Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

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It really depends on the style of rural living we're talking about.

In my poor rural neighborhood most people simply consume substantially less than the average urbanite, and they reuse as much as possible. Since everyone has a lot of space, they tend to keep everything around and repair stuff, make things from disused junk, repurpose materials from disused/broken structures, etc.

I've never lived in an urban setting where storage space was so readily available and eyesore messes tolerated that everyone could practice such extreme levels of reuse. I don't even have garbage service at my place.

My urban experiences have been exercises in rampant waste and consumerism.

There are folks who live an urbanite high-consumption lifestyle rurally, and those people are definitely burning a lot of energy getting everything brought to them continuously. But that seems to be the exception around me at least; those households stand out like a sore thumb, with a UPS truck visiting every day.

> It really depends on the style of rural living we're talking about.

It also depends on the style of urban living we're talking about. People living in single-family houses and driving everywhere consume much more resources per person than those living in high-rise apartments and taking public transportation or walking. High population density, in general, means low per-capita consumption.

I'm not sure how this argument applies to people living completely off the grid and raising their own food. But many parts of the world have too many people to make that a practical option for more than a tiny minority.

Except that as my sister discovered after moving to the Loop in Chicago, public transportation is great until you need to depend on it. Work doesn't care if you're chronically late because of chronically late trains. Maybe other cities are better here, but before long she was spending 45 minutes commuting 20 miles in a car because at least then she could choose to give herself more time, and swing by the store on the way home.

Full caveat, I live on a homestead much like this story (except we still haven't gotten around to taking down the two dilapidated structures on our property). I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth. This is especially true when I think about the number of SUVs and trucks I see when I go to Boston, sigh.

> I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth.

Chicago and Boston are valid examples, of course. But I had more in mind cities like Seoul, Shanghai, Mumbai, Manila, Paris, and Dhaka.

> I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth. This is especially true when I think about the number of SUVs and trucks I see when I go to Boston, sigh.

The efficientcy is in the number of SUVs and Trucks that you don't see relative to the population. Even in a traffic jam of them you couldn't see an "equal" ammount of them because they wouldn't fit in the area in a per capita homogenized area. Well unless they were literally all stacked up.

> People living in single-family houses and driving everywhere consume much more resources per person than those living in high-rise apartments and taking public transportation or walking.

Neither of those fall into what I'd consider a rural "homesteading" scenario.

In my experience rural living conditions involve such an inconvenient drive to town that you make shopping lists and coalesce needs for the infrequent trip. It's necessarily a bulk-mode operation with substantially improved efficiency over what you're describing which strikes me as the typical suburban American home.

Of course if rural folks are commuting to a city by car every day for work, it's not great.

Neither of those fall into what I'd consider a rural "homesteading" scenario.

Well no, those were both examples of urban living.

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