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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

Everyone in dense areas is the only sustainable settlement pattern. The energy alone needed to maintain existing levels of sprawl cannot go on much longer.

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I hear this a lot. But the fact remains that it is significantly more expensive to live in a dense urban area. Until the claimed efficiency improvement can be translated to an actual day-to-day cost improvement, people will continue to live where their dollars go farther.

I think there are different concepts of "cost" and "expensive" at play in this discussion which can lead to this kind of misunderstanding.

Having the population located in dense urban areas is more efficient and therefore cheaper in terms of the real resources that are required: infrastructure is cheaper to build, distances are smaller so that less time is wasted commuting and transport is cheaper (not to mention that highly efficient public transport becomes viable).

So in real resource terms, urban sprawl is more expensive.

But since land is still a limitation and zero-sum, competition can drive up housing costs in attractive dense urban areas to the point where it more than cancels out the efficiency gains of the urban density, and the cost of living in the urban area to the individual becomes higher than the sprawl.

This is why some sort of collective planning is required to make sure that as much as possible of the efficiency gains of urbanization are actually realized. This means having proper infrastructure mostly in terms of public transport.

(Of course, the other part of it is that you need to be careful not to look at just housing costs in the first place. For example, I don't even have to pay for a car, and I benefit from city infrastructure in many other ways.)

The land that can be used as "dense urban area" is strictly upper-bounded by zoning, precisely because it is so economically efficient: a few suburban homeowners cannot hope to compete financially with the ~400 potential high-rise condo owners vying to live on the same block, so instead they fight (and generally win) in the public-policy arena.

For the efficiency factor to overcome the desirability factor, we would have to actually issue the building permits to allow thriving urban areas to overtake some of their surrounding lower-density neighborhoods.

We've decided as a society that this is unacceptable, so urban areas will probably maintain their premium indefinitely. In a sense you're right. But only for self-inflicted public policy reasons.

> Until the claimed efficiency improvement can be translated to an actual day-to-day cost improvement

I don’t own a car, offload a bunch of concerns into City infrastructure, walk to a corner grocery store, and go from idea to meetings inside a single day, thereby letting me dance circles around competitors who have to schedule a call or flight out.

Cities don’t make sense for everyone. But they do for a lot of people. They make so much sense for enough people, that those people will pay a premium to have everything else nearby.

Energy is poised to get cheaper. Consumption will go up and mostly come from sustainable sources.

Mass transit eliminates the energy problem. Two far away cities connected to each other via high-speed rail might as well be next-door-neighbors.

Sure, between two cities. Not so useful for rural-to-city commuting.

I think we can all agree that if the costs of high-speed transit were low enough to support hubs in every city city with spokes going to all nearby suburbs, all sorts of problems would be solved.

Suburbs are unlikely to support everyone walking to the train station unless they were explicitly designed for it. You’d need immense parking lots/garages at the suburban stations (which most transit advocates oppose and are trying to remove), blanket coverage with local bus service (expensive and structurally difficult in a suburb), or to remake the local streets around bicycling. Plopping down a station without a last-few-miles solution doesn’t get you much.

Suburbs (and small towns) can implement local bus circulators for last-mile solutions to connect with central stations.

Local bus service can be helpful for the disabled or in extreme weather conditions, but rarely beats a brisk walk. They usually average under 10mph while in motion; then add 10+ minutes of 0mph waiting.

A 40 minute walk and a 40 minute train ride are both reasonable commutes, but added together are nightmarish. I’ve tried.

This is so wildly off base it is not even funny. The most sustainable forms of life is decentralized subsistence hunting and gathering or small scale farming. When civilization collapses, which it does and will, that is the only form of human life that survives. Cities rise up through political power and exploitation of the rural areas around them but they are a graveyard. Just a matter of time.

>The most sustainable forms of life is decentralized subsistence hunting and gathering or small scale farming

i.e. staying within the radius you can traverse on foot. Our oldest villages may be small, but they are unthinkably dense compared to midcentury American suburbia.

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