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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

I just spent 3 weeks in the US Midwest. There is plenty of land to use, thousands of square miles of empty rolling grassy plains. (Ex.: South Dakota averages 11 people per square mile.) Apply a little modern technology (solar/wind, water storage/purification, insulation, Starlink satellite internet) and nobody need complain of population density. There's a startup waiting to happen: self-sufficient high-tech prefab homes plus easy land purchase, organized for instant technocommunities; there are many of us "work from anywhere" types who would jump at the chance made easy.

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If people are going to live anything resembling a modern American lifestyle, then gathering people together in cities has much lower environmental impact and lower infrastructure costs than spreading them around South Dakota.

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.

Consider the environmental transparency: instead of utterly devastating an environmental region as does cities, encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres, the high-efficiency home sporting solar roof & rainwater collection, wireless/satellite high-bandwidth internet, home & prolific electric car chargers, optimized Amazon/etc delivery, home/neighborhood schooling, work-from-home norm, etc. Environmental impact? between normalizing practically everything environmentalists call for (I'm not one), and there being not much of an environment to impact (have you seen the Dakotas?), the neo-futuristic American lifestyle can be achieved while minimizing environmental footprint/impact without the hideous expense & annoyance of overpopulated cities.

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.

You still need to give those people roads, maybe even sewer rather than having them use a horrible septic tank. They will probably want internet as well...and not the crappy satellite variety. And schools...ya, that’s a lot of bussing.

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).

> encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres

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.

There are 57.5 million square miles of land on Earth, including mountains, deserts, rainforests, national parks, tundra, and Antarctica. There are currently 7.4 billion people. This works out to ~4.9 acres per person of land of any type.

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.

South Dakota (and other such places) have most of those things up to reasonable standards, except perhaps the (well-connected) telecoms and airports in some cases. All of those things can come together as the population scales up and demands them.

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!

>"Location, location, location" has got to stop being the reason people choose a city.

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.

Strong Towns notes that the real cost of spreading out is all the infrastructure you need to maintain.

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.

But they ignore the risks of infill where infrastructure approaches capacity. And much of the infrastructure dates back a century or more. As you infill, demand for water/sewer/gas/electricity increases.

Roll it out in say Rugby, ND and you'll even have an Empire Builder stop right there, with service to Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago!

Looked. Prolific lakefront opportunities, lots of suitable roads in place. Base town already there. LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). Just need someone to (profitably!) take on making it easy to move there.

> LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living).

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.

I gave in-state jobs to show there is a tech environment. Indeed, the goal is to promote remote work, make living there point-and-click easy, and attract a critical mass of introverts who want open spaces and who, by simply being there en masse, attract a growing population.

I grew up out there. Lots of those 100k+ jobs are oil jobs. It's hard work, even if you aren't working directly on the drilling rigs.

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.

Absolutely. Part of the solution is to figure out how to disaggregate knowledge economies. Why so many mostly digital companies insist on in-office work is absolutely beyond me.

I think it's because our telecomm tech still sucks. It's not as good as real life and it has bugs.

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.

I think that until you're able to emulate meatspace in every aspect with VR, you cannot replace face-to-face.

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.

I'd kind of like to go to rural nowheresville, live cheap, and still make tech money. But my parents are here, my wife has health issues, and my kids need decent colleges.

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...

I grew up in rural nowheresville and went to a good college across the country, but that's not necessary. Every single state has acceptable state colleges, if your children cannot bear doing their own laundry :)

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