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Comment by pomian | Hacker News Reader

As you have written before, most of us who have worked with environmental issues in the real world, have long tried to 'value ' the environment. Forests, wetlands, waterfronts, etc. Common scenario, let's say there is a beautiful bay. Many tourists visit to see the view. Condos are built around the bay. Now there is no view. There are no tourists. Water quality in and around the bay degraded. But when trying to stop the development, the only arguable economic value, is the amount of the taxable value of condo, and 'housing starts' . There is no present way, (still - after 50 years of talking about this) to place a value on the view, waterfront, water quality, etc.

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There is no present way, (still - after 50 years of talking about this) to place a value on the view, waterfront, water quality, etc.

It's been a lot of years since I took the class, but those things can be valued. One of the things I did in my case study of Suisun Marsh was quantified how much the marsh cleans up the water and what it would cost if humans did it with a water treatment plant.

Suisun Marsh is also a historic birding area and the rails go through there for that reason. It brought tourism.

You can place dollar values on tourism, water quality and other things. It doesn't get done a lot but can be done.

A lot of places with such assets are small town or rural. Planning jobs tend to pay better in the big city so your best talent tends to end up designing cities and planners often hate their jobs because they don't get to do what they wanted to do.

Planning something good for people and the environment that makes economic sense and gets buy in from enough pertinent stakeholders is hard. So, all too often, "money talks" instead.

> There is no present way, (still - after 50 years of talking about this) to place a value on the view, waterfront, water quality, etc.

The sub branch is "environmental economics." My cousin got his PhD in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics

Why would the water quality have to degrade when there is residential development around a coastline? The views are still there and the tourists still come. Many are skeptical about "enivornmental" issues being used to prevent housing development, because it's most often used to stop it in heavily developed areas, replacing parking lots and single family houses. It's more environmentally friendly to have density than the alternative SFH sprawl. If you want to keep nature nature, make it a park.

> It's more environmentally friendly to have density than the alternative SFH sprawl.

I saw a Nature study on HN recently and I think it called this thinking in to question? I’ll go search for it and update this comment if I find it.

EDIT: No luck finding it. EDIT2: found it! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01477-y

I know you couldn't find it, but what was even the basic principle? It's hard for me to imagine that dramatically increasing land use, transportation and infrastructure costs could be environmentally beneficial.

They looked at total land use required to support cities and other areas and found that while the city footprint is small, the supportive infrastructure for the city is large. They found that when accounting for this, land use per capita is about the same regardless of density. Wish I could find it but there are a lot of Nature papers submitted every week.

EDIT: found it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01477-y

They didn't go into US cities in this analysis as far as I can see right, just chinese and european ones? Also do they focus on total ecological footprint or just land use equivalent, such as more energy usage from suburban housing, more emissions from car ownership and driving vs. things like every human needs this much farm land to feed them?

That study doesn’t address your argument. The land use of a city isn’t simply the physical land taken up by that city. Per capita energy expenditures significantly drop as city density increases, even if we moved to solar power that would still represent land use.

The actual study is filled with it’s own problems such as ignoring land covered by water etc, but that’s largely irrelevant here. However the real issue is it’s looking at land use around cities which are rarely independent. The area around London for example isn’t a single city it’s a cluster of different cities of various densities that all bleed into each other. Is to use a US example is Patterson part of NYC? How about Stamford and or Newark? If not where exactly do you place the borders between each of them?

Looking at population in the heart of NYC vs the surrounding areas over time and they are fairly independent.

That’s fair. I didn’t remember the study properly.

Isn't this paper discussing land use, and not environmental friendliness? Concerns such as the cost of transport are ignored here.

Yeah I only vaguely remembered it and it seems like it doesn’t apply here.

Stormwater run-off, anything that goes onto the ground (and especially paved surfaces) eventually ends up into the water cycle. Let's say 10 cars are leaking oil in their parking spot. That oil gets washed away by the rain and ends up in the local waterways.

Think of all the paving that prevents natural runoff. The increased human loading due to higher population living pressures = waste water, waste fuels, oils, particulates (dust, tires.)

Residential developments around coastlines typically drain directly into the bodies of water the coastlines are on.

Eutrophication can occur from lawn maintenance runoff alone. For coastlines around larger bodies of water, chemicals and heavy metals can deposit near the coast, and concentrate in filter feeders and animals higher up in the food chain to the point that it is unsafe to eat things that are caught off the coast.

There is still ample view in the Bay Area, while we're in the midst of a severe housing shortage. The marginal loss to the view / waterfront / water quality from a new development is more than outweighed by the marginal gain in housing availability.

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