They don't even have to be in the state, right? Because the core concept was that a remote-working code-slinger could live anywhere.
Another neat point about Rugby: it's apparently got gigabit ethernet service through North Dakota Telephone Co, although you'll pay $220/mo for that service.
It's incredibly easy to move there. My hometown of ~1,400 has something like a couple dozen vacant properties right now which you could probably buy for $150k or less because all the townies are moving out to the lake. But once you're there, there aren't a lot of good paying local jobs, there is very little to no culture, very few amenities. Not much to do unless you're into hunting and motorcycles. There's a reason it's sparsely populated.
Until we can smoothly emulate meatspace with VR, I don't think you can replace face-to-face interaction. If you can't do that, then people will still want to be close to jobs and similar businesses, so they'll continue to urbanize in a natural distribution.
And even if you had your new VR tech with enough bandwidth to run it nicely, you'd still need to be able to provide it to your offworld coloni--I mean rural exclaves.
Economic clusters aren't just valuable for people being in the same office. They produce value because people and ideas meet in bars and restaurants and coffee shops and backyards. All of this is stuff you'd need to replace to "disaggregate the knowledge economy".
This is not something you can accomplish with GitHub and teleconferencing.
We're getting to the point where maybe the work part works. College may be able to be fully remote fairly soon (Western Governors University is there already, but only has select majors). Specialized doctors, though... that might be a bit harder.
I mean, yes, you can do "face to face" via Skype. You can't do blood tests that way, though...
People don’t expect just electricity and plumbing, they also expect modern construction techniques, roads, police, fire suppression, emergency response, schools, full-service hospitals, telecommunications, airports, parcel delivery, ....
A big reason that rural / exurban living is cheap in the USA is that we massively subsidize services for people living very spread out.
I think you massively overestimate the rural "subsidies". Make it easy to move rural and "go green" with minimal regulations, and you may find the problems nearly solve themselves.
Western Washington state subsidizes Eastern Washington state greatly, and that isn’t even as sparse as South Dakota (or as I like to call it, Tropical Dakota).
There will soon be 11 billion people in the world.
This is a pipe dream, but if it came to fruition it would wreck the planet very quickly.
World arable land is ~26.2 million square miles, or about 2.2 acres per person. At 11 billion people (projection world population peak by ~2100, you get about 1.5 acres of arable land per person. There is literally, physically not enough space on Earth to put your plane into action.
I like nature, but I think you underestimate the subsidies given for rural development and infrastructure and just how unsustainable our development style in the US is.
I agree that gathering people into larger population centers is way more efficient for us and the planet, but I don't think anyone's arguing for us all to spread out on 10 acre farmsteads.
The middle ground is just to build more decently-sized cities in all of the vast available land. Why fight for overpriced artificially scarce land in San Francisco when there are 20 other SF-equivalent cities a state or two away (existing ones, or ones that could be hypothetically built). "Location, location, location" has got to stop being the reason people choose a city.
As a side bonus: by moving a bunch of coastal persons back into the flyover country, you're re-exporting newer cultural norms into those backwaters, perhaps enough to cause meaningful cultural and political reform in places that sorely need it!
Why? I want to live where I get to do the things I enjoy. I would say most people I know prefer temperate, low humidity weather, access to fresh fruits and vegetables, beaches, mountains, lakes, good water quality and security, etc. The places that have these features will cost the most, since more people will be bidding up the price.
Running water? Gotta run the pipes further. Road access? Gotta pave (and maintain) more road Power? Same thing
Plus having decent response times for emergency services, quick commute to things like groceries as you mentioned.
Not to mention having critical mass for a commercial district with any sort of variety within reasonable distances of each other to compete and cross-pollinate.
I'm pretty young.
Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius.
The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it.
We can't go on like this.
What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point?
> The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces
I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something.
Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.
This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here.
Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead?
I mean, seriously.
The solution right now is to build medium density housing and disincentive individuals from driving their cars alone to work.
That's my main point, not what the solution looks like.
Tall buildings are inherently communal.
Terraforming is an idea so absurd I'm not sure where to start - the dream of a 16 year old science fiction reader.
We have a solution for housing. It's called houses. This breaks down when you get millions of people and stuff them in the same small coastal region. A good start would be to, well, just not do that.
My home town of 200,000 can be cycled across in 20 minutes. It has very few apartments and is primarily made up of terraced or semi detached housing.
Sure and that's _your_ view of the matter (where I'm reading "communal" as "undesirable" here). Hundreds of thousands of people continue to view high-rise apartments as desirable places to live, as evidenced by housing demand in Manhattan, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and other world cities. The Bay Area has created bureaucratic and legal roadblocks from allowing these high-rise apartments. If people really didn't want them, then folks would be moving out of these high-rise cities instead of moving into them. There's no need to mandate low-rise by law as the Bay Area has done.
Cool so stop building them.
You can't make the workplaces incredibly dense and the housing incredibly sparse in a geographically constrained area though and expect things to be OK.
For every Salesforce tower build a giant apartment skyscraper. For every Google campus build a major apartment complex campus.
It's fundamentally ridiculous to just have everyone that "matters" live in the same city or small group of cities.
That's what people seem to be talking about here. In the UK it's London, in the US it's SF, NYC and a few others.
If "pack everyone into skyscrapers and have them rent their Logan's Run existence" is the model for the entire economy I'm honestly quite sad about that.
There is a huge HUGE difference between "you must own 1/3 of an acre of land to live within an hour commute of your job" and "microscopic communal living spaces", if you haven't looked at a map recently we are much much closer to the prior than the latter.
London is somewhere in-between; so are most of our towns and cities, really.
Tons of semi-detached or terraced homes, well served by public transport, which provide a decent balance.
We still can't just increase the population in those commutable areas without bound though.
Here's a great visualization of how we use our land: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med...
If fertility is below 2.1 it's below replacement.
There are not many rich countries with replacement level fertility rates.
Japan's population is decreasing at ~300K a year because they don't allow much immigration. As countries become rich people leave in lower numbers.
There are quite a few countries in the world that are already experiencing population decline :
But they'll have to stop building massive office buildings if so.
If you wait longer you're increasing the number of people that have to suffer during the transition period and increasing the ecological load of the stable population's lifestyle.
It’s not an issue of limitless growth of the population, it’s an issue of the population consolidating into a smaller footprint (which from an ecological perspective is a Good Thing) and stupid policies blocking it from happening.
There is more issues to be solved, yes - but reversing wasteful land use is a HUGE component of preserving our planet and quality of life.
Cut out meat, suburban lawns, and the cars that go with them, and the earth could support 10B people right now, at the living standards of a typical Millenial in a cosmopolitan metropolis.
Unfortunately, there's pretty good indications that most people on earth want those meats, suburban lawns, and cars, so I think it's more likely we'll get war instead. But it's totally doable, at a standard of living that people will grumble at but could abide.
Can I opt out of the coming war if I don't want these things?
Maybe we shouldn't have those programs structured as they are now. But we do, and a shock to the system will result in unprecedented economic misery and social instability. If we want to talk about how to deal with demographic change, there's an important long-term conversation to be had about preserving the social safety net. But any solution that wants to avoid a potentially-catastrophic economic crisis must have a serious, realistic answer for this. Not building housing is a fundamentally unserious policy, driven by a preference for the suburban lifestyle and the fear of change more than any realistic concerns about sustainability.
Indebted, underemployed people with just a rented bedroom and dysfunctional social safety nets are, for some odd reason, less eager to procreate.
If you don't have enough grandkids, there won't be enough able-bodied people around to wipe the drool off your generation's collective chin and push your age cohort's wheelchair out to the common room. That's the real cost of pulling up the ladder after yourself. You break the generational compact by denying opportunities to young folks, and they not only won't take care of you in your sunset years, but they won't even exist to do anything for you at any price.
This is an interesting contradiction. I agree we need to be more efficient with land use, but listening to some of the climate change predictions, we're going to need as much land as possible to sustain a population living in areas where agriculture may be limited or impossible.
For some concrete examples: NYC has far better public transit than the peninsula. The block layout of NYC means you can live on a purely residential block but generally never be farther than a few short blocks from a busy commercial area with small shops and restaurants.