I am thinking specifically of the US, not a third world country. Take a city with the population density of New York. Now double/triple it.
Or instead of that, Take Los Angeles as it is, but have every home and apartment have twice the square feet in real estate.
Would more supply just fill up to the point where no matter how much supply you had, the cities would remain costly places?
I am trying to think of novel ways of accelerating the move and desireability and economic feasibility of moving to cities. I want to see rural strongholds emptied out and stripped of whatever shadows of population they have left beyond the bare essentials. Saving that, I’d like to see the urban centers we know as cities expand outward to encompass more area.
If the cities are to be the liberal stronghold, and rural america is the home of conservatives, I want to drain the swamp of conservatism and make it FAR more desirable to move to the city, I want better economic prospects than there are now, I want the decision to stay rural to be so destructive that even the Sarah Palins of the world will strap on rocket boots to move to modernity.
Is it doable? In the foundation series, the starting world was a giant City PLANET, the entire thing was one giant city. We are not going there, but can’t we take over more of the landscape, or increase the magnet of modernity and city life for the rural holdouts?
First off my family, aside from me, all voted for Clinton and that sounds like my idea of hell. I couldn’t stand to be around that many people. In my perfect world I wouldn’t be able to see or hear my neighbors from anywhere around my house.
As far as your question goes it seems you have three barriers to your plan: people like me who don’t want to deal with traffic, noise, and lack of privacy, the cost of moving to the city, the cost of living in a city including work opportunities. Your plan possibly addresses one concern of city life if you double the available housing you should reduce the price per unit by more then half unless you were also able to double the work opportunities so people had a reason to move. But how you would probably idea that opportunity to the owner of a small shop or restaurant if a harder question then building all of the high rises.
The Economist Ed Glaeser has done a lot of work on urban economics. There’s a curious balancing around the economics of building density. The taller you build, the more cost in materials and labor is needed per square foot of livable space. However, also the taller you build, the less physical real estate you need per habitable unit. These forces largely balance each other out up until around 12 stories or so and result in a built cost of about $250 - $300K for a 1200 sqft, 2BR apartment. Cost above that point mainly come from zoning and urban policy laws (mainly by not allowing buildings of the ideal density from what the land price suggests), not from the intrinsic cost of the land or materials. It’s not “low cost” by the standards of the midwest but it’s certainly a lot cheaper than most major cities.
I’d say look at Tokyo as an example of a city that manages to combine high density with reasonable cost of living. It’s a city that manages to pretty harmoniously support some pretty mixed density development while also providing the social services & infrastructure expected of a developed city. Rent tends to hover around the $1000 - $2000 per month range and apartments are around $500Kish.
In recent years the media has somewhat overplayed some research into studies showing negative mental health effects of city living, often with headlines like “Cities make you crazy!” But city living is correlated with an increase in stress, anxiety, mood disorders, circadian disruptions (which can have a host of effects, such as breast cancer in women), alienation, and schizophrenia. The brains of city dwellers are oversensitive to stress compared to those of rural and suburban subjects. This isn’t to be unexpected, since you see similar maladaptive behavior if you crowd other mammals into tiny spaces, such as mice. A city planet sounds like a dystopia to me.
On the other hand, cities are economic power houses. City dwellers are less likely to be obese compared to rural folk. Cities are compact and use resources and infrastructure efficiently, especially when it comes to their environmental impact. They’re less dependent on car culture due to ease of walking and public transportation.
Political ideology seems a poor reason to advocate city living. There’s no particular reason why rural people can’t be liberal.
America is already over 80% urbanized with the figure remaining fairly stable (It’s ticked up 3 points in the last quarter century). There’s not that much rural area left to depopulate.
My impression is that Tokyo is full of well-earning young professionals living in closets. I’d like to see some cites about the “affordability” of living in Tokyo, myself.
Rural dwelling liberal here. Nothing you could do would make living in a city more desirable than living in the country. As far as I’m concerned, city living just sucks. Just too many people.
And, I’d like to know just who is going to provide the cities with food in your utopia. And for that matter, maintain everything that needs maintaining in rural areas. Transportation system anyone?
It would be very doable if not for politics. Cities have zoning boards and community development boards and historical landmark designations, all designed to keep cities from being too dense. These make existing dwellings worth more so any changes are fought tooth and nail to keep property values from going down.
Tokyo has been mostly able to avoid this by having zoning done at the national level. This keeps local property owners from dominating and allows builders to respond to demand, keeping prices low.
I made a post earlier this year about a blog I read that claimed you could build walks ups, maybe 3-6 stories and 300 square feet each for 50k or so.
If you had communal bathrooms and kitchens the prices would would be even lower. If you want to drive prices even lower, a dormitory environment would be pretty cheap. I remember seeing some communes in large cities claim you could get a bunk bed, food and utilities for under $500 a month.
If the cheapest hostels in NYC or sf are on $25 a night, then a permanent residence would probably be 30k or so for similar accommodations.
I guess if you are comfortable with a 100-300 square foot apartment with a shared bathroom and kitchen it is possible. If you are willing to have a dormitory or multiple people per small room it is even cheaper.
But the city government would never allow it. For one it would drive down real estate costs and for another low income housing tends to attract the riff raff.
…And you have to have really, really good mass transportation. Something we, in the US, are not known for.
I suppose with enough planning, and with a willingness to allow “alternative” living designs, we could go for higher density than we have now. But absent any kind of government coercion, I suspect there is some sort of equilibrium that one reaches since not everyone wants to live in a dense, urban environment.
At what point does moving people around become too difficult? I’m not up to speed on transportation economics. I suppose if we banned personal vehicles from dense areas, we could use the parking space for housing and the parking lanes for buses or platooning robot-ubers or something.
The price is only one aspect of why someone may avoid living in a large city. For a person like me, you can make city life more appealing by getting rid of all the people.
Apartment living is kind of a negative for a lot of people, personally I prefer my own home to apartment living. But cities can have that as well. Also, one of the main reasons I prefer homes is the issues with sound and creaking with so many apartments and apartment dwellers, but perhaps there is a way to engineer around such things.
Also, some of those futuristic cityscapes looks supremely cool.
But if that kind of density is untenable, simply having commuties of houses interspersed inside a general city can work fine. That is kind of How Los Angeles is, it’s a spread out city. Terrible traffic, but part of the reason is that a lot of the major hubs are in west la and hollywood and downtown. If there were more spread out hubs perhaps there would be less clustering around a mega few. But as you go out to areas like riverside, it gets less and less developed, less and less citylike, and more like trace smatterings of civilizations before it drops off a cliff near the desert.
There must be a way to extend the encroachment of civilization, make the rural places less rural.
But in my fantasy world, I want to see the earthly equivalent of this created in the US
This is the kind of location that will grind conservatism and xenophobias and cultural purity to dust and ash.
Kind of? umm. I don’t think you quite understand just how much many, many people absolutely hate the idea. And clusters of houses within a city is better, but doesn’t cut it either.
Yes, it does sound contradictory, all I will say is that I live in a residential area with blocks of houses not apartments, but we are very much part of a city and not rural or a suburb. But again, this is typical of many areas in Los Angeles. That said, it’s not the kind of mixed neighborhood you’d get in a place like NY… the self segregation of people warrants its own thread.
The posts of all the rural people on this thread have me scratching my head. For the longest time, we lived outside of a small town. Had to drive an hour out, to get any serious shopping done. Then we lived in the suburbs- plenty of shopping, but culturally dead as a doorknob. Currently we have a house smack in the middle of a ~230k-person city. City living trumps country living, methinks.
Downsides-
Rush hour traffic- generally bad idea to try to drive anywhere around those hours.
Noise. We live on a major street with all sort of emergency vehicles passing by, multiple times a day.
General lack of respect for private property (cars rummaged through if left unlocked, vandalism, trash, etc.). Doesn’t help that we’re in an old block of row-houses, surrounded by apartment buildings- most people rent out here.
Crime- though that’s very conditional/regional. If you don’t go out alone at night/don’t stumble around drunk/avoid certain parts of town, you’re generally fine.
Got to be prepared to pay for parking.
City’s lack of maintenance on certain things (potholes take a while to fix, and we’ve got a running battle to get the trash removal people to do regular pick-ups at the local dog park.)
Tiny, tiny back yard.
Upsides-
A good grocery store 2 blocks away.
Post office and veterinarian 7 blocks away.
One of the better hospital complexes in this state, within 5 minute drive. (~12 blocks).
Numberless restaurants within easy walking distance.
More galleries/museums/etc within 10 minute drive than you can shake a fist at.
Festivals/concerts/other performances/marathons… seriously. You name it- chances are, it’s happening somewhere in the city this week.
Civic organizations and non-profits by the dozen. Also, there’s no longer a need to drive an hour to join a geeky club/meet-up.
A river 2 blocks down from us, with white-water rapids ~10 blocks down. Amazing park/trail system around the said river. (And, heck, the park system in the city in general. There’s 3 large-ish ones within a 10 block radius of us that I can think of; probably more.)
A rather large and respectable dog park within 15 blocks.
People of all walks of life, rubbing elbows. We’ve met some really cool friends out here.
I wouldn’t lie, the noise took about a year to get used to, and I still sleep with ear-plugs… but we’re down to 1 car in the household, both work from home, and are finding this city living experience pretty darn convenient in general.
