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Comment by AcerbicZero | Hacker News Reader

They need 180 million dollars to move 600 people ~5 miles? That seems a bit ridiculous.

It's not like you're moving into another apartment 5 miles down the road. They're going to be building an entirely new city (with infrastructure).

Everything in Alaska is expensive. It all comes from far away into a very spread out area with difficult terrain and weather conditions. Many places can be reached only by air (quick but expensive) or, in some reasons, barge or ice bridge. In the bigger cities (Anchorage, Fairbanks), things are pricey, but the smaller villages are eye-wateringly expensive. My brother and I paid $4.50 for a single warm can of Shasta Root Beer in a small village in Southwest Alaska. We saw a bag of Toastitos going for ~$15.

At these prices, even the boxes and packing tape are going to hurt a bit.

there's no reason for anybody in alaska to be selling warm soda!

For reference, that's $300,000/person. Alaska's annual state budget is $13.8 billion [0]. $180 million / $13.8 billion = ~0.94% of the annual budget spent on 600 people out of the ~740,000 who live in Alaska [1]. (I'm aware that Alaska is not footing the entire bill.). I'd be interested in how the town came up with that $180 million figure.

[0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_state_budget_and_finances [1]: https://www.google.com/?q=alaska%20population

So if it costs 1% of the budget to move .1% of the population in 1 year, it would cost 10% of the budget to move 10% of the population in 10 years. Clearly a major expenditure but totally doable.

I suspect "building a whole new town" is a large part of that cost.

Not to mention that that's only $300k per person. If you're building shelter for even half of the population that's going to account for a majority of the $180 million.

Right, remember that houses in this neck of the woods are typically prefab houses that are shipped to Alaska, then shipped to the middle of nowhere, then assembled.

It gets expensive really quickly.

There are no hardware stores with building materials already there, and no trees to make a cabin with. A locally sourced house would probably be a permafrost dirt hut, which would melt as global warming continues or maybe a discarded shipping container. They must bring in prefabs, just full stop.

Look at the pictures, they aren't living high on the hog, but I guarantee the buildings you see in the picture are comparable in price to the 300k/person.

If that is the case, moving the houses should be no problem (Maybe not no problem, but easier than getting brand new ones!)

Hard to say. It's entirely possible that there is no heavy equipment suitable for house moving and this is all just for cranes, dozers and telephone poles to roll houses on, not to mention barges and tugs. The ground is pretty soft, so moving big loads may be problematic, and they probably don't have a dock with a lot of house loading provisions, so maybe all that would need fixed to move houses.

Could also be that existing housing is too fragile to move, conditions are mighty rough out west.

But, it could also be a tiny bit of pork helping out some disadvantaged people in the boonies. Maybe a combination of all of them

I guess my main point is that things are surprisingly tricky in the arctic, far away from developed places

For only 600 people, they should probably just move them to an existing town.

Which is why they are fighting for this. The city has unique culture (dances, language) that would be hard to preserve in an existing city with majority outsiders.

Ridiculous? In a place where many towns are only accessible by seaplanes? Hardly.

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