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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

There are at least two active cargo ports in the New York Harbor: the Port Jersey Marine Terminal in NJ, and the Red Hook Marine Terminal in Brooklyn. I believe the city has also been slowly reactivating the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal.

I don't know if the average resident on NYC benefits much from living near a cargo port. But there are significant benefits to living in coastal areas: water has a moderating effect on climate, provides either natural sewage outfall (or fresh water, depending), and brings in tourists. It's not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of cities exist on sea or lake coasts, followed by navigable rivers, and that there aren't all that many choice locations left.

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Ah, good point, I stand corrected on New York Harbor, glad to see that.

That seems true for most cities that made it through the Age of Sail, but less true before and unclear going forward. It seems trade routes by land were generally more important, and conquest and shipping were more carried out on land than sea until the technical developments of the 15th century. Most large ancient cities seem to have lied along the Silk Road, and many large (and late) ancient cities that still exist (Rome, Paris, London) aren't right on the sea as in the Americas.

Going forward the bigger issue seems to be insurability. Who's going to hold the bag on all those high rises in Miami...

Rome is on the Tiber, which flows directly into the Tyrrhenian Sea (via Ostia, which was Rome's "Oakland" and had its own sizeable population in antiquity). London, Thames. Paris, Seine.

(Closer to MENA and the Levant, and you'll find that antiquity cities almost entirely exist on the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, etc. You can find inland Silk Road ksour in countries like Morocco, but these too exist along seasonal rivers, and have correspondingly lower and nomadic populations.)

I don't particularly disagree about climate change, and I think a lot of the coastal Southern US is in for a rough awakening in the next 15 to 30 years. But things haven't been so peachy inland either (the Midwest has had both more numerous and more severe floods, tornadoes, etc.). NYC's weather is also certainly going to become more extreme, and the city's response so far has been unimpressive.

Rome is over 15 miles from the coast, London over 20, Paris over 90. OTOH, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and Antwerp have direct sea access (and benefited early in the Age of Sail).

Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore, and DC all have direct sea access.

Agreed. To me New England and the Great Lakes seem the best positioned U.S. regions for the 22nd century.

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