
Looking For a New Way to Live: neighborhoods that generate power, grow food - Kaibeezy
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/business/james-ehrlich-environment-neighborhood.html
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Kaibeezy
_... a far-reaching plan to create new neighborhoods that will generate their
own power through solar photovoltaic panels, biomass and biogas from material,
food and animal waste, and geothermal sources, to name but a few. The
communities will also grow their own food largely from aquaponic farms, which
essentially combine plants with fish cultivation in water._

OK, so far, so good...

 _At the outset, the communities that ReGen hopes to build will be within an
hour’s travel from major cities to attract those who must commute to work._

Fail. Expensive land within commuting range, but remote workers don’t need to
commute. Expensive land near supermarkets, so what’s the incentive to “farm”?
Kids need to be driven to baseball, but your car is a 10-minute schlep from
your house, and it’s raining.

Here’s a better idea: Bring a few key urban amenities to any thousands of
actual existing but fading exurban and rural villages: produce market, bakery,
well-equipped playground, car charger, decent fiber line, bookstore cafe/co-
work space, weekend evening bus into town and back so you can have a couple of
glasses of wine.

It’s funny to call a project that prominently features waste biomass and
swimming pool aquaponics “glam” but that’s what it is and why it won’t change
the world. ReGen could make an actual meaningful difference if it spent a
fraction of the investment it hopes to raise on actually learning how people
live and making strategic improvements to their existing environments. This
takes time and is gradual work with an unglamorous mix of success and failure,
uninteresting to investors and unlikely to get you featured as a “visionary”
in the NYT. People and their bullshit, SMH.

