the arguments apply to THIS migration. People are not moving into the rain forest, and the American mountain west, in particular, is fairly arid. The wildlife density of some places is orders of magnitude greater than other places. Preservation is a battle that you never win, you just delay. If we can't have our big houses, wide lawns, and transportation work with some ecosystems, maybe it's all doomed either way.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  > I kind of don't feel like we can afford to. The housing price increases since 2020 have an atrocious human cost. These rising costs of living are not sustainable. There are some good (tech) jobs that compensate sufficiently for this type of development to work... but no where near enough. On a macroeconomics sense, I'm inclined to think it just doesn't work at all. The costs are rising because there is demand to move to cities, but we aren't increasing density. In most cities zoning and arduous permit processes are making building downright impossible. The lack of real density is driving the cost problem
  - AlanSE 6y ago
    Ah yes, the old single family housing issue. I painfully remember a moment from the 2020 election cycle where CPAC or something had someone, amid much other nonsense, framed Democratic opposition to single-family zoning as ruining our way of life. This is, of course, while 90% of zoning is single-family. It's not just urban areas that need (at minimum) some zoning diversity. I don't know what the most cost effective density for construction is, but I know that in the US laws have prevented the market from realizing that optimum. Maybe 6 floor buildings provide the most floor space for the construction cost. Maybe it's 4. With the cost of housing being what it is, I feel like we can't afford to build at density either lower or higher than the optimum.. at least for the median economic persona.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
      I mean, we don't need to figure out the right height of buildings or the right way to zone specific areas, we just need to remove restrictions and let the market figure it out. Just let people build stuff on the land they own, and the out-of-control rent spirals will eventually stop when there's enough housing.
- ecshafer 6y ago
  Housing prices are almost purely supply and demand. Cities like New York City have 90% of their existing housing stock ( the cheapest and densest buildings) labelled as illegal under their current zoning laws.Los Angeles have extremely restrictive laws that make only the most luxurious high end towers being financially viable, and most of the city zoned for only suburban sprawl. San Francisco is largely illegal to build anything at all there. Cities everywhere have zoning that requires deep pockets (and bribes to city officials) to get anything built and can still be stuck in random lawsuits for decades. We need to build our cities like we did pre-wwII. We need cities like look like Tokyo, Vienna, Paris, Manhattan, etc. We need cities that are dense and walke-able. Whether that is through removing zoning and height limits and putting parking maximums, or through government building public housing. Something needs to be done, it is a threat to our existence. We need to densify cities and towns, and replace highways full of SUVs with train lines. We need to replace coal and natural gas burning with solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.
simonsarris 6y ago
> We must increase the density of our cities. We could also try to make a few new cities, instead of ten thousand new suburbs
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  Would these cities have the density of suburbs or be real cities?
- farnsworth 6y ago
  We already have cities, we are just refusing to build new housing in them.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    And villages and towns that could become cities
- rendang 6y ago
  The West Coast could use a new metropolis somewhere near SW Oregon, to fill in the gap between the Bay and Portland.
  - reducesuffering 6y ago
    There's a reason one doesn't exist and that is because of terrain. It's thick mountain passes there from Redding to Eugene. It's much more geographically feasible to expand Sacramento or Eugene north.
- asdff 6y ago
  No reason to scar fresh land when we have plenty of land that is already well scarred, which could just have things like apartments over two stories tall legalized.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  One more comment on this, since I now heard the exact same point from a friend and talked more about this: we don't build cities. We build villages that grow into towns, that grow into cities. There are very few exceptions like Brazilia, which has lots of issues. Generally this to me is indicative that we are thinking wrong about cities. Cities aren't like massive buildings, but more like organisms. Three best results are achieved if we allow them to grow somewhat organically. I recommend the book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities or the short podcast of the same name.
BurningFrog 6y ago
> Are we still ignoring the ecological collapse that is caused by urban sprawl? We *must* increase the density of our cities. I agree. And moving from California to somewhere that still builds new housing is one way to contribute to that.
dan-robertson 6y ago
Meh, cities are quite small. Their expansion can lead to eg draining marshes and wetlands (especially coastal cities), but in many places in the developed world, that happened long ago. If you care about ecological collapse, you should be worried about intensive agricultural practices and agriculture in general. I think one should always be wary with topics like climate change or ecology that issues may exist at many orders of magnitude and it is important to focus on the bigger issues. (Yes there are very small areas to which some species are endemic but general hand waving about density is not sufficient for them: a farm is not dense)

Are we still ignoring the ecological collapse that is caused by urban sprawl? We *must* increase the density of our cities. If you believe that the climate cri

AlanSE 6y ago

I'm extremely sympathetic to this view. Habitat destruction is the #1 or #2 way we're screwing over the planet. However, this looks like an area where environmentalists risk getting themselves into trouble. Global warming is a defined and solvable task, but the messaging keeps changing to something more like an open-ended commitment. That has huge risks for the public to tune it out, and perhaps further procrastinate on the carbon emissions problem. Average people do not have the emotional energy for a perpetual guilt machine. > We must increase the density of our cities. I kind of don't feel like we can afford to. The housing price increases since 2020 have an atrocious human cost. These rising costs of living are not sustainable. There are some good (tech) jobs that compensate sufficiently for this type of development to work... but no where near enough. On a macroeconomics sense, I'm inclined to think it just doesn't work at all. I'm also skeptical that the arguments apply to THIS migration. People are not moving into the rain forest, and the American mountain west, in particular, is fairly arid. The wildlife density of some places is orders of magnitude greater than other places. Preservation is a battle that you never win, you just delay. If we can't have our big houses, wide lawns, and transportation work with some ecosystems, maybe it's all doomed either way.

ajmurmann 6y ago
> I kind of don't feel like we can afford to. The housing price increases since 2020 have an atrocious human cost. These rising costs of living are not sustainable. There are some good (tech) jobs that compensate sufficiently for this type of development to work... but no where near enough. On a macroeconomics sense, I'm inclined to think it just doesn't work at all. The costs are rising because there is demand to move to cities, but we aren't increasing density. In most cities zoning and arduous permit processes are making building downright impossible. The lack of real density is driving the cost problem
- AlanSE 6y ago
  Ah yes, the old single family housing issue. I painfully remember a moment from the 2020 election cycle where CPAC or something had someone, amid much other nonsense, framed Democratic opposition to single-family zoning as ruining our way of life. This is, of course, while 90% of zoning is single-family. It's not just urban areas that need (at minimum) some zoning diversity. I don't know what the most cost effective density for construction is, but I know that in the US laws have prevented the market from realizing that optimum. Maybe 6 floor buildings provide the most floor space for the construction cost. Maybe it's 4. With the cost of housing being what it is, I feel like we can't afford to build at density either lower or higher than the optimum.. at least for the median economic persona.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    I mean, we don't need to figure out the right height of buildings or the right way to zone specific areas, we just need to remove restrictions and let the market figure it out. Just let people build stuff on the land they own, and the out-of-control rent spirals will eventually stop when there's enough housing.
ecshafer 6y ago
Housing prices are almost purely supply and demand. Cities like New York City have 90% of their existing housing stock ( the cheapest and densest buildings) labelled as illegal under their current zoning laws.Los Angeles have extremely restrictive laws that make only the most luxurious high end towers being financially viable, and most of the city zoned for only suburban sprawl. San Francisco is largely illegal to build anything at all there. Cities everywhere have zoning that requires deep pockets (and bribes to city officials) to get anything built and can still be stuck in random lawsuits for decades. We need to build our cities like we did pre-wwII. We need cities like look like Tokyo, Vienna, Paris, Manhattan, etc. We need cities that are dense and walke-able. Whether that is through removing zoning and height limits and putting parking maximums, or through government building public housing. Something needs to be done, it is a threat to our existence. We need to densify cities and towns, and replace highways full of SUVs with train lines. We need to replace coal and natural gas burning with solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.

simonsarris 6y ago

> We must increase the density of our cities. We could also try to make a few new cities, instead of ten thousand new suburbs

ajmurmann 6y ago
Would these cities have the density of suburbs or be real cities?
farnsworth 6y ago
We already have cities, we are just refusing to build new housing in them.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  And villages and towns that could become cities
rendang 6y ago
The West Coast could use a new metropolis somewhere near SW Oregon, to fill in the gap between the Bay and Portland.
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  There's a reason one doesn't exist and that is because of terrain. It's thick mountain passes there from Redding to Eugene. It's much more geographically feasible to expand Sacramento or Eugene north.
asdff 6y ago
No reason to scar fresh land when we have plenty of land that is already well scarred, which could just have things like apartments over two stories tall legalized.
ajmurmann 6y ago
One more comment on this, since I now heard the exact same point from a friend and talked more about this: we don't build cities. We build villages that grow into towns, that grow into cities. There are very few exceptions like Brazilia, which has lots of issues. Generally this to me is indicative that we are thinking wrong about cities. Cities aren't like massive buildings, but more like organisms. Three best results are achieved if we allow them to grow somewhat organically. I recommend the book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities or the short podcast of the same name.

BurningFrog 6y ago

> Are we still ignoring the ecological collapse that is caused by urban sprawl? We *must* increase the density of our cities. I agree. And moving from California to somewhere that still builds new housing is one way to contribute to that.

dan-robertson 6y ago

Meh, cities are quite small. Their expansion can lead to eg draining marshes and wetlands (especially coastal cities), but in many places in the developed world, that happened long ago. If you care about ecological collapse, you should be worried about intensive agricultural practices and agriculture in general. I think one should always be wary with topics like climate change or ecology that issues may exist at many orders of magnitude and it is important to focus on the bigger issues. (Yes there are very small areas to which some species are endemic but general hand waving about density is not sufficient for them: a farm is not dense)