5 ms·

An initial cost of 16 million, and yearly maintenance of 600,000, for a city of 2.5 million? Per person, $5 initially and $0.25 per year. That seems incredibly

An initial cost of 16 million, and yearly maintenance of 600,000, for a city of 2.5 million? Per person, $5 initially and $0.25 per year. That seems incredibly cheap for the benefits. Colombia looks to have a GDP per capita about 1/10th of the US, so if we scale it up 10X... I live in a relatively cold climate, and I would still be delighted to pay $2.50 a year for this kind of infrastructure development. Heck, even scaling it up 100X seems like it would be worth considering. Maybe there's a cost I'm missing here, but for a hot city, the AC savings alone seem like they would be worth it, not to mention the 40% reduction in respiratory infections through increased air quality.

gottorf 3y ago
> Colombia looks to have a GDP per capita about 1/10th of the US, so if we scale it up 10X... Ah, yes, but costs for public projects like this in the US is far greater than 10x Colombia's.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Yes, amazingly paying someone $2/hour won't fly in a major US city.
  - throwup238 3y ago
    It will if they’re convicts on a chain gang.
    - roughly 3y ago
      Acknowledging the general ickyness of prison labor, I'd be curious what the overall effect on wellbeing and recidivism among prisoners would be of spending time working outside planting trees to make the local community a better, more beautiful place.
      - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
        Probably better than making garments for McDonald’s and Walmart, but yeah we should abolish prison labor (and prisons). Here’s a report on the state of human rights abuses in prison labor in the United States: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-violate-fundamental-human-rights-new-report-finds https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-vio...
      - joecool1029 3y ago
        It was pointed out to me awhile back that the 'slave states' that utilize this kind of labor need all sorts of low-level nonviolent crimes to lock people up with. Why, you may ask? It turns out giving violent offenders (murderers, wife beaters, gang bangers) tools like shovels in an open environment can be pretty dangerous. Guards would rather have some pothead teenager to order around.
        Terr_ 3y ago
        > It was pointed out to me awhile back that the 'slave states' that utilize this kind of labor need all sorts of low-level nonviolent crimes to lock people up with. Arguably a continuation of their post-civil-war Black Codes [0], where--if you had a certain skin color--it was effectively a crime to ever leave/lose your abusive "employment", then that crime led to fines, then the fines led to more fines from compounding court costs, and once you were in prison, you were forced to labor for private interests. Perhaps even the same "employer" you tried to leave. [0] https://www.history.com/news/black-codes-reconstruction-slavery https://www.history.com/news/black-codes-reconstruction-slav...
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    Are you saying that the people building those parks in Colombia were only paid $0.2 per hour?
    - marcinzm 3y ago
      > The groundwork is carried out by 150 citizen-gardeners Probably lower on average given a lot of them got paid $0 it seems.
- roughly 3y ago
  I'd happily pay $25/year. $2/mo to live in a city with that kind of greenery and QOL improvement? Absolutely sign me the fuck up.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Highly recommend Medellín if you can swing the remote expat life.
    - onemoresoop 3y ago
      How is the COL compared to the local salaries? And how is the job market there?
      - m_dupont 3y ago
        I live here as a nomad. Job market is pretty bad. Haven't seen any official statistics but I've heard many locals anecdotally say that the pay even for people with econ / engineering degrees is pretty bad. Lots of young people with advanced degrees just end up working in call centres, or onlyfans.
    - baristaGeek 3y ago
      Unless you’re in tech or a few other sectors (eg: long tail exports such the company that manufactures transistors for Tesla, which is near here) the local job market is very bad. Particularly with new prices, in the wealthy areas it’s comparable to a city like Lisbon now. If you have a remote job however, it’s a no brainer. For example, renting a 3 bedroom in a wealthy area (through the local route, not Airbnb) within a gated community that has a pool, a gym, etc = $1,000. A private maid/chef once per week = $80. Normal Uber ride = $4-$6. Meal for 2 in a very fancy restaurant = $50 - $75. Makes SF prices feel insane.
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Agree with everything in your comment.
      - 3y ago
darth_avocado 3y ago
You have to keep PPP in mind when you look at numbers like this. In San Francisco, for example, the park and recs dept gets the budget in the tune of hundreds of millions. Does it mean they are wasting the money? Absolutely not. Land acquisition, construction, hourly wages (with minimum wage at $36000/year excluding benefits) etc. are all very expensive in absolute dollars in some parts of the world, while in others, it is very cheap. You simply cannot compare the two.
- mc32 3y ago
  A counterpoint is their $1.7M toilet. But yeah at 10x that’d be taking away from significant programs never mind 100x.
thriftwy 3y ago
In a cold climate, these wide boulevards lose their leaves in the autumn and the turn into enormous ducts for cold wind to traverse freely. You freeze just while crossing it. In cold climate, you definitely do not want tall buildings with space between them, or straight roads. Unfortunately that's what gets built.
- itishappy 3y ago
  Fascinating! Got any examples of particularly good or bad cold-climate cities?
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    Particularly good: Central St. Petersburg, especially Petrograd island[1] and other districts with smaller streets such as Peski/Kolomna. Smaller streets, slightly broken grid and uniform height 5-storey buildings lead to never experiencing serious wind. It has a different pest that is ice on the sidewalks, though. Vasilievsky island is slightly worse as there's wider streets and more regular grid. Particularly bad: The same St. Petersburg but now Brezhnevist and contemporary built up districts such as Murino[2] or Veteranov[3] (but any of these, actually). Even the pompious Stalinist Moscow avenue[4] would be quite uncomfortable in chilly wind and -15C. Wide streets mean faster winds and more walking. St. Petersburg is very transit oriented so most people do walk. The newly build Vostochnyi Cosmodrome Tsiolkovsky town[5] seems super chilly as it is the same pattern of high-rises separated by a long nothing. And it's located way north. You would need a space suit just to get groceries. 1. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZUm4 https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZUm4 2. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZU-0 https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZU-0 3. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZY7J https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZY7J 4. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZY2B https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZY2B 5. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZR0D https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZR0D
stickfigure 3y ago
Colombia is equatorial. It rains a lot; the green spaces probably don't need irrigation. It might not be so easy or cheap to pull this off in places like Los Angeles, Los Vegas, or Phoenix.
- danlugo92 3y ago
  > the green spaces probably don't need irrigation Truly they don't, but even inside Medellin the precipitation rates are not as great as the lands around... ...because of the deforestation that /already/ happened, say, 50 years ago... Ain't no commercial high rise neighborhood (semi-common in Medellin) that can "pull in" as much precipitation as a virgin forest no way, and you can see this if you visit there and then you visit an actual virgin rain-forest... ...but of course, this is what they are trying to alleviate and if the outskirts of the city are super-green it can help... Btw all of the outskirts aren't super green but a lot of them are...
- apercu 3y ago
  Those places (all places) should be primarily using local flora.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Yep exactly. I decided to look up the local flora for Los Angeles and found this nice article. It notes that Los Angeles has a Mediterranean style climate, and there certainly are plenty of local flora options to choose from: https://la.curbed.com/2018/8/23/17720768/los-angeles-plants-trees-glossary-guide-jasmine-palm https://la.curbed.com/2018/8/23/17720768/los-angeles-plants-...
    - apercu 3y ago
      I'm in year two of turning the front yard (half-acre) in to prairie. I'm _mostly_ using local flora but the climate is changing so there are more options. More challenging is that I had started with drought resistant indigenous stuff but the predictions are that anticipating the coming years weather is "unpossible" and that even the local stuff is going to fail half the time.

gottorf 3y ago

> Colombia looks to have a GDP per capita about 1/10th of the US, so if we scale it up 10X... Ah, yes, but costs for public projects like this in the US is far greater than 10x Colombia's.

marcinzm 3y ago
Yes, amazingly paying someone $2/hour won't fly in a major US city.
- throwup238 3y ago
  It will if they’re convicts on a chain gang.
  - roughly 3y ago
    Acknowledging the general ickyness of prison labor, I'd be curious what the overall effect on wellbeing and recidivism among prisoners would be of spending time working outside planting trees to make the local community a better, more beautiful place.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      Probably better than making garments for McDonald’s and Walmart, but yeah we should abolish prison labor (and prisons). Here’s a report on the state of human rights abuses in prison labor in the United States: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-violate-fundamental-human-rights-new-report-finds https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-vio...
    - joecool1029 3y ago
      It was pointed out to me awhile back that the 'slave states' that utilize this kind of labor need all sorts of low-level nonviolent crimes to lock people up with. Why, you may ask? It turns out giving violent offenders (murderers, wife beaters, gang bangers) tools like shovels in an open environment can be pretty dangerous. Guards would rather have some pothead teenager to order around.
      - Terr_ 3y ago
        > It was pointed out to me awhile back that the 'slave states' that utilize this kind of labor need all sorts of low-level nonviolent crimes to lock people up with. Arguably a continuation of their post-civil-war Black Codes [0], where--if you had a certain skin color--it was effectively a crime to ever leave/lose your abusive "employment", then that crime led to fines, then the fines led to more fines from compounding court costs, and once you were in prison, you were forced to labor for private interests. Perhaps even the same "employer" you tried to leave. [0] https://www.history.com/news/black-codes-reconstruction-slavery https://www.history.com/news/black-codes-reconstruction-slav...
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  Are you saying that the people building those parks in Colombia were only paid $0.2 per hour?
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    > The groundwork is carried out by 150 citizen-gardeners Probably lower on average given a lot of them got paid $0 it seems.
roughly 3y ago
I'd happily pay $25/year. $2/mo to live in a city with that kind of greenery and QOL improvement? Absolutely sign me the fuck up.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Highly recommend Medellín if you can swing the remote expat life.
  - onemoresoop 3y ago
    How is the COL compared to the local salaries? And how is the job market there?
    - m_dupont 3y ago
      I live here as a nomad. Job market is pretty bad. Haven't seen any official statistics but I've heard many locals anecdotally say that the pay even for people with econ / engineering degrees is pretty bad. Lots of young people with advanced degrees just end up working in call centres, or onlyfans.
  - baristaGeek 3y ago
    Unless you’re in tech or a few other sectors (eg: long tail exports such the company that manufactures transistors for Tesla, which is near here) the local job market is very bad. Particularly with new prices, in the wealthy areas it’s comparable to a city like Lisbon now. If you have a remote job however, it’s a no brainer. For example, renting a 3 bedroom in a wealthy area (through the local route, not Airbnb) within a gated community that has a pool, a gym, etc = $1,000. A private maid/chef once per week = $80. Normal Uber ride = $4-$6. Meal for 2 in a very fancy restaurant = $50 - $75. Makes SF prices feel insane.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Agree with everything in your comment.
    - 3y ago

darth_avocado 3y ago

You have to keep PPP in mind when you look at numbers like this. In San Francisco, for example, the park and recs dept gets the budget in the tune of hundreds of millions. Does it mean they are wasting the money? Absolutely not. Land acquisition, construction, hourly wages (with minimum wage at $36000/year excluding benefits) etc. are all very expensive in absolute dollars in some parts of the world, while in others, it is very cheap. You simply cannot compare the two.

mc32 3y ago
A counterpoint is their $1.7M toilet. But yeah at 10x that’d be taking away from significant programs never mind 100x.

thriftwy 3y ago

In a cold climate, these wide boulevards lose their leaves in the autumn and the turn into enormous ducts for cold wind to traverse freely. You freeze just while crossing it. In cold climate, you definitely do not want tall buildings with space between them, or straight roads. Unfortunately that's what gets built.

itishappy 3y ago
Fascinating! Got any examples of particularly good or bad cold-climate cities?
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Particularly good: Central St. Petersburg, especially Petrograd island[1] and other districts with smaller streets such as Peski/Kolomna. Smaller streets, slightly broken grid and uniform height 5-storey buildings lead to never experiencing serious wind. It has a different pest that is ice on the sidewalks, though. Vasilievsky island is slightly worse as there's wider streets and more regular grid. Particularly bad: The same St. Petersburg but now Brezhnevist and contemporary built up districts such as Murino[2] or Veteranov[3] (but any of these, actually). Even the pompious Stalinist Moscow avenue[4] would be quite uncomfortable in chilly wind and -15C. Wide streets mean faster winds and more walking. St. Petersburg is very transit oriented so most people do walk. The newly build Vostochnyi Cosmodrome Tsiolkovsky town[5] seems super chilly as it is the same pattern of high-rises separated by a long nothing. And it's located way north. You would need a space suit just to get groceries. 1. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZUm4 https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZUm4 2. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZU-0 https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZU-0 3. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZY7J https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZY7J 4. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZY2B https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZY2B 5. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZR0D https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CDFjZR0D

stickfigure 3y ago

Colombia is equatorial. It rains a lot; the green spaces probably don't need irrigation. It might not be so easy or cheap to pull this off in places like Los Angeles, Los Vegas, or Phoenix.

danlugo92 3y ago
> the green spaces probably don't need irrigation Truly they don't, but even inside Medellin the precipitation rates are not as great as the lands around... ...because of the deforestation that /already/ happened, say, 50 years ago... Ain't no commercial high rise neighborhood (semi-common in Medellin) that can "pull in" as much precipitation as a virgin forest no way, and you can see this if you visit there and then you visit an actual virgin rain-forest... ...but of course, this is what they are trying to alleviate and if the outskirts of the city are super-green it can help... Btw all of the outskirts aren't super green but a lot of them are...
apercu 3y ago
Those places (all places) should be primarily using local flora.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Yep exactly. I decided to look up the local flora for Los Angeles and found this nice article. It notes that Los Angeles has a Mediterranean style climate, and there certainly are plenty of local flora options to choose from: https://la.curbed.com/2018/8/23/17720768/los-angeles-plants-trees-glossary-guide-jasmine-palm https://la.curbed.com/2018/8/23/17720768/los-angeles-plants-...
  - apercu 3y ago
    I'm in year two of turning the front yard (half-acre) in to prairie. I'm _mostly_ using local flora but the climate is changing so there are more options. More challenging is that I had started with drought resistant indigenous stuff but the predictions are that anticipating the coming years weather is "unpossible" and that even the local stuff is going to fail half the time.