Why Don't We Just Build New Cities?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/housing-crisis-new-cities-california-forever/675465/

by fortran77 • 3 years ago

21 15 3 years ago

theatlantic.com

abdullahkhalids3• 3 years ago

We should build a "car-free" city just to see how well it will go.

* Large percentage of city is green.

* Most of the city is mixed retail+residential.

* Lots of 3-5 story residential buildings to have appropriate density.

* Streets have a single one-way car lane + two bike lanes + two walking paths + green space.

* Bigger roads are 1+1 lane, and primarily used by buses, commercial vehicles, emergency vehicles and people with mobility disabilities.

* The city should not be much bigger than 10km x 10 km. That's enough for 0.5-1 million people, while small enough that a regular person can cycle end-to-end.

* High-speed train access to nearby cities.

Since, this is a new city people who looove cars don't have to move there. So nothing for them to complain about.

seanmcdirmid• 3 years ago

Isn't Saudi Arabia planning to do this with NEOM? It might still out to be a pink elephant, but if they get it done...

Having lived in Beijing that really exceeds 3-5 story density, but also has huge ring roads combined with lots of bicycles, buses, HSR to nearby cities, and a huge expansive subway, you can still be screwed even if you have all of that (not sure if getting rid of the roads would make it better).

abdullahkhalids3• 3 years ago

NEOM seems to be an ecological disaster. "The Line", its major residential component, is a city that is 100 km x 200m. A block of concrete and glass placed right in the middle of the dessert. Its going to completely disrupt migratory patterns and ecosystems in a much larger area than a normal circular/square city.

wizofaus2• 3 years ago

We should build a "car-free" city just to see how well it will go.

Fairly sure we were doing exactly that for most of the last 9000 years or so.

Anyway, it's hard to see how it will solve or prove anything - the vast majority of us aren't going to move to greenfield cities. We already have plenty of towns and cities around the world (not many in the US, granted) that have managed to strike a reasonable balance between car-usage and other forms of getting around, at a "human" scale. The primary challenge is ensuring future urban development follows that path rather than continuing the same trends of excessive devotion to cars-above-all that we've witnessed in many cities over the last 70 or 80 years.

abdullahkhalids3• 3 years ago

To me the ideal balance is the type of cars I have specified in my comment. And I know there are many others like me. We just want our own community. The others can do what they want.

mateusz_2• 3 years ago

You can check how it works in Amsterdam

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

Unless you can import Amsterdam's weather and geography, it's not relevant to dissimilar locations.

plmpsu• 3 years ago

Sounds like Utrecht.

CyberDildonics• 3 years ago

I'm not a financial wizard, but probably because it's expensive.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/37YG8

The article itself answers the question. The biggest thing is people move to cities because of the people already there. You've got a pretty supreme chicken and egg problem trying to bootstrap a new one from nothing. In the past when we still had a frontier, it was a fairly small number of people who set out for it, and it took decades if not centuries for some of those tiny outposts to eventually become cities, usually because trade needed to happen there and the outpost happened to be ideally positioned near natural routes for it.

As for construction in existing cities, I wish people could acknowledge it still takes more than just people willing to tolerate housing expansion. I personally don't even care about my average neighbor possibly becoming slightly poorer or even my own home value decreasing. I kind of do care about the quality of life hit from the construction itself. My neighborhood has actually been in a construction boom for over 7 years now, and that means roads constantly being closed, sidewalks being unavailable, ad hoc blockages, a fire every now and then, trash all over the place, a more or less constant cloud of dirt in the air and thin film covering the roads, sidewalks, my house, my car, my body if I'm outside for a few hours, my wife's car getting all tires flat within two months of moving here because of nails left in the road.

When people are opposed to this, it isn't universally because they're greedy misers who don't care about homelessness and only want to see their paper net worth get bigger. I don't even really personally care that much and am more than willing to put up with it or I wouldn't be here, but I'm not going to act like there are no tradeoffs, no downsides, no annoyances.

And I suppose it's impossible to know to what extent regulations are partially causing it, but it's not like the existing construction projects are always going all that smoothly. Even when they're allowed to build, builders seem to struggle, at least the urban builders. During the free money era, every mom and pop seemed to believe they were qualified to become home builders, and most of them are now out of business, but projects stagnated for years while they went through bankruptcy and slowly unloaded their properties. When they still had them, scheduling was a mess. Skilled trades have severe shortages and you can't complete a project without them. Laying new utility lines is inherently harder and more expensive when you have to do it through roads and properties already occupied and in use. I've watched these projects for years because they're happening right out in front of my window. The crews are out there using wooden crates with one side ripped off propped onto a forklift as a cherry picker. They're on 60 foot ladders without a harness leaning out three feet to the side to lay a dryer vent. When we moved in, we were the first owners of a new building. Three of six units had the furnaces upside down. Our roof had nails sticking out that weren't even covered. We come to find out the code inspector was 84 years old and was not walking up 4 flights of stairs to actually look at any of this stuff. Maybe the building regulations are excessive, but does it even matter if no one enforces them? Being able to operate like the wild west didn't seem to help our builder. He still went out of business within a few years and left six separate in-progress projects and empty lots he'd purchased abandoned. That was three years ago, and so far, they're still abandoned.

I don't doubt that NIMBYism and provincialism in local government are serious problems, but you'll have a hard time convincing me that even undoing that on its own will solve the problem and these builders will just magically become competent and three decades worth of sufficiently smart people who opted for college will instantly reskill to become electricians and plumbers instead.

As it stands, I talked to my builder's son about this years ago when he was charged with doing some remedial work for free because they'd laid the foundations wrong for our units and drift between that and the slab for the driveway was cutting our water main. He told me they couldn't hire decent crew almost no matter what they tried. Nobody wants to do urban work. It's inherently harder and less profitable than putting up endless cookie-cutter identical subdivisions on previously unoccupied land out in the sticks. Some of that is local opposition, but some of it is just you can't control the layout of the roads. You can't control what the adjacent lots are shaped like. You can't control how much land is even available. In principle, building a brand new city in the middle of nowhere is a solution to those problems, but it won't matter if no one wants to live there.

graypegg• 3 years ago

The Canadian federal government owns 18600 acres (9600 of which is currently not being used as a park) of land not too far from Toronto. [0] It was originally expropriated for an airport that will never be built. I’ve always thought it would be an interesting place to build up a town.

There’s not a lot of contiguous land that they own that’s cleared for development, local to some major nearby cities, connected to the road network, has a rail line going thru it, and has had the tough job of expropriation done decades ago by a long forgotten administration.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickering_Airport_Lands#

Tagbert• 3 years ago

It has been tried with different goals. Part of the problem is that we are not smart enough to design for the full complexity of society in a city and end up with cities that only partially work. Naturally evolved cities tend to handle that kind of complexity and flexibility better.

https://gizmodo.com/10-failed-utopian-cities-that-influenced...

klondike_klive• 3 years ago

In the UK we built postwar "new towns" and they are largely brutalist nightmares.

Why Don't We Just Build New Cities?

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