> Pretty sure almost anything else is more profitable on a sqft basis - retail, housing, dining, entertainment, etc. Yes, I fully agree. From my comment: "some

> Pretty sure almost anything else is more profitable on a sqft basis - retail, housing, dining, entertainment, etc. Yes, I fully agree. From my comment: "something like this make sense if [...] got the land and materials for free" > Urban utility rates also tend to be much higher than a bit further ou If you could centrally plan this kind of project and had complete freedom to do anything you wanted you could: 1. Use light tubes to funnel sunlight into the building for the plants. You could also pretty cheaply collect more light than the sqft-age of the roof by putting reflectors on multiple roofs to reflect light towards a central point on your farm building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Pr.... 2. You can make the entire building a greenhouse. NYC loves steel, glass, and concrete so you could probably make the entire envelope of the structure glass. Many buildings already do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdy-bOTYlDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdy-bOTYlDs. This would let even more light in. 3. You could use this building as part of your waste treatment process. Human waste has a lot of nutrients needed for plant growth (nitrogen, phosphorus, etc). Rather than ship fertilizer, mined and processed across the globe, we could just extract most plant nutrients from waste. We're (the USA) currently not entirely managing this side responsibly: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/treated-sewage-algae-blooms-southern-california-coast https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/treated-sewage-algae-bloo... 4. We could use far less water which, in climates which do most of our growing, would be pretty important. Since the building would essentially be a greenhouse you would retain a lot more moisture. There are a lot of synergies where if we had control over the growing environment we could improve things. For example: we could collect light in light tubes, use crystals to split out only the light segments which the plants need, and use the remaining light segments for solar energy (panels, desalination, dehydration of products, etc). There are endless mini optimizations that we can't do right now. Obviously, though, this is entirely hypothetical because the construction costs are not currently yet outweighed by the existing farming industry production pipeline. Once more externalities are accounted for that may change things (ex: we lose the ability to mine fertalizer due to war or supply). Then moving food production closer to consumers might make sense.