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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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I have been watching a lot about housing lately. The lack of affordability and so on. I won't bother you with details, since they are known to everyone. Almost every capital city in the developed world (and big parts of developing) is struggling with unaffordable rent, insane house price rises etc.

The process is usually something like this. Rural people move to cities, city people move to capital cities and capital cities people move to global cities. And global cities people try to live as close as possible to the city center. All the eastern europeans that I know that moved to UK didn't move to bumfuck nowhere in the Midlands. They moved to London. Ditto for a lot of other immigrants into the UK. So there is real demand to live in London. The process of concentration of people in the big metro areas doesn't seem to slow down or reverse (white flight is the only counter example).

So there is the minor problem that I have with YIMBY people - why do you think that building more will actually solve the problem with unaffordable housing? We have been adding lanes to highways since time immemorial (aka the 50s) and the congestion is still here.

But what I have been thinking is - are freedom of movement and affordable housing compatible at all? The communist regimes had something like city citizenship - you were allowed to move to the capital only with marriage/secured job in the city. Not saying it was good, but it kept the capitals a bit emptier. In the 30 years since the Berlin wall fell in my eastern european country the only people that didn't try to move to the capital are the ones that moved to London, Paris and the big German cities to make their housing situation worse.

Now people are sometimes just priced out and they move. And if the city becomes terrible people will also move. But so far it seems that if the city is safe enough, people are willing to tolerate insane economic hardships to live there. We can't cram 8 billion people in 20-30 megapolises. Could this be solved with policies alone? Should we even solve it? Is it ok to infringe on the right to move to actually strike a balance.

I don’t think any of this applies to America. We have in America one city that has any density. Chicago literally has entirely abandoned neighborhoods close to the city core that aren’t developed because too many people shoot each other. This is the standard in America.

We might need some density enabling technologies to get things going - basically get cars off roads but America has a long way to add density.

And as below we could add ghost cities. Why can’t we make a giant metropolis in Oklahoma? And build it to 30 million people.

I’m against mass immigration for HBD reasons but there’s no reason why America can’t grow out cities and cut home prices. Maybe if we had a billion people we would need to think harder about it,

Why can’t we make a giant metropolis in Oklahoma? And build it to 30 million people.

Or better - why can't we make a giant metropolis in Silicon Valley? The current population density of the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area) is 1.1k/sq mi and it has 7.7M people. The density of Brooklyn is 38k/sq mi and San Francisco is 18k/sq mi.

If we increased the density of Silicon Valley to that of Brooklyn, we could fit 266M people there. We could fit 21M people alone in Santa Clara (San Jose plus a couple of suburbs) if we increased the density to San Francisco or Cambridge levels.

If you want to do it on unoccupied land, there is literally unoccupied land the size of San Jose directly adjacent to San Jose.

We could.

Though admittedly I always thought it would be better to have your concrete jungle built in the Great Plains and reserve your coastal areas for vacations. I think a lot of things like water, infrastructure etc would be easier built in those areas. If we had a big improvement in air travel somewhere like Oklahoma could be 2 hours away from Miami or San Fran for leisure. But that’s far higher level planning. The big thing with cities is a few settled there because they were nice habitats then a lot more came because there were a lot of people there.

Doesn't that me that many people would want to live in a Santa Clara even with Stanford and Silicon Valley relocated to a new location, purely for the weather?

The costs of moving freight and supplies like water become pretty important. Beijing has been piping in water from pretty far away (800+mi, 1400+km) and has committed to one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world to sustain the city. A very rough approximation for freight has planes costing ten times as much as trucks costing twice as much as rail costing three times as much as barge. When multiplied across everything a city needs, that ends up costing a lot raising costs of living in a big way. There's a reason most major cities that arose from non-political pressures are on ports. Political capitals might be placed elsewhere for military or historic (read whims/personal history of rulers) reasons but extracting resources from the provinces to feed and fuel the capital has been known to cause trouble when resources become scarce.

Most things that are shipped by water are first shipped by land to port then port to city. So a megapolis somewhere in a milder climate in the Great Plains would just be surrounded by a giant plain that could direct ship all the foodstuff by rail. Rail being more expensive than sea wouldn’t be an issue for a lot of goods because the things coming by port first need shipped to a major port then by sea.

When I’ve traveled around anecdotally I felt like Texas had the cheapest grocery prices.

Energy would be the key bottleneck for people living in a central megapolis and traveling to coast for play. Cheaper nuclear or geothermal would make that a lot more feasible.

If you stick it along the Mississippi you can probably keep quite a bit of cheap water transport.

Not with the Jones Act, you can't.

anecdotally I felt like Texas had the cheapest grocery prices

This could be due to taxes, low overhead(labor and rent, mostly) or more intense price competition. I seriously doubt that Texas has notably more rail shipment than other states.

because the things coming by port first need shipped to a major port

Major manufacturing in China is in port cities around Shanghai, Zhejiang and Guangdong for the most part, particularly for things shipped abroad. If you wanted to you could build up some place like Omaha but aside from odd balls like Denver or Cheyenne, most of the big existent Great Plains cities are on tributaries to the Missouri for a reason. (Even those two are on forks of the Platte but not really navigable.)

I don’t think it makes sense to argue cities which depend on network effects have to be on rivers today because when they were founded 200 years ago were on rivers.

A lot of newer cities are not on rivers - Phoenix, Las Vegas etc. We don’t run on 18th century tech anymore.

And yea Chinese stuff would be harder to ship there. But things like most food would be easier to ship.

Container ships are not 18th century tech. Standardized containerization (the physical one, not the VM replacement tech) is one of the major logistic technologies of 20th century that makes possible much of modern consumer life. (I would note that even simple logistic technology like standardized palletization is not universal, see: RU army logistics and why supplying positions away from rail lines is such a struggle for them.) It's not a tech level thing anyways so much as a cost of inputs thing. There needs to be a very good reason to be paying twice or more the cost of an input. Maybe an inland location has benefits that outweighs the additional cost but it has to actually be factored in especially when talking the volumes of inputs for a proposed megapolis.

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A lot of newer cities are not on rivers - Phoenix, Las Vegas etc.

Point of order as a Phoenecian: we may not have rivers in our city limits, but we sure do have canals.

I was looking at Omaha and a few others towards the end of the line, and realized it'd take an enormous amount of dredging to get the river straight and deep enough. From the numbers I found it sounds like rail has gotten competitive with all but deep draft high volume barges.

Most of them don't do a lot of river traffic anymore. Heck even Houston used to get steamboats up the Trinity route back around the civil war and that was before the sandbars at the mouth were cleared. Rail from an actual port is reasonably priced at this point but if the volume were to treble or increase by larger factors it becomes a bigger issue.

I think you could get away without barge shipping for a non-industrial city, given that it seems to be used mostly for coal, ore, and other bulk stuff these days, but water supply would be a huge limiting factor.

Barges get pretty specific to the waterways they operate on but container barges can do a lot to service a city inland of a major port. Grain is also one of the bigger uses for barges.

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