
We've Built Cities We Can't Afford - jseliger
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/8/weve-built-cities-we-cant-afford
======
xyzzyz
Strongtowns has had the same shtick for years now, predicting that the cities
are are going to collapse under cost of maintaining infrastructure. For years
though, the numbers just refuse to add up in Strongtowns favor.

If cost of maintaining roads and utilities in typical American suburban
pattern is so high that cities can’t afford it, where are all the cities that
went bankrupt because of it? Strongtowns argues that early on, it’s covered by
the developers, but after its useful life, it must be replaced by
municipality. Ignoring the whole issue of the original residents actually
covering the cost instead of the developer (clearly, the developer didn’t just
donate the roads and sewers, it’s all priced in), how long do we actually have
to wait for chicken to come home to roost? I live in a suburban development in
Seattle, packed row to row with the single family houses with yards and
garages that Strongtowns says is a bane to long term finances. The median age
of the house is probably something like 50 years, with a good amount over 100
years old — it’s a relatively old neighborhood. When will the road costs will
finally kill our budget?

If you look at the city budgets, there is no mystery: road maintenance is
simply a very small part of municipality budget. It simply doesn’t cost as
much as Strongtowns keeps implying. The infrastructure maintenance budget is
dwarfed by everything else.

Just look at the numbers: [http://www.seattle.gov/city-budget/2020-proposed-
budget#/sdo...](http://www.seattle.gov/city-budget/2020-proposed-budget#/sdot)
Road maintenance is what, $150M-200M counting generously and adding some
overhead? Even if you apportion all of that to suburbia, compared to total
budget of over $6B, it’s not going to make a serious dent.

That the road costs are low in suburbia can even be seen with a simple back of
the napkin calculation: assuming cost to repave a mile of suburban road to be
$1M, house frontage of 100 feet, and useful life of road at 30 years, you’re
looking at $20 000 per house over 30 years, or less than $700 per house per
year. Sure, that’s not nothing, but how much do you already pay in property
taxes?

In short, while I think many suggestions of Strongtowns are good in their own
right, and would indeed improve many places in America, the infrastructure
costs story simply doesn’t add up.

~~~
burlesona
What you're quoting is the money that was allocated to maintenance (the
budget), not the actual amount required to maintain quality and level of
service comparable to when things were originally built. But also, Seattle is
a bad example, as the city of Seattle is largely pre-war and has an
exceptionally valuable Downtown, and Seattle is booming off the charts
compared to the rest of the US.

If you go look at older suburbs, especially the less wealthy ones, you see a
lot of supporting evidence for the Strong Towns argument. Try traveling around
metro Chicago, for example. Or go to a place like Memphis, TN and take a hard
look at their maintenance costs versus income. Unfortunately, Seattle's
economy isn't the norm.

~~~
xyzzyz
Seattle does not seem to be skimping on maintenance of its infrastructure.
City roads do not have potholes and are generally of good quality.

Anywhere I look, municipalities don't spend too much on road maintenance. If
the argument is that it's below what's actually necessary to spend to maintain
it, and in near future it will come and bite us, clearly some places must
already be ahead of the curve and already have significant pains due to
falling behind with maintenance and having no budget to pay for it. Where are
those places?

> If you go look at older suburbs, especially the less wealthy ones, you see a
> lot of supporting evidence for the Strong Towns argument. Try traveling
> around metro Chicago, for example. Or go to a place like Memphis, TN and
> take a hard look at their maintenance costs versus income.

Can you name one of those places around Chicago so that we can look at its
budget? Memphis budgets around 10% of its revenues for infrastructure. Is it
significant? Yes. Will it bankrupt the city? No.

~~~
rdtwo
What about the west Seattle bridge, a huge chuck of Seattle just got cut off
for many years due to failing infrastructure. That’s probably the first of
many infrastructure debts coming due

~~~
mjevans
I live near Seattle. The bridge you're talking about is actually a modern
replacement that has failed well before reasonable expectations. I don't
recall hearing a root cause, but I don't believe anyone was expecting this or
that it's a results of lack of maintenance.

------
formalsystem
I don't know what we've built in the US but it certainly doesn't feel like
we've built cities for people. In California, most of the outside real estate
is dedicated to roads with the monotony occasionally interrupted by a parking
lot with the same cookie cutter businesses. It's very rare that I'll see a mom
and pop shop here and for the most part the outside world with billboards,
malls and fast food chains is a distribution channel for big businesses.

~~~
chapium
I cannot imagine what living in downtown Chicago is like. On top of being
prohibitively expensive, where would you shop for groceries or other domestic
services? Its like a double whammy of expensive living and poor access.

~~~
pgsbathhouse2
>where would you shop for groceries or other domestic services?

What kind of weird question is this? "Downtowns" are _more_ accessible for
people, not less. That's why they are more expensive by the foot.

Are you under the belief that there are no markets or services in cities? This
seems like a perspective you can get from only living in the suburban non-
sense that America has constructed.

~~~
freehunter
You'd be surprised. Maybe not Chicago, but there are a lot of cities with zero
grocery stores. It was big news in my Midwestern city when a Meijer went in
downtown because people living downtown used to have to drive or take the bus
outside of the city to do their grocery shopping.

It's always a big question in my city, "can you live here without a car?" and
most of it has historically hinged on grocery shopping.

~~~
pgsbathhouse2
>It was big news in my Midwestern city

What city?

~~~
freehunter
Grand Rapids MI

------
jackcosgrove
If a city is going to go bankrupt, it will be because of pension and
healthcare costs and not infrastructure maintenance costs. If all else fails
infrastructure can be abandoned but pensions and health plans will be
politically untouchable, and in some places they are legally untouchable.
Detroit abandoned swathes of the city for decades, but in the end it was the
pensions that did them in.

However having driven through the Kansas City metro I was impressed, and not
necessarily in a good way, by the massive amount of paved roads. It was nice
in a way; there was very little traffic. However it seemed to have the most
roads of a city of its size that I have every seen. I have never been to
Houston or Dallas however.

~~~
anm89
There is no way americans would accept their infrastructure failing.

The average American just doesn't believe this is a possibility in a way which
meaningfully affects them because they've never seen it or they believe ive
some exceptionllalism nonsense.

~~~
beart
Infrastructure has definitely failed and the general public has shown very
little passion for doing something about it. Take a drive through South East
Michigan some time.

------
janvdberg
Made me think of this paulg tweet/quote:

"Cities that we think of as marvels from the past that we could not match were
built by people much poorer than us."

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1199278650652286977](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1199278650652286977)

~~~
preommr
What does this even mean?

I'd like to see an actual example of such a city for better context. What city
do people think we can't build today better and faster? Who are the people
that are poorer? Like the US is richer, but detroit got wrecked over time.

~~~
rhino369
Some of it is true, but that's because we paid in lives and human suffering.
Safety and environmental restrictions multiply the cost of building
infrastructure.

------
gok
"make the city stronger and more financially resilient"

"target productive development patterns"

"incentivize productive development"

It's hard to read Strong Towns articles because they write almost entirely in
euphemism. What they're really advocating is smaller homes, more density, and
less driving. They would really sound much less Orwellian if they stopped
using so many weasel words.

~~~
MattGaiser
They realize that few people will accept the trade off of having less house.

~~~
username90
That isn't true, people pay a lot more to live in the denser part of towns
even when they are at equal distance from the city center.

------
crazygringo
OK, so _if_ this is true that towns and suburbs had subsidized construction
and that now the cost of full infrastructure maintenance can't be supported
locally...

...then what happens? Do roads just get a lot more potholes but we deal just
fine in the end? Or would it get so bad that people wind up just leaving
somehow?

It's almost impossible for me to imagine that road etc. maintenance is _that_
expensive that it could mean shutting down entire neighborhoods because
there's no other choice. ("Everybody who owns a house, goodbye it's worthless
now.")

Is there more likely to be a supply-and-demand thing where a town is forced to
massively increase property taxes, people who can't afford it are forced to
leave for a cheaper locale, and people with more money come in? (Attracted by
the now lower price of the houses which compensates for the higher property
taxes.) In other words, existing homeowners will get the shaft, because the
deferred maintenance will essentially be paid for in the end by their loss in
home equity?

~~~
vharuck
I lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our whole state has infrastructure
problems. For the highways, it's because we're connected to a lot of
logistical hubs. But a lot of our towns, including our capital, have big
problems with big potholes.

It doesn't happen in a single decision or even a single year. It's a slow
spiral: people move out, crumbling streets go on the "cons" list of house
hunters, the city has a smaller income base, so non-urgent roadwork is less
urgent. Repeat.

I'm not saying people will flee neighborhoods with bad streets. But they will
move out for the usual reasons: family, new jobs, marriage. The problem is new
people are less likely to move in.

------
strategarius
I don't know, why no one mentioned remote work as a solution, at least for
businesses who can afford it. I clearly know from my friends in HR industry,
positions which never assumed remote options, now opened and filled without
significant problems for business and new employee. Businesses are working in
(almost) normal mode, apocalypse is postponed. So why pour money in expensive
offices, require from you employees to rent apartments near your work, which
cost like lux-class, or repeatedly spend hours of their lifes that accumulate
in months in public transport or traffic jams?

When business people talk about remote job in the team, it's usually
outsourcing to India. Why not to let your employees present at the office,
say, 1 time a week, to deal with the customer or attend weekly meeting for
those who miss socialization.

------
KoftaBob
Which is why counties should tie property taxes to infrastructure costs.

You want to live in a sprawled out suburb where there's a low ratio of
taxpayer/mile of infrastructure? You're free to do so, but expect to pay a
higher share of the infrastructure costs to do so.

Also, the budget set aside for infrastructure projects should do a much better
job of allocating future tax revenue towards maintaining it over time. Right
now, the cost analysis of these projects is way too focused on what it'll cost
to build it, and then maintaining it is left up to future planners to figure
out.

Every project must have a guaranteed tax revenue percentage exclusively set
aside towards maintaining it going forward.

------
reddog
Isn't this one of those sites that advocate getting rid of "sprawl" and having
everyone move to high density apartments near the train station? And they want
to replace cars with government run mass transit so everyone gets to work and
back in trams, busses and subways filled shoulder-to-shoulder with 800
strangers?

Thats really going to be a tough sell over the next few years. I got to say I
live in exactly the kind of suburbs they hate with a house big enough for
everyone to spread out and enough square footage to store a months worth of
food. And when I do get out its alone in my car to curbside pickup or a drive
through. I couldn't be more pleased.

~~~
asokoloski
I think they try to stay pretty explicitly neutral about advocating a
particular density, it's just that they want people to be realistic about how
much a particular kind of development costs. Suburbs are perfectly fine -- but
if they were taxed to a degree that reflects their actual infrastructure cost,
it would be much more expensive to live in them. There's currently a bizarre
pattern where poorer, older, higher-density urban neighborhoods end up
subsidizing richer suburbs.

Likewise, it's fine if you want to live out on a farm well away from other
people -- but the town shouldn't pay a million dollars to run a paved road and
water supply out to your house, when a dirt road and a well is good enough.

The problem is that we all want something for nothing. We all want to live in
low-density suburbs like you love, but since charging enough in taxes to pay
for them would not be very politically popular, instead we've run up massive
infrastructure liabilities, depending on unsustainable exponential growth for
funding to fix the old infrastructure.

Would you still love the suburbs as much if your property taxes were 2x or 4x
what they are now? If you would still want to live in a suburb, great, no
problem. But many people would probably rather choose to move to a denser area
and pay a more reasonable tax rate.

------
ryanmarsh
Why is it that these “economic development” non-profits and city planning
think tanks all sing a similar tune and have no money? Why don’t developers
and land (home) owners align with the (supposed) best thinking in city
planning? Why aren’t the cities planning themselves like these outsiders want?

It seems to me if you really want to design a city, I mean _really_ care you’d
be better off becoming a real estate investor or developer and then building
things how you think they should be built.

The Strong Cities folks and the like don’t seem to have good answers for how
you actually implement their ideas without wealth destruction and dislocation
of communities that have built up in ways that don’t meet the standards of
urban planning high ideals.

The Haussmannisation of Paris 2.0 is not going to happen in a US city full of
middle class land owners.

Maybe we’d take these people seriously if they had a reasonable PLAN for
implementing their grand ideals

~~~
zemvpferreira
Why is it that these "nutritionists" spend all their time talking about clean
eating with no results? Clearly regular people can't eat more vegetables and
less Doritos. Maybe we'd take them more seriously if they had a reasonable
plan to thin America down.

I'm a strong town proponent and advocate (though I live in Portugal where many
of these problems never surfaced on the same scale). I'm also a real estate
investor.

The crux of it is that the priority for urban planning enthusiasts must be
education, not mass rebuilding. A large, large majority of people would still
rather take out buy a horrible McMansion in a soulless development than buy a
smaller, well-built home closer to their neighbours. Showing off wealth and
ticking off features is valued over long-term enjoyment of your home and
betterment of the community.

Is it such a surprise that it's hard to get a large number of folks to do
what's best in the long term instead of what they want right now?

------
6510
Where have we seen this before? Attract a larger audience, more users, more
customers then expect everything to scale wonderfully?

I feel there is something romantic about keeping things a predefined size. The
corner store, the closed discussion group, the small town, the limited edition
FOO. It tends to get some things right in a magical way.

------
burlesona
This is an interesting read, but it's a bit insider. If you're having a hard
time grokking what they mean by "growth that makes the city _less_
prosperous," you should start with the Growth Ponzi Scheme series:
[https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-
scheme](https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme)

I'll attempt to briefly summarize:

The post WW2 development pattern across North America (and many other places
around the world) is characterized by car-oriented development, where large
collector roads fan out to support tree-like trunk-and-branches local streets
full of houses, with commercial box stores and strip malls often located where
the major collectors cross.

This infrastructure pattern (road, sewer, power) is much more expensive than
most people realize, and (to most people's surprise), the local taxes
(property, sales, and sometimes income) collected by all the properties that
depend on that infrastructure are rarely sufficient to pay for it.

This means that as municipalities expand in this way they are increasing their
cost of maintenance faster than they are increasing their revenue, and thus
becoming poorer.

The reason this continues is that the majority of the initial capital cost
(which, again, is substantially more than most people realize) is heavily
subsidized by federal and state "growth" programs. Thus, in the range of the
first 5-10 years, local places often get a short-term influx of cash as new
development pays local taxes spurred by infrastructure the city didn't have to
pay for. But it's a bad deal, because the city is on the hook to maintain that
infrastructure forever, and again, the long-term tax base is rarely adequate
to pay for it.

This leads to a vicious cycle - which probably sounds familiar - where city
officials are desperately chasing more "growth programs" from the state and
federal level because they need the income to cover budget shortfalls -- but
they aren't stepping back to recognize that the budget shortfalls were
actually caused by this same pattern played out over the last 50 years.

It's a fascinating, slow-moving train wreck, one of those things that is all
around us, and once you see it, you can't un-see.

Strong Towns exists to spread awareness of this situation. The organization's
theory of change is that if the general public were well-educated on this
phenomenon, then it would change, as people in each local area would stop
making the problem worse then start iterating and innovating on ways to make
it better. You can see some examples of places where this is playing out on
the organization's "success stories" page:
[https://www.strongtowns.org/success](https://www.strongtowns.org/success)

~~~
Noos
That infrastructure is necessary for small towns. It would be much worse if
they had to maintain expensive public transport in addition to all the roads,
and it's not realistic to have density at that level I think. The only
solution is to make the small town a large town.

Like you always will have a minimum level of sprawl, period. Density means you
just have a lot of people packed into that minimum area. But you need to have
services and things that can't be packed together, and they can't always be
dense enough to work with limited transport relative to the town size.

~~~
burlesona
You can also have less infrastructure. Even the tiniest town could work fine
on gravel roads with well and septic systems. The problem is usually when
small towns try to build city-grade roads... which is pretty much what all of
them do.

~~~
rezonetheburbs
Or we could put the buildings closer together and not separate them by
purpose. A mile of road goes much further if there's housing AND commercial
that doesn't require an expensive, large automobile just to get from A to B.

~~~
chongli
People who live in small towns don’t want to be huddled together. They buy
houses in these towns because they want a large property with lots of space
between them and their neighbours.

------
seemslegit
No, we've built cities whose residents can't afford to live in them because
their taxation isn't used to provide services at optimal cost but instead
funneled to private interests and various rackets under the auspices of urban
development paradigm du jour.

~~~
rezonetheburbs
You're being downvoted, but you're not wrong. Under the guise of things like
public-private partnerships, public money is increasingly funneled to private
interests. Look at the humble TIF. Does your city need a big-ass stadium that
won't actually help development or build community? Cool! Let's draw a border
around several blocks and capture all of the tax increases for 20 years and
then give it to a private company. Once that's over, the company can collect
on the next boondoggle while everyone wonders why their city is a decaying,
boring place to be, ultimately resulting in demolition of the stadium.

This cycle repeats forever.

~~~
carapace
"humble TIF"? What's that?

~~~
OrangeMango
Tax Increment Financing. A city designates a geographic zone and all property
tax money collected in that zone above a certain baseline amount goes into an
account that is separate from the city budget account. The city then spends
that money on development as they so choose. Some places allow it and some
don't. Some places abuse it and some don't. But in general you can expect TIF
money to be given directly to a developer to encourage them to build something
within that zone.

One of the big problems is that that extra money is diverted away from the
city budget for 20-30 years. The area I live in used to be inside a TIF (it
expired). During that time, only about 10% of my property tax money went to
the city. We had overcrowded schools getting 10% of the money they normally
would have received. The library got 10% of the money it normally would have.
Some of that TIF money went to build a basketball stadium. In a final gesture
of goodwill (I guess), when the TIF expired they spent the final ~$40 million
in the TIF account on an elementary school.

~~~
carapace
Thanks.

Also, wow.

------
siliconunit
The whole economy as it stands is a clever puzzle of guessing a half rigged
race to the bottom (or the top) game. Now we have the computational and
technological resources to track almost anything down to the single item, we
should use this power to assure an even and fair distribution of goods and
resources and nothing much more. Work to generate income is a destructive and
obsolete concept; money as a construct has nearly finished its useful lifespan
together with the egotistical concept of accumulation of wealth, a thought
that should cease to exist for the greater good of everyone, sweat and pride
should be taken for the achievement, not for the reward, but this is something
very hard to swallow in certain circles that achieve nothing and produce
mostly unfairness.

~~~
eklavya
This is really naive. Money is just an idea and it lets the mega connected
world of today operate with some semblance of sanity. What do you propose we
use instead of money and how is that different from money? Who gets what and
how much of it? Who decides all this?

------
elihu
Value per acre seems like a better metric than just value per lot, but it
seems like the metric you'd really want to maximize is value per
infrastructure cost, which isn't quite the same thing.

For instance, narrow, deep lots would have less street frontage than square
lots and therefore have lower infrastructure cost and be more efficient.
Similarly, having large areas of undeveloped forest or park land don't
necessarily increase costs much if they don't require major infrastructure.
(One could reasonably debate whether undeveloped space significantly increases
the need for roads elsewhere to compensate for reduced density.)

------
lawrenceyan
An urban exploration channel I like watching for potential places to go to did
a dive through an abandoned Chinese ghost city recently [0]. It's honestly
pretty shocking, almost like a set to some kind of dystopian horror movie.
Perfect for urban exploration, but perhaps not the best for healthy long-term
sustainable economies.

It really makes you think about the potential house of cards everything must
be built on, and what's going to happen when it all catches up to us.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE-
Oa7mAyDU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE-Oa7mAyDU)

------
throw_this_one
Obviously this is super hard/impossible to calculate, but everybody should be
paying in a certain fraction of what they are getting out of the system.

ex. The entrepreneur that gets access to the road system, educated workforce,
police/legal system protection... if they didn't have that then they couldn't
profit from their widget. So pay something significant back to the system, or
you can't participate in the system.

------
Noos
There are plenty of cities you can afford. It's just that if you want walkable
and world class network effects, eventually the demand will drive us prices so
that only the wealthy can afford to live there.

~~~
burlesona
I don't think that "walkable" and "world-class network effects" are actually
required to go together. The majority of walkable places around the world are
just ordinary towns you've never heard of.

In North America this tends to be true mostly because just about everything
was walkable before WW2, and after WW2 the almost the only places that were
left that way were the places too wealthy and expensive to demolish and
rebuild around the car. Not too much of a surprise, the places that had that
much wealth 70 years ago are still the major hubs of the economy today.

~~~
Noos
If it were just walkable, you could pick a smaller city or downtown area and
live there, especially with a class that does intellectual or remote work. The
issue of "too expensive" is usually that everyone wants to crowd into a few
cities because of those network effects and social life features, walkability
is one of them.

For all the love of decentralization HN has, in practice they very much want
to centralize where wealth and power is.

~~~
ghaff
When most people say "walkable," what they generally really mean is walkable +
good transit + tons of places they'd actually want to walk to like parks,
bars, restaurants, and shops.

------
HashThis
This is mostly SanFran and NYC. Other cities can build housing and apartments.
Seattle has built tons of apartments. Costs are a bit high, but that is the
fuel to kick growing the supply into overdrive.

------
question11
I think it starts to make sense when you add in subways and the personal cost
of car ownership (1 car vs 3 car families) then density makes complete sense.

------
smoyer
This site/magazine/think-tank/whatever has told the same story for years ...
certainly there are case studies that they would cite as following their ideas
if those were succeeding somewhere? Barring evidence and scientific trials,
aren't these ravings from a group of malcontents?

~~~
projektfu
It takes a long time to do the experiment. A few years isn't enough. The
suburban pattern experiment was enacted without any control group and now
we're finally recognizing that it didn't work out as we hoped. Now that people
are realizing that Jane Jacobs was on to something, we have to experiment to
go forward.

The default in America is going to be what we're familiar with. Continue
building the next subdivision on the nearest farmland or forest. Run more
roads to it, widen the current ones to handle the new traffic, watch as the
people pull up stakes in their current suburbs and move out, leaving the
existing ones to decay.

Towns that follow a different approach will be able to see results in
different timescales, but hopefully we will relearn how to build towns that
can last generations.

------
lambdasquirrel
Shrugs... when you don't want to build, and then the only developers are the
folks that can push through all the NIMBY, then this is what you get.

~~~
loeg
The article is talking about public infrastructure — freeways, suburban
development — all things planned by local government. Not private development.

~~~
timerol
Private development funds public infrastructure though. So if you build really
expensive public infrastructure, you need a corresponding amount of private
development in order to pay for it. Really dense and valuable development like
in downtown Manhattan can support much more expensive public infrastructure
than a smaller town could.

~~~
loeg
Funding sources and project direction for municipal government are a lot more
diverse and complicated than the picture you're painting. Yes, everything kind
of feeds into everything else; you could broadly call this "the local
economy." Development is one piece of that, but not the only piece.

------
mathattack
What’s the endgame? Cities default on their Muni bonds? Then what? Giving up
pension obligations?

What should we be looking at for precedent? Detroit? Rural Japan?

~~~
jandrese
Higher tax rates that more accurately reflect fixed costs? This site seems to
think that if we aren’t spending enough to maintain our infrastructure then it
is impossible to maintain and we should radically redesign our entire society.

~~~
projektfu
This site is incrementalist. There's a vision for the future but it is not
radical.

------
brenden2
The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth, infinite
leverage, and assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for
example). It works, until it doesn't.

I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real
correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth.

~~~
airstrike
> The entire economy is based on the idea of never ending growth

Yes, because total factor productivity[0] always grows.

> infinite leverage

None of us can raise an infinite bank loan, so this isn't really true. There
are many, many, many limits to leverage.

> and assets that always inflate without increasing utility (homes for
> example).

Also not true... if the value of living in SF increases, it makes perfect
sense that land in SF is also more valuable

> It works, until it doesn't.

That's not really a falsifiable assertion.

> I don't know how long it will keep going, but I do think we need a real
> correction in order to redistribute some of the wealth.

Notwithstanding all the faults in the arguments above, how does distributing
wealth arbitrarily at a single point in time ("real correction") solve any of
the issues you present?

__________

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity)

~~~
ahnick
Why does TFP always grow? Is the fundamental reasoning that new technologies
and efficiency improvements in existing technologies will always occur over
time and therefore guarantees this growth?

~~~
nerfhammer
people are smart and slowly inevitably figure out ways to do things more
efficiently

~~~
stouset
And this does not and cannot continue indefinitely.

~~~
nerfhammer
what do you mean, do you think over time people are going to stop being
clever?

~~~
sudosysgen
Eventually, all the clever innovations will either have smaller and smaller
impacts, or will be impossible to implement due to material restrictions.
Exponential, infinite growth can not be sustainable.

~~~
jimbokun
I mean, once you have a Dyson sphere, sure.

We have a ways to go before then.

~~~
sudosysgen
Sure, but even beforethen growth will slow down very very significantly, and
might go to zero for some for significant periods. Just building a Dyson
sphere would probably take a few millenia.

~~~
fastball
You're assuming we don't make any fundamental discoveries in various fields
that allow for an exponential number of new technologies based on those
discoveries.

This seems short-sighted, as we've been doing that for most of human history,
and honestly I don't think we're very close to unveiling all the mysteries of
the universe.

We could start building a Dyson sphere right now. It would just take a long,
long, long time given our _current understanding of physics_ and technology.
Imagine all the things we might be able to achieve with our understanding of
physics in 300 years. Imagine the thing we will discover that will have their
own Dyson-sphere equivalents. i.e. things we discover that we know
(hypothetically) how do do, they are just not quite in our grasp.

~~~
sudosysgen
No, I'm projecting it would take millenia even if we start multiple hundreds
of years in the future. We absolutely could not even start building a Dyson
sphere today, the material constraints are far beyond anything we are capable
of.

The reason why I'm saying it would take in the thousands of years, is because
of this tautology: If we _want_ to build a Dyson sphere, it means that we are
still limited to the energy we can get from Earth. Given the issues that come
with extracting a large percentage of the energy received by the Earth, even
if we used fusion (due to thermodynamic constraints), the limit of energy used
can be placed around 5-10% of the energy Earth receives from the Sun (And that
would require extensive geo-engineering). With that sort of energy output, the
energy alone required in order to move the material needed for a Dyson sphere
from Earth orbit to Sun orbit would take literally millenia, and that's with a
combined effort from all of Mankind, which politically completely impossible
for the next centuries unless China or some other superpower was able to
magically establish true utopic statless communism and win away the rest of
the world to establish a world cooperation of sunshine and rainbows magically.

A Dyson sphere would weight around the mass of the Earth. The Hohmann transfer
from Earth to Mercury (fly-bys cannot work due the sheer mass knocking out
other planets from their orbits, this is actually the magnitude of energy
we're talking about). If we could magically make the material necessary appear
from Earth gradually, d/v from earth surface to LEO then from LEO to Mercury's
orbit or thereabouts via a Hohmann transfer is of around 15 000 m/s. If you
take the good old kinetic energy formula, 1/2mv^2, you find that this would
require a staggering amount of energy that would take millenia to amass.

~~~
fastball
So the actual logistics of starting work on a Dyson sphere wasn't really the
point of my comment. My only point was that we could make a start, because we
grasp the principles – surround the sun with a structure that can capture most
of its energy output.

Contrast with the plentitude of natural things we presumably _don 't_
understand / know about (unlike the sun) and there is a lot of potential for
the future.

That being said, for the construction of a sphere you would presumably _not_
be shipping matter from earth. You'd be towing in matter from asteroid belts
and such.

~~~
sudosysgen
Towing materials from asteroid belts would require almost as much energy, and
you would need some sort of megastructure for processing.

What I'm telling you is that there are hard limits that mean that our growth
must slow down. There is a hard limit to how much energy we can harness from
the earth, and a hard limit for how fast we can avoid this. Progress will have
to slow down, a society based on endless exponential growth at short-term
significant rates is untenable.

------
fheudjdjw
All of these City Lab and Strong Towns articles boil down to complaining about
how every city isn't exactly like San Francisco. Some people have lifestyle
preferences that are not as common in the bay area. Some people want good
infrastructure so that they can commute from affordable housing. This is an
example of SV hubris.

~~~
burlesona
The founder of Strong Towns lives in Brainerd, Minnesota, and the entire
organization was for many years exclusively focused on problems in small towns
in rural America. It's very different from City Lab.

------
tehjoker
The rich have built cities they can afford.

