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I like the idea of starting a new town, something that’s in great need with so many cities oberpopulating Why no AC? He says they can’t produce enough power.
by midhhhthrow 5y ago
I like the idea of starting a new town, something that’s in great need with so many cities oberpopulating
Why no AC? He says they can’t produce enough power. But all it takes is one powerwall and 4K or 8k solar panel per house.
- whatshisface 5y agoI think the author is an urban professional dreaming about people doing what he never has in a place he's never lived. There's nothing wrong with doing that, although if you really wanted to design a realistically successful small town, you'd start by asking "where will we put the chemical plant/oil refinery/paper mill?"
- ghaff 5y agoAnd 600 people. (Supposedly growing to 3000.) I doubt you support a school system with 600 people unless it's some communal everyone pitches in sort of thing. You're not going to support much in the way of stores--which I suppose can be built along the outside of the town. And you're not going to supply the town, get people to doctors, have emergency services, etc. without some degree of car access. The fire department isn't going to arrive by train. And I assume most people will be working remotely?
- lastofthemojito 5y agoI cringe thinking about the dating pool in an isolated community of 600 people. Just one more reason this sort of experiment might accidentally push people to their cars instead of away from them.
- wyager 5y ago600 people is a larger social group than most humans have had for our species’ entire existence. No, app-based hookups won’t work well in this environment. So what?
- lastofthemojito 5y agoThat may be true, I don't really know. I tend to make my choices based on what's available to me currently, rather than the standards of the past. Even if a nice tent is better shelter than most humans have had for our species' entire existence, I'm still going to choose to live in a house.
- valarauko 5y agoAs a queer person of color, I have enough trouble dating in larger cities.
- zip1234 5y agoI didn't read this as 'completely isolated community'--the author writes about a rail station. Also if it is as idyllic as described it would be swamped by tourists.
- IncRnd 5y agoWith 600 people paying $1,000 in taxes per month, the city would only net $7 million/year. This is less a plan and more a pipe dream. Cities are built where there are demands for cities to be built. They grow around nexus points of travel, gold rushes, or other places that invite entrepreneurs to build them. Entrepreneurs might create the need for the city, but there has to be some means of sustenance for the city not to become what is called a "Ghost Town".
- wyager 5y agoThere’s certainly demand for living in a place like this.
- IncRnd 5y agoThen, lets look back in a year and see whether this city had been created.
- ipaddr 5y ago7 million a year can hire a doctor, and a variety of other services.
- ghaff 5y agoModern medicine isn't "a" doctor. You're going to Houston, Dallas, or Austin for more than a casual annual physical.
- ipaddr 5y agoThese days it would be a virtual visit. Anything more you would have to go to a major center.
- IncRnd 5y agoI think if you were to create a city budget of infrastructure, emergency services, courts, and so forth you would run out of money before your list of unfunded services got completed. Of course, people who stick-with-it can get anything done. The village I live in has a budget of $48 million, so it is possible $7 million would be enough (after taxing everyone 1k/month). Let's look back on this in a year.
- wyager 5y agoCreating a K-12 for like 100-600 kids seems pretty feasible to me. If for some reason that didn’t work, I’m not going to mourn the loss of modern industrial schools.
- ghaff 5y agoThat's 600 total population. My town has something like K-8 with a 7K population and has a regional system with 2 other towns for high school. And that's about 60-70% of our property tax spend.
- wyager 5y agoThe target is 3k people. 20% in k-12 is what I roughly expect for this sort of community. I went to a few K-12s with fewer than 400 people. They were great. American public schools are notoriously inefficient. Spending tons of property tax revenue is not necessary, just politically challenging to undo. You might be able to pull it off in a project like this. Or just say there are no public schools and outsource education to parochial schools or something. It doesn’t really matter - education has minimal impact on life outcomes until high school/college. It would not be my first concern with this kind of experiment.
- justusthane 5y agoMaybe it was edited after it was posted, but it doesn’t say no AC—it said the town should be designed to function without AC in case of power outages and use as much passive cooling as possible, but that AC can be added in as needed.
- freeone3000 5y agoSo, constantly. It's Texas. 40C summers are normal. The state was sparsely populated, even by 19th century standards, until air conditioning became a common fixture. It's a necessity.
- dredmorbius 5y agoIn west Texas, assuming you have access to water (by no means a guarantee), the option for water-based cooling (evaporative or indirect cooling) is present. "Swamp coolers" have a deservedly bad rap in humid climates, they're far more tolerable in dry ones. Forms of evaporative + stored thermal mass cooling (rooftop sprinkler systems, perhaps combined with a rooftop garden and an underground irrigation + cooling mass water system) could provide the basis for an indirect cooling system that isn't reliant on electrical power, though it would still have fairly high evaporative losses.