11 ms·

I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use.

by xyst 4y ago

I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. American housing is a Ponzi scheme and this only helps perpetuate it. We need to reverse this trend with significant investments in public transportation and other alternative forms of transportation which can scale to meet the needs of the future. We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design (ie, highways, parking lots, parking garages, roads, street parking) and re-allocate it for more housing, businesses, and public transportation. Entities that can generate new income for the municipality and city. In parallel, can work to preserve our existing natural green spaces and hopefully over time expand those green spaces which give us breathable air, drinkable water, protection from natural elements (ie, floods or long periods of torrential rain), and help keep viruses and other bad elements out of human populations.

deleted 4y ago
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Syonyk 4y ago
> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. If you're 20 miles outside a town, you almost certainly have electrical service, but are on a well and septic system. City water and sewer doesn't make sense at those sort of densities. You also probably have the land to easily put a nice ground mount PV array in, and grow a good bit of your own food, should you care to.
- themitigating 4y ago
  I don't think this is the case for suburbs, at least for water. Septic tanks are used I think
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    Suburbs aren't generally described as the "sticks." That would be exurbs or lower. A typical suburban subdivision will have city water and sewage, though depending on the details, you might have a couple community wells and individual septic fields (or a link to city sewage).
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Suburbs are often on city utilities. And they pay for the infrastructure. You won't generally find septic systems on properties under about an acre. Not that it never happens, obviously, but a septic field has geographic requirements that means you won't often see it in a suburban neighborhood.
- rascul 4y ago
  It depends. We have a lot of small water coops around here and water lines ran nearly everywhere a road goes, even if the nearest city is 50 miles away.
mikeyouse 4y ago
Not to interrupt a good rant, but the program includes duplexes, townhomes, multifamily projects, and mixed use buildings with residential less than 6 stories. It's a sensible plan that was passed by sensible people who actually do have climate goals in mind. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/DOE%20ZERH%20V1%20Rev08%20-%2010-20-2022.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/DOE%20ZER...
danans 4y ago
> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. What if this was done this brownfield development in areas with existing infrastructure? New development doesn't need to be coupled with sprawl. There is a significant amount of multifamily development that looks exactly like that. The IRA also included large incentives for the retrofit of the existing housing stock.
- xthrown1 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - Dig1t 4y ago
    What does this mean exactly? Like we should be forcing people to move into big cities? What about all the people that don't want to live that kind of lifestyle?
    - xthrown1 4y ago
      Let them pay the $20,000 in rates they will without subsidies from the inner core. The free market will sort it out in short order.
      - prottog 4y ago
        > without subsidies from the inner core Like how the residents of New York City are able to get the food and water it needs all produced within the five boroughs? Or is that a different kind of "subsidy" from the hinterlands.
        xthrown1 4y ago
        A subsidy means you pay less for something than you would on the open market. Cities not only pay the market price for all those products the majority of their taxes go out to the hinterlands on top of that.
IncRnd 4y ago
> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. That's not generally how this works. There aren't necessarily highways and new paved roads going to rural properties. Electrical service isn't only downtown in cities but for miles outside of them or from solar, propane, or any one of the many other technologies. As everyone who has built a property outside of some service area knows, the homeowner is the one who pays to drop the lines or service to the properety. Water almost always comes from a well on the property, and sewage tanks are how the sewage are handled. Later, if Frank & Martha's property gets annexed into the city, they will pay taxes and will be just as entitled to city services as others. They already pay county, state and other taxes, which means they are entitled to whatever their taxes pay for. "In general, rural areas in the United States have higher homeownership rates than urban areas. Compared with urban areas, where the homeownership rate was 59.8 percent, rural areas had a homeownership rate of 81.1 percent." [1] [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/12/homes_on_the_range.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...
- xputer 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    They certainly don't seem to be talking about suburban homes. > But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments).
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    Many of your points are valid for many suburbs but also not for many others. Talking generally like this is weird, I've lived in about 6 different suburbs my whole life and nothing you listed was true for any of them. I'm not a fan of suburbs but I'm tired of people holding up the worst possible examples and saying "SEE, SUBURBS SUCK!"
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes. If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too. It'd be nice if property taxes were slightly higher in suburban areas to make up for the higher costs - but it really wouldn't need to be that much higher. Houses usually cost more than condos - so you're paying more property tax already by having a more expensive home... Sure, there's exceptions like condos in Manhattan and near the beach and ski resorts, etc...
- verall 4y ago
  According to some quick googling, about 26% of roads are financed by gasoline tax, another 11% from tolls, and the rest from federal and state general funds: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/highway-and-road-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
- askvictor 4y ago
  > roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes. Do you have any sources for that? I'm in Australia, where fuel costs about twice what it does in the US. A decent portion of that is taxes/duties, but road spending is taken from consolidated revenue, and fuel taxes ultimately contribute a minority of the spending on roads. So unless the cost of fuel production is massively lower in the US, something doesn't add up.
  - loeg 4y ago
    GP is likely talking about US federal gas taxes -> Highway Trust Fund -> Federal highway spending. Notably, though, the HTF spends more than it earns in gas tax revenue; the shortfall comes from the general fund. And also Federal highway spending does not cover all highway spending; the rest comes from the states[1][3]. Federal highway spending also does not cover local roads at all. [1]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/2021/57110-fig3_public-spending.png https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/... [2]: (Above image from https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57138 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57138 ) [3]: https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/ https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/
bitwize 4y ago
Indeed. Time to break out the omnitool Hackernews favors for solving very large scale problems: government regulation. Nationalize zoning laws, ban home ownership, and herd the population into bughive arcologies in major cities, where they'll be fed vegan or insect-protein-fortified food brought by Amazon delivery drones. If Hackernews believed in god, surely this would be their idea of heaven.
- parthianshotgun 4y ago
  What's your point?
throwaway894345 4y ago
People are going to build new homes outside of dense urban cores and suburbs either way; may as well build them 'green'. We need to be more flexible and realistic with our environmentalism--people just aren't going to give up meat, cars, or houses overnight so we need to allow progress where we can actually get it.
louwrentius 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
swatcoder 4y ago
It’s not precedented, wise, or even realistic to expect all of civilization to live in cities surrounded by unspoiled wilderness. Highly efficient low density housing has a place. So does high density housing. Everything you say about improving urban development practices is valid, but doesn’t mean that efforts to improve suburban/exurband/rural development are problematic. They’re all inextricably part of the future and they all have their own development needs.
- kiba 4y ago
  You can roughly double the volume of a single story building by adding a floor. Taken to extreme, we could make sure a square kilometer is at least two stories tall, but we don't do that. We live mostly a in 2.5d environment. The skyscrappers that we see in our skylines are not even the majority of what we see. A lot of place will benefit from being 3-4 stories tall. A lot of space that is developed is hugely wasted, devoted to storing cars, or roads to facilitate car movement. Meanwhile, a human being is very compact in comparison.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying, but those slightly denser and taller districts are historically called villages and they died, tragically, with the rise of national retail chains. Walmart and Kroger like having big operationally efficient stores that they can operate like all their other stores, and can’t scale their model well to oddball village locations. So they make or buy a big building with a giant parking lot and underprice all the local stores with their hyperoptimized business model until the village is dead. At that point, there’s nothing left to do in your dense housing district and everybody needs a car anyway, so you may as well have some breathing room and a garage. If people want suburban density, it won’t come from zoning changes (although that will help urban density) — it’ll come from somehow making village commerce more economical. But good luck getting that kind of effort past national-retail lobbyists! Ultimately, again, the fact is that urban development issues are different than the issues in other areas and the solutions don’t need to come at the expense of each other or in competition with each other.
taude 4y ago
We already have solutions in place being implemented in the next 10 - 15 years for electric cars and car-based carbon emissions. So carbon based commuting is going to get fixed. People in the U.S. won't be living in dystopian China-style 40 floor housing anytime soon, in ways that is sounds like you're hoping for with dense city living.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I'm no expert in this field, but I think that changing zoning in current suburbs to mixed use would go a long way towards fixing them. The central wards of Tokyo are surrounded by such mixed use residential areas and it works extremely well, with most necessities being within walking distance or at worst biking distance. It wouldn't fix the suburbs' lack of density, but it'd still be a marked improvement. It'd theoretically lighten the burden suburbs place on cities too, since there'd be a lot more corner shops and the like paying taxes.
- Fauntleroy 4y ago
  If you can find a way to convince Americans they don't all need a yard that can easily fit 6 (japanese) houses, we'll be well on our way.
  - johnweldon 4y ago
    Why do we need to convince someone they don't "need" anything? Each person has the best information about their own situation to decide what they need (or even want - you don't have to _need_ something to have to justify _wanting_ it)
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      Convince them not to want it
      - masfuerte 4y ago
        Stop convincing them to want it
        johnweldon 4y ago
        My somewhat libertarian take is that they themselves are best suited to judge what they should or shouldn't want. Not that there isn't a time for trying to bring a different perspective. But we should do it with humility, rather than assuming they're just wrong or misguided. So... yes "stop convincing them" is a valid argument. "convince them not to" is slightly shakier moral ground.
johnweldon 4y ago
Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it. The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in higher density living, closer to urban centers, but instead they choose to suffer long commutes and expensive transportation in order to enjoy a different lifestyle. I think it's naive to suggest that "American housing" is a Ponzi scheme.
- roywiggins 4y ago
  Ponzi's are very attractive too, for a while. People get a lot out of Ponzis. "the revenue collected over time does not come near to covering the costs of meeting these long-term obligations. Development spread out over a broad area is very expensive to maintain. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability... Decades into this experiment, American cities have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates deferred maintenance at multiple trillions of dollars, but that's just for major infrastructure, not the local streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that directly serve our homes. Every mature city has a backlog of deferred maintenance, a growing list of promises with no discernible path to make good on them." https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020?format=amp https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
  - johnweldon 4y ago
    I'm a fan of strongtowns too. To the degree that that analysis is true, it will sort itself out. We don't need to do anything to save our neighbor from themself. We can make a lifetime of difference solving our own problems.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    You need to quit reading strongtowns and start thinking. Every city has deferred maintenance and unmeetable promises, most of it is maintenance that it is more cost effective to defer. We don't need perfectly smooth streets, so defer minor maintenance makes sense. Most unmeetable promisees are things they never intended to meet. Suburbs have existed for over 100 years. If there was a problem we would see it all over, not just in a few random ones.
nebulousthree 4y ago
It's a culture problem. Suburb dwellers, at best, are indifferent towards their neighbours.
- taude 4y ago
  As someone who lives in a city, I see it being no different for neighbors who share the same front door.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Suburb dwellers, at best, are indifferent towards their neighbours. Huh? Where did you get this nugget of wisdom from? We have great relationships with almost all of the neighbors I can see from my porch. It's called community. I've lived in urban high rises and known fewer neighbors.
dylan604 4y ago
>(in some cases >20 miles away) what a privileged life style one must have. you realize that there are entire metro areas where you can drive in 20 miles in any direction and still be in urban environment, yeah? also, thinking 20 miles is just oh so far away is so outside of my world experience that I just don't easily understand your situation of think that it is so far away. clearly, you and I have grown up in totally different situations, and it is interesting to me that one can be so restricted in their movement and consider that normal just as you clearly think anyone traveling > 20 miles is just from Neptune or something. i'll chalk this up to a nature vs nurture kind of experience
kortilla 4y ago
> American housing is a Ponzi scheme This is shockingly dumb. Please lookup the definition of a Ponzi scheme. First, you do know that when you get a house you actually get the house, right? That’s the value residents extract from the house. Whether my parents could resell their house was only relevant when they needed to, big shocker, move to a different house in another area. Apart from leaving something for inheritance the re-sale value was irrelevant to the utility. That’s antithetical to a Ponzi scheme. Second, anyone can build more housing and there is tons of land to keep building in 90% of the country. That doesn’t work in a Ponzi scheme if the real value that sets the price is margin that can be captured by builders.
kerpotgh 4y ago
[dead]
pmontra 4y ago
> We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design There are many small towns in Europe surrounded by networks of even smaller towns and one or two house farms. There is nothing to claim back there: they've been like that since well before any European moved to the Americas. That was a way to be close to fields, when economy was mostly farmers and herders and people mostly walked or at best moved in animal powered carts. Some people move from there to big cities now, some people move from big cities to there. Everybody has a car, it can't be helped. I think that people in big cities will end up with public transport and few cars, but people in small towns and in the fields or in the hills or mountains will keep having a car, maybe just use it less if it costs too much.
- yurishimo 4y ago
  I live in one of these small European towns. It is honestly mind boggling how far some people drive to go to work here. I'm in The Netherlands around Eindhoven. We have colleagues in Den Bosch, Utrecht and Maastricht driving to work every week. Eindhoven is full of commuters. Some people take the train, but that isn't always convenient, especially with strikes! Your boss doesn't care that you were 3 hours late due to a bus skipping out on work. Your paycheck cares a lot though. Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem owing to the size of the country, but I don't see how they can reduce car usage without significantly more investment in public transportation. By the looks of the current state of the government, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
  - rovolo 4y ago
    > Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem This isn't a uniquely Dutch problem. The longest commute you mentioned: Utrecht -> Eindhoven: 1 hr 4 min (92.2 km) isn't unheard of in the US. These are the commutes for a cousin, and a friend's uncle: Colorado Springs, CO -> Denver, CO: 1 hr 19 min (113.5 km) New Britain, CT -> New York, NY: 2 hr 4 min (177.1 km) These are memorable though because they are so long. Many of the people I know have far shorter commutes. For example, my mom would drive 30 min (21km). But, these long commutes definitely exist. In 2019, 10% of US workers had a 1-way commute of over 1hr. (The average times for transit are quite high in the US, but 90% of commutes are by car so a large portion of that 10% are by car). https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2021/acs/acs-47.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... In 2003, 8% of 1-way commutes were over 56 km. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1006/ML100621425.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1006/ML100621425.pdf
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
s/sticks/Styx Fwiw, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx
- mrjh 4y ago
  “'In the sticks' is just a reference to an area where there are lots of twigs, that is, the countryside.” https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/in-the-sticks.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/in-the-sticks.html
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    I suspect that's just a historic instance of the same error playing out. But, I'll take that on advisement. It doesn't make sense as a description of where people live, but [English] language rarely makes sense. Thanks for your reply.
mdgrech23 4y ago
I agree but good effing luck.

by xyst 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Syonyk 4y ago

> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. If you're 20 miles outside a town, you almost certainly have electrical service, but are on a well and septic system. City water and sewer doesn't make sense at those sort of densities. You also probably have the land to easily put a nice ground mount PV array in, and grow a good bit of your own food, should you care to.

themitigating 4y ago
I don't think this is the case for suburbs, at least for water. Septic tanks are used I think
- Syonyk 4y ago
  Suburbs aren't generally described as the "sticks." That would be exurbs or lower. A typical suburban subdivision will have city water and sewage, though depending on the details, you might have a couple community wells and individual septic fields (or a link to city sewage).
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Suburbs are often on city utilities. And they pay for the infrastructure. You won't generally find septic systems on properties under about an acre. Not that it never happens, obviously, but a septic field has geographic requirements that means you won't often see it in a suburban neighborhood.
rascul 4y ago
It depends. We have a lot of small water coops around here and water lines ran nearly everywhere a road goes, even if the nearest city is 50 miles away.

mikeyouse 4y ago

Not to interrupt a good rant, but the program includes duplexes, townhomes, multifamily projects, and mixed use buildings with residential less than 6 stories. It's a sensible plan that was passed by sensible people who actually do have climate goals in mind. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/DOE%20ZERH%20V1%20Rev08%20-%2010-20-2022.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/DOE%20ZER...

danans 4y ago

> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. What if this was done this brownfield development in areas with existing infrastructure? New development doesn't need to be coupled with sprawl. There is a significant amount of multifamily development that looks exactly like that. The IRA also included large incentives for the retrofit of the existing housing stock.

xthrown1 4y ago
[flagged]
- Dig1t 4y ago
  What does this mean exactly? Like we should be forcing people to move into big cities? What about all the people that don't want to live that kind of lifestyle?
  - xthrown1 4y ago
    Let them pay the $20,000 in rates they will without subsidies from the inner core. The free market will sort it out in short order.
    - prottog 4y ago
      > without subsidies from the inner core Like how the residents of New York City are able to get the food and water it needs all produced within the five boroughs? Or is that a different kind of "subsidy" from the hinterlands.
      - xthrown1 4y ago
        A subsidy means you pay less for something than you would on the open market. Cities not only pay the market price for all those products the majority of their taxes go out to the hinterlands on top of that.

IncRnd 4y ago

> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. That's not generally how this works. There aren't necessarily highways and new paved roads going to rural properties. Electrical service isn't only downtown in cities but for miles outside of them or from solar, propane, or any one of the many other technologies. As everyone who has built a property outside of some service area knows, the homeowner is the one who pays to drop the lines or service to the properety. Water almost always comes from a well on the property, and sewage tanks are how the sewage are handled. Later, if Frank & Martha's property gets annexed into the city, they will pay taxes and will be just as entitled to city services as others. They already pay county, state and other taxes, which means they are entitled to whatever their taxes pay for. "In general, rural areas in the United States have higher homeownership rates than urban areas. Compared with urban areas, where the homeownership rate was 59.8 percent, rural areas had a homeownership rate of 81.1 percent." [1] [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/12/homes_on_the_range.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...

xputer 4y ago
[flagged]
- IncRnd 4y ago
  They certainly don't seem to be talking about suburban homes. > But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments).
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  Many of your points are valid for many suburbs but also not for many others. Talking generally like this is weird, I've lived in about 6 different suburbs my whole life and nothing you listed was true for any of them. I'm not a fan of suburbs but I'm tired of people holding up the worst possible examples and saying "SEE, SUBURBS SUCK!"

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes. If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too. It'd be nice if property taxes were slightly higher in suburban areas to make up for the higher costs - but it really wouldn't need to be that much higher. Houses usually cost more than condos - so you're paying more property tax already by having a more expensive home... Sure, there's exceptions like condos in Manhattan and near the beach and ski resorts, etc...

verall 4y ago
According to some quick googling, about 26% of roads are financed by gasoline tax, another 11% from tolls, and the rest from federal and state general funds: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/highway-and-road-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
askvictor 4y ago
> roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes. Do you have any sources for that? I'm in Australia, where fuel costs about twice what it does in the US. A decent portion of that is taxes/duties, but road spending is taken from consolidated revenue, and fuel taxes ultimately contribute a minority of the spending on roads. So unless the cost of fuel production is massively lower in the US, something doesn't add up.
- loeg 4y ago
  GP is likely talking about US federal gas taxes -> Highway Trust Fund -> Federal highway spending. Notably, though, the HTF spends more than it earns in gas tax revenue; the shortfall comes from the general fund. And also Federal highway spending does not cover all highway spending; the rest comes from the states[1][3]. Federal highway spending also does not cover local roads at all. [1]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/2021/57110-fig3_public-spending.png https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/... [2]: (Above image from https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57138 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57138 ) [3]: https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/ https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/

bitwize 4y ago

Indeed. Time to break out the omnitool Hackernews favors for solving very large scale problems: government regulation. Nationalize zoning laws, ban home ownership, and herd the population into bughive arcologies in major cities, where they'll be fed vegan or insect-protein-fortified food brought by Amazon delivery drones. If Hackernews believed in god, surely this would be their idea of heaven.

parthianshotgun 4y ago
What's your point?

throwaway894345 4y ago

People are going to build new homes outside of dense urban cores and suburbs either way; may as well build them 'green'. We need to be more flexible and realistic with our environmentalism--people just aren't going to give up meat, cars, or houses overnight so we need to allow progress where we can actually get it.

louwrentius 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

swatcoder 4y ago

It’s not precedented, wise, or even realistic to expect all of civilization to live in cities surrounded by unspoiled wilderness. Highly efficient low density housing has a place. So does high density housing. Everything you say about improving urban development practices is valid, but doesn’t mean that efforts to improve suburban/exurband/rural development are problematic. They’re all inextricably part of the future and they all have their own development needs.

kiba 4y ago
You can roughly double the volume of a single story building by adding a floor. Taken to extreme, we could make sure a square kilometer is at least two stories tall, but we don't do that. We live mostly a in 2.5d environment. The skyscrappers that we see in our skylines are not even the majority of what we see. A lot of place will benefit from being 3-4 stories tall. A lot of space that is developed is hugely wasted, devoted to storing cars, or roads to facilitate car movement. Meanwhile, a human being is very compact in comparison.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying, but those slightly denser and taller districts are historically called villages and they died, tragically, with the rise of national retail chains. Walmart and Kroger like having big operationally efficient stores that they can operate like all their other stores, and can’t scale their model well to oddball village locations. So they make or buy a big building with a giant parking lot and underprice all the local stores with their hyperoptimized business model until the village is dead. At that point, there’s nothing left to do in your dense housing district and everybody needs a car anyway, so you may as well have some breathing room and a garage. If people want suburban density, it won’t come from zoning changes (although that will help urban density) — it’ll come from somehow making village commerce more economical. But good luck getting that kind of effort past national-retail lobbyists! Ultimately, again, the fact is that urban development issues are different than the issues in other areas and the solutions don’t need to come at the expense of each other or in competition with each other.

taude 4y ago

We already have solutions in place being implemented in the next 10 - 15 years for electric cars and car-based carbon emissions. So carbon based commuting is going to get fixed. People in the U.S. won't be living in dystopian China-style 40 floor housing anytime soon, in ways that is sounds like you're hoping for with dense city living.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

I'm no expert in this field, but I think that changing zoning in current suburbs to mixed use would go a long way towards fixing them. The central wards of Tokyo are surrounded by such mixed use residential areas and it works extremely well, with most necessities being within walking distance or at worst biking distance. It wouldn't fix the suburbs' lack of density, but it'd still be a marked improvement. It'd theoretically lighten the burden suburbs place on cities too, since there'd be a lot more corner shops and the like paying taxes.

Fauntleroy 4y ago
If you can find a way to convince Americans they don't all need a yard that can easily fit 6 (japanese) houses, we'll be well on our way.
- johnweldon 4y ago
  Why do we need to convince someone they don't "need" anything? Each person has the best information about their own situation to decide what they need (or even want - you don't have to _need_ something to have to justify _wanting_ it)
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    Convince them not to want it
    - masfuerte 4y ago
      Stop convincing them to want it
      - johnweldon 4y ago
        My somewhat libertarian take is that they themselves are best suited to judge what they should or shouldn't want. Not that there isn't a time for trying to bring a different perspective. But we should do it with humility, rather than assuming they're just wrong or misguided. So... yes "stop convincing them" is a valid argument. "convince them not to" is slightly shakier moral ground.

johnweldon 4y ago

Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it. The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in higher density living, closer to urban centers, but instead they choose to suffer long commutes and expensive transportation in order to enjoy a different lifestyle. I think it's naive to suggest that "American housing" is a Ponzi scheme.

roywiggins 4y ago
Ponzi's are very attractive too, for a while. People get a lot out of Ponzis. "the revenue collected over time does not come near to covering the costs of meeting these long-term obligations. Development spread out over a broad area is very expensive to maintain. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability... Decades into this experiment, American cities have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates deferred maintenance at multiple trillions of dollars, but that's just for major infrastructure, not the local streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that directly serve our homes. Every mature city has a backlog of deferred maintenance, a growing list of promises with no discernible path to make good on them." https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020?format=amp https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
- johnweldon 4y ago
  I'm a fan of strongtowns too. To the degree that that analysis is true, it will sort itself out. We don't need to do anything to save our neighbor from themself. We can make a lifetime of difference solving our own problems.
- bluGill 4y ago
  You need to quit reading strongtowns and start thinking. Every city has deferred maintenance and unmeetable promises, most of it is maintenance that it is more cost effective to defer. We don't need perfectly smooth streets, so defer minor maintenance makes sense. Most unmeetable promisees are things they never intended to meet. Suburbs have existed for over 100 years. If there was a problem we would see it all over, not just in a few random ones.

nebulousthree 4y ago

It's a culture problem. Suburb dwellers, at best, are indifferent towards their neighbours.

taude 4y ago
As someone who lives in a city, I see it being no different for neighbors who share the same front door.
rootusrootus 4y ago
> Suburb dwellers, at best, are indifferent towards their neighbours. Huh? Where did you get this nugget of wisdom from? We have great relationships with almost all of the neighbors I can see from my porch. It's called community. I've lived in urban high rises and known fewer neighbors.

dylan604 4y ago

>(in some cases >20 miles away) what a privileged life style one must have. you realize that there are entire metro areas where you can drive in 20 miles in any direction and still be in urban environment, yeah? also, thinking 20 miles is just oh so far away is so outside of my world experience that I just don't easily understand your situation of think that it is so far away. clearly, you and I have grown up in totally different situations, and it is interesting to me that one can be so restricted in their movement and consider that normal just as you clearly think anyone traveling > 20 miles is just from Neptune or something. i'll chalk this up to a nature vs nurture kind of experience

kortilla 4y ago

> American housing is a Ponzi scheme This is shockingly dumb. Please lookup the definition of a Ponzi scheme. First, you do know that when you get a house you actually get the house, right? That’s the value residents extract from the house. Whether my parents could resell their house was only relevant when they needed to, big shocker, move to a different house in another area. Apart from leaving something for inheritance the re-sale value was irrelevant to the utility. That’s antithetical to a Ponzi scheme. Second, anyone can build more housing and there is tons of land to keep building in 90% of the country. That doesn’t work in a Ponzi scheme if the real value that sets the price is margin that can be captured by builders.

kerpotgh 4y ago

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pmontra 4y ago

> We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design There are many small towns in Europe surrounded by networks of even smaller towns and one or two house farms. There is nothing to claim back there: they've been like that since well before any European moved to the Americas. That was a way to be close to fields, when economy was mostly farmers and herders and people mostly walked or at best moved in animal powered carts. Some people move from there to big cities now, some people move from big cities to there. Everybody has a car, it can't be helped. I think that people in big cities will end up with public transport and few cars, but people in small towns and in the fields or in the hills or mountains will keep having a car, maybe just use it less if it costs too much.

yurishimo 4y ago
I live in one of these small European towns. It is honestly mind boggling how far some people drive to go to work here. I'm in The Netherlands around Eindhoven. We have colleagues in Den Bosch, Utrecht and Maastricht driving to work every week. Eindhoven is full of commuters. Some people take the train, but that isn't always convenient, especially with strikes! Your boss doesn't care that you were 3 hours late due to a bus skipping out on work. Your paycheck cares a lot though. Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem owing to the size of the country, but I don't see how they can reduce car usage without significantly more investment in public transportation. By the looks of the current state of the government, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
- rovolo 4y ago
  > Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem This isn't a uniquely Dutch problem. The longest commute you mentioned: Utrecht -> Eindhoven: 1 hr 4 min (92.2 km) isn't unheard of in the US. These are the commutes for a cousin, and a friend's uncle: Colorado Springs, CO -> Denver, CO: 1 hr 19 min (113.5 km) New Britain, CT -> New York, NY: 2 hr 4 min (177.1 km) These are memorable though because they are so long. Many of the people I know have far shorter commutes. For example, my mom would drive 30 min (21km). But, these long commutes definitely exist. In 2019, 10% of US workers had a 1-way commute of over 1hr. (The average times for transit are quite high in the US, but 90% of commutes are by car so a large portion of that 10% are by car). https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2021/acs/acs-47.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... In 2003, 8% of 1-way commutes were over 56 km. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1006/ML100621425.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1006/ML100621425.pdf

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

s/sticks/Styx Fwiw, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx

mrjh 4y ago
“'In the sticks' is just a reference to an area where there are lots of twigs, that is, the countryside.” https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/in-the-sticks.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/in-the-sticks.html
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  I suspect that's just a historic instance of the same error playing out. But, I'll take that on advisement. It doesn't make sense as a description of where people live, but [English] language rarely makes sense. Thanks for your reply.

mdgrech23 4y ago

I agree but good effing luck.