241–250 of 279 posts
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" . . . America's oldest city . . ." Santa Fe, Newport News, Hampton, Albany, and Jersey City would disagree.
He could mean that in the sense of "first to declare independence from European colonists and fall under control of the political body that would become the United States."
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> Towns and villages in Europe are almost always highly compact compared to the US That's a political choice. I mean, yes, the US has a lot of land and fewer people, but there are plenty of places that might be more compact if it were legal.
> That's a political choice. Well, yes, in that, among other things, many European towns and cities are shaped by political choices made when population to length of enclosing wall ratio was an important political consideration.
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I'm perfectly fine with the idea of a "land value tax" so long as the value of unimproved land is properly assessed: it is only use by humans that gives land economic value, so the value of unimproved land is zero. Feel free to multiply that by whatever rate you see fit.
imagine you have a single acre of dirt in the middle of the financial district in Manhattan. even if you aren't using it yourself, you really think the value of that land is zero? the fact that you aren't currently using the land for anything doesn't mean someone else couldn't use it for something extremely valuable. you are keeping that land idle at a massive opportunity cost. on the flip side, if you have a huge pl…
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Yeah, this was my first objection, and the article addresses it in a way that I find completely misses the point. I think it's a fantastic idea overall, but not at the expense of wetlands preserves. Then again, what would actually be a fantastic idea overall would be increasing density in existing areas, but clearly that's politically fraught right now.
I used to think, why not build in desert or unproductive land? Well, you need water and you need jobs. There is a reason very few people want to live in Siberia (south of the tundra). Except for some mineral extraction, fur trappers and some science/military outposts there’s not much to attract people even when Putin promises free land.
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Towns and villages in Europe are almost always highly compact compared to the US - I put it to that auto ownership was a bit lower and trains could be more efficient. Plus the relatively homogenized cultured meant there was less of a need to have sub enclaves on things other than economic class.
> Towns and villages in Europe are almost always highly compact compared to the US That's a political choice. I mean, yes, the US has a lot of land and fewer people, but there are plenty of places that might be more compact if it were legal.
”Making more land” requires destruction of relatively rare marine habitats. Sure, there’s a lot of ocean out there, but many species thrive where the land naturally meets the sea. Bays and estuaries are treasures, not just bits of water waiting to be paved.
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I used to think, why not build in desert or unproductive land? Well, you need water and you need jobs. There is a reason very few people want to live in Siberia (south of the tundra). Except for some mineral extraction, fur trappers and some science/military outposts there’s not much to attract people even when Putin promises free land.
There's plenty of room between "inhospitable desert" and "protected wetlands" where people could live.
America has an attitude problem. It thinks it is already developed. Like, there is nothing left to do. That is the single biggest difference between the America of today and the America of the last century. The Netherlands feels more like India, in that everything is under a state of continual improvement all the time. The Netherlands is fantastically futuristic, though, and super nice (much more developed than most…
That’s exactly our problem. Even on hacker news, check out the top comment on any new proposal or technology. It’s always negatively mentioning the downsides and unintended consequences.
I doubt too many people became engineers or entrepreneurs because they were pessimistic luddites.
I don't see a lot of people here poo-pooing public space programs or other truly horizon expanding projects.
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I tend to lean libertarian on most issues, but I am starting to think it just doesn't make very much sense for people to own land privately. it's one of the only things in the world that is truly scarce (ie, you can't make more plots in the upper east side), and the value of land tends to be based much more on improvements to the surrounding area than improvements to the land itself. also, land ownership seems to lea…
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.
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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...