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Make More Land

jefftk.com

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Re: Make More Land

#231

Post by jimmaswell »

davidw wrote: post #172
beerandt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest? Houston has its own set of problems.

Houston, like many American cities, massively subsidizes sprawl and an auto-centric (or auto-only) lifestyle. They may not have zoning, but they do have things like parking minimums throughout much of the city. And in their favor, it is a place where many people can afford to live, something that can't be said of places like the San Francisco bay area. Where I lived in Italy, I could walk to: * My kids' schools * A s…

why would I want to walk so much all day? I had my fill of that lifestyle in college just walking around campus.

Re: Make More Land

#232

Post by fiter »

strken wrote: post #89
fiter wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with a dedicated lane, there will still be more delays than with a grade separation (subway). Intersections are a bottleneck.

Intersections aren't as much of a factor when the majority of travel is on a freeway.

Are you thinking of dedicated on-ramps and off-ramps as well? Otherwise, I think stops will take a long time due to lane changes.

Re: Make More Land

#233

Post by fiter »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #93
fiter wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with a dedicated lane, there will still be more delays than with a grade separation (subway). Intersections are a bottleneck.

Not when buses get signal priority.

Signal priority over pedestrians too?

Re: Make More Land

#234

Post by haihaibye »

jefftk wrote: post #206
isostatic wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A land value tax, where you pay for the value of the land. Society builds a new subway stations near you, and land increases 20%, you pay 20% more tax. Society puts a power plant on your doorstep, land drops 40%, and you pay 40% less tax. What you do with that land is irrelevent - you pay the same whether you have a small house on a 15 story building on it.

If you buy cheap land, build a subway out to it, and now the land is worth more, what should happen to your land value tax? (I talked about this some in https://www.jefftk.com/p/land-value-taxes-are-distortionary , which I probably should have linked from the article)

The by far more common scenario is taxpayer dollars build infrastructure which is captured by private land holders. But thanks for coming up with an interesting thought experiment by inverting it.

If the government is reasonable they should have exemptions for this:

* Pay you back for infrastructure development

* Have the government agree to treat the area as a whole (it was unimproved land til you improved it) then grandfather prices in as you subdivide

If they are completely unreasonable I guess you are left with:

* Don't subdivide instead rent out the parts of your unimproved superblock

* Charge so much for a subway there is no consumer surplus and recoup your money that way

Re: Make More Land

#235

Post by numtel »

pas wrote: post #223
seiferteric wrote: post #35

> The world is very large, and cities are a very small portion of it. The land we set aside for animals should be outside of cities, where far more land is available at far less impact to people. Wetlands in particular are pretty rare and environmentally valuable places though. The fact that you would fill them in and "set aside" some probably less valuable land somewhere else is not very reassuring.

The idea is sound though. Calculate how much that particular wetland is worth ecologically and find a low-price equivalent somewhere, buy that. The Bay gets more space to sprawl their ugly single family madness and the wetlands (or more precisely the wetland equivalents) are safe too. Furthermore, it's possible to simply incrementally move the wetlands toward north by filling in a southern patch and wetland-ifying so…

So we've already destroyed 99% of wetlands in California in the last 150 years, let's play hot potato with the small patch that's left?

The entire central valley was a marsh. The delta is the small part that still slightly resembles its natural state.

Look at this picture of Sacramento from 1857 surrounded by ponds and wetlands:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sacramento,_Califor...

Re: Make More Land

#236

Post by kyledrake »

This isn't a bad idea and I would vote for it, but I can't imagine the political battle to build this would be any less hard than the one to fix density and transit issues with the land already there.

Americans don't love to hear this but the political battle here is fundamentally a class war between the people that own property in California and the people that don't. The haves will also fight this proposal for the same reasons they are financially incentivized to fight the proposals to improve the existing land. You can technology your way out of some political problems but probably not this one.

Re: Make More Land

#237

Post by romwell »

jefftk wrote: post #230
romwell wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way the thing that works literally in every other country on Earth will work (or is possible) in the Bay Area. No, we should fill the Bay, build more single-family units, and hope that whatever reasons we have for not having functional transit magically won't apply in the newly-minted suburb.

I'm very much not proposing building single-family units. See the discussion about density starting at "Wait, how many people are you saying would live there?"

Alright! We can't build multi-story, multi-use, walkable neighborhoods in San Jose now.

Is the proposition then to create more land to work around these restrictions? Why wouldn't the same forces apply on the new land?

What I am saying is that there's enough land already for the vision you have for the infilled areas. Your post is implicitly saying that it's easier to literally create land than change zoning laws.

And it might be, but let's be clear on what the problem actually is -- and the lack of land it is not.

EDIT: just to emphasize: Brooklyn has 2.5x population on (1/2.5)x area, and is growing -- all within the confines of an island.

Re: Make More Land

#238

Post by EdwardDiego »

beerandt wrote: post #86
rhacker wrote: post #63

> You do need to take fill into account to build in an earthquake-safe way, but modern engineering is well up to the task. That's pretty hand-wavy. I'm sure the guys in 1970 said the same argument. The word modern has been around for thousands of years.

Soil liquefaction is better understood, in the sense that we know better than to use certain soils for fill. A lot of these soils happen to be the ones dredged from water bottoms.

Yep, you definitely don't want to be building on uniformly graded soils, especially not unconsolidated fine-grained soils.

Which is pretty much why we got "residential red zones"[1] in Kaiapoi and Christchurch in the 2010 Greendale earthquake and subsequent aftershocks - suburban areas built on large unconsolidated deposits of fine alluvial silts left by the Waimakariri River in its long wanderings across the Canterbury Plains[2] suffered massive liquefaction, repeatedly.

IIRC liquefaction has even been observed in uniform gravels.

[1]https://www.linz.govt.nz/crown-property/types-crown-property...

[2]https://www.ecan.govt.nz/get-involved/news-and-events/zone-n...

Re: Make More Land

#239

Post by hnruss »

beerandt wrote: post #189
hnruss wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm referring to coastlines, estuaries, river deltas, wetlands, etc. In terms of surface area of the Earth, it seems easy to make the argument that those places are relatively rare. Development of this land hasn't been off-limits historically, although many of these places in the U.S. are now (rightfully) preserved. Certain types of development are more detrimental to ecosystems than other types. If something is rare…

>In terms of surface area of the Earth...relatively rare Using that definition, anything and everything could be justified as rare. Coastlines are the most dynamic places on Earth. They change, they adapt, they are a constantly shifting equilibrium. Geologically, they are the youngest and most easily replaceable features on Earth. They're not fragile things. What isn't natural is how static we've tried to keep them.…

When natural habit is destroyed by human development, it is not replaced by something "better". It is replaced by something different, which benefits some species over others (mainly humans). Coastlines and wetlands are never "moved", they're simply destroyed. The life that was there dies and species go extinct, one after the other.

Sure, it's possible for people to create new and better habitat for endangered species. The problem is that we usually don't. The "make more land" article doesn't even offer that as a suggested environmental offset. I imagine that the cost of doing so in a way that would actually be beneficial to the environment would nullify any gains to the developers.

I agree that coastlines aren't fragile on geologic time scales. The living things which depend on them are. There are millions of species that we haven't even cataloged, so how many are going extinct because of human development? We'll never know.

Re: Make More Land

#240

Post by EdwardDiego »

greggman2 wrote: post #102
beerandt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soil liquefaction is better understood, in the sense that we know better than to use certain soils for fill. A lot of these soils happen to be the ones dredged from water bottoms.

Even Japan doesn't handle earthquakes (according to an NHK special on quakes). They built all these earthquake proof buildings and then the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake came along with new behavior that none of the buildings in Japan are built for. They did come up with new ways to build to handle this new type of quake but of course that's only for buildings since 2016 (probably more like 2018 when they figured out what…

Question is, did people get out of those buildings alive?
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