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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> Dense living inherently requires less infrastructure and less transportation

Not really. Firstly, it costs a lot more per square foot to build a high rise than a single family home. Secondly, it costs a lot more to maintain it (elevators need constant maintenance, you can't just run to Home Depot to get replacement drain parts, etc.).

And the infrastructure costs more to maintain -- running power to a high rise requires a lot of specialized commercial electric equipment that can handle the high loads and variability. Same with water -- you need special pumps and extra big boilers. Sure you can gain some efficiency by sharing those resources, but at the end of the day the costs per person are roughly the same.

The main impact comes from needing less transport of goods and people, which is an environmental plus, but not something priced into the cost of living.

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> Not really. Firstly, it costs a lot more per square foot to build a high rise than a single family home. Secondly, it costs a lot more to maintain it (elevators need constant maintenance, you can't just run to Home Depot to get replacement drain parts, etc.).

Just to clarify: High density doesn't mean high rises. It means traditional developments at 2-5 stories. No elevator, water pump, special power, etc. These places are significantly cheaper than single family homes and provide dense walkable living.

> And the infrastructure costs more to maintain

Wouldn't this be addressed by economies of scale? If you have 400 people living in a building, even if the complexity of the infrastructure is greater, isn't it more efficient than having 400 single family homes? Not that one can directly replace another, but I'm talking about the number of people being the constant.

> The main impact comes from needing less transport of goods and people, which is an environmental plus, but not something priced into the cost of living.

Transportation I think is especially huge, but I imagine there are other efficiencies of living in a dense urban area. And I think that regardless of whether or not external costs are priced in, they should be counted towards efficiency of infrastructure.

> Wouldn't this be addressed by economies of scale?

It would seem not. It's hard to find data, but a good proxy is condo fees for high rise condos vs low rise condos. Typically the high rise condo fees are higher than the low rise condos in similar areas, when the offer similar amenities. And usually condo fees are true cost representations, because the residents control the spending of their own money, so it's not a profit area for the owner, like the rent is.

Which means by proxy it's more expensive to maintain a high rise than a low rise complex.

Roads alone cost $2-3M/mile and last 30 years. Amortized, that's on the order of $100k/yr/mile.

In a city, that would be $100k / 10 city blocks, probably 100 parcels with 100-1000 low-to-mid rise housing units. In a rural area it might be just 10 housing units, at the cost of $10k/yr/parcel. And productivity in rural areas is 2-3x lower, so it's even higher as a percentage of per-capita GDP.

Add on top of that electric grids, water supply, sewage, emergency services, hospitals, etc. Bottom line: rural areas only survive due to subsidies from productive and overtaxed urban Americans.

> Roads alone cost $2-3M/mile and last 30 years. Amortized, that's on the order of $100k/yr/mile.

Do you have a cite for that? I believe that figure for new roads, but you generally don't have to rebuild the entire road, including roadbed, after 30 years, just repave, which is a lot cheaper.

And urban Americans only survive due to crops produced in rural areas.

Which they pay for, many times over.

Rural areas also consume goods and services from urban areas, but nonetheless they supported the SALT rollback for "fairness."

Urban roads don't last 30 years. Major roads with high traffic get repaved every few years, and even residential roads in urban areas need to be repaved every decade or so.

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