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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,
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.
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.
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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