Stop the Plague of Sprawl!

[phx1138]

why not have lots of small towns.

For a start, it multiplies the amount of bureaucracy needed to cope with the same pop.

the issue with agriculture has more to do with subsidization than mechinization...

With that I disagree. Mechanization has been around much longer than subsidies.

outh Portland, OR as a good example of how to manage the space in an interesting way. You have detached houses next to small (2-4 unit) apartments next to small stores next to a short line of rowhouses, usually running perpendicular to a commercial high street, and all served by an increasingly legendary transportation package.

As I said, this is a thought experiment. We're not all relocating to Kentucky. But density doesn't have to be scary. And detached housing doesn't have to lead to sprawl.

I would agree with all of that. It doesn't have to look like Hong Kong, Tokyo, or London...or have the same problems.

 

[history nerd]

For a start, it multiplies the amount of bureaucracy needed to cope with the same pop.

With that I disagree. Mechanization has been around much longer than subsidies.

1) Local is always better, no one knows better how to run a given area than the people living there. The smaller the town the less bureaucracy is needed so even if it produces more bureaucrats and politicians over all its better because we can get closer and closer to direct democracy and more and more direct election of representatives.

2)yes, it has. While Mechanization does lead to larger farms over all it does not weed out the smaller producers to the extent that subsidies do, when you subsidize a specific crop and especially specific strains of a crop and especially when you subsidize specific corporations it creates a monopoly that drives out competition i.e. small farmers. without the subsidies and legal protections of the big agribusinesses any relatively wealthy individual with some know how would be able to compete in the agricultural industry and we would see the proliferation of small farms. This does not mean that everyone can become a farmer but it does mean that the smaller farmers will have less infrastructure and will want to sell at a (more) local level which means processing facilities for their products will have to be located closer to the producers in towns and small cities rather than shipping products long distance to large population centers and then shipping the processed product all the way back for sale. This makes jobs more spread out, allowing those sick of the city to get jobs in small towns rather than commuting from suburban sprawl.

 

[Workable Goblin]

1) Local is always better, no one knows better how to run a given area than the people living there. The smaller the town the less bureaucracy is needed so even if it produces more bureaucrats and politicians over all its better because we can get closer and closer to direct democracy and more and more direct election of representatives

Local is not always better, as can be illustrated by the water rights of a hypothetical river in a dry land. From a purely local perspective, it's always better for the towns higher up to take the maximum amount possible from the river, and damn the towns downstream, since that will allow them to grow the maximum amount of crops and support the maximum amount of people. Yet that solution is clearly not the best for every town put together, let alone for the river itself (the river ecosystem, etc.).

Clearly, in this situation some higher authority (a river authority, for instance) is needed to help sort out how much each town gets and how much is reserved for the river, and help adjudicate conflicts between towns as to how much they are getting in, eg., dry years or wet years. The same is true in many other fields as well, which is why national bureaucracies exist in the first place. It's true that in many cases local control is superior to national or even state-level authorities, but in many other cases it simply isn't adequate, and sometimes where it is and isn't enough is a very hard question to answer (that's the fun of it).

 

[history nerd]

Local is not always better, as can be illustrated by the water rights of a hypothetical river in a dry land. From a purely local perspective, it's always better for the towns higher up to take the maximum amount possible from the river, and damn the towns downstream, since that will allow them to grow the maximum amount of crops and support the maximum amount of people. Yet that solution is clearly not the best for every town put together, let alone for the river itself (the river ecosystem, etc.).

Clearly, in this situation some higher authority (a river authority, for instance) is needed to help sort out how much each town gets and how much is reserved for the river, and help adjudicate conflicts between towns as to how much they are getting in, eg., dry years or wet years. The same is true in many other fields as well, which is why national bureaucracies exist in the first place. It's true that in many cases local control is superior to national or even state-level authorities, but in many other cases it simply isn't adequate, and sometimes where it is and isn't enough is a very hard question to answer (that's the fun of it).

broad over generalization gonna be broad and overgeneralized.

... in response: sure sometimes, the problem is when those bureaucracies function of their own accord rather than being accountable to the municipalities that they represent and you end up with things like CA stealing all of NVs water.

 

[phx1138]

Local is always better, no one knows better how to run a given area than the people living there. The smaller the town the less bureaucracy is needed so even if it produces more bureaucrats and politicians over all its better because we can get closer and closer to direct democracy and more and more direct election of representatives.

Perhaps. If towns were superior in all ways, we wouldn't have cities... I'm not well-enough versed in psychology or demographics, or whatever science is appropriate, to know why cities arose, & why they persist. Since there appears to be an appeal to greater opportunities in cities, thanks to greater concentrations of population, I suspect economics is at least part of it.

Mechanization does lead to larger farms over all it does not weed out the smaller producers to the extent that subsidies do, when you subsidize a specific crop and especially specific strains of a crop and especially when you subsidize specific corporations it creates a monopoly that drives out competition i.e. small farmers. without the subsidies and legal protections of the big agribusinesses any relatively wealthy individual with some know how would be able to compete in the agricultural industry and we would see the proliferation of small farms. This does not mean that everyone can become a farmer but it does mean that the smaller farmers will have less infrastructure and will want to sell at a (more) local level which means processing facilities for their products will have to be located closer to the producers in towns and small cities rather than shipping products long distance to large population centers and then shipping the processed product all the way back for sale. This makes jobs more spread out, allowing those sick of the city to get jobs in small towns rather than commuting from suburban sprawl.

That's interesting, if true. (IDK either way.) I wonder why that apparently piecemeal approach is superior to the economies of scale of unified processing. This sounds to me like a recipe for higher costs all the way along the supply chain.

some higher authority (a river authority, for instance) is needed to help sort out how much each town gets

True. I don't think that was the point. Nor was I suggesting state or federal oversight isn't sometimes required, just comparing city to town: more/less like v like.

CA stealing all of NVs water.

Let's not forget that's in no small part because L.A. has scant regulation on wastage, not least because CA won't enact or enforce it. Nor because there's a lobby of lunatics irrigating the desert to grow cotton.

Nor because the farmers, & Angelinos, don't pay the full cost of their water, thanks to a federal subsidy... More bad policy decisions.

 

[ArKhan]

Shorter range electric cars continue to dominate after 1990. People commute shorter distances. Cities become more densly populated.

 

[TxCoatl1970]

@phx-
LA's truly an interesting case study. LA's metastasizing thanks to Hoover Dam, WWII's need for skunk works and insistence on building everything everywhere and various other factors allowing it to grow pretty much unchecked, you wouldn't haven't seen the explosive growth of NV, Phoenix and other Southwestern cities.

You touched upon the third rail of what makes California's agriculture possible- the complete diversion of both NoCal and Colorado River watersheds so the Inland Empire through the Imperial Valley can be truck garden of the gods.

Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation had some pretty broad mandates in the 1930's to radically transform what water goes where in the name of flood control, building drought-proof reservoirs, providing irrigation water, and damming whatever looked halfway good for generating hydroelectric power as public-works projects during the Depression and ameliorating/preventing another Dust Bowl with an extended middle finger to both environmental effects and property rights it took forty years to address via NEPA, ESA, and so forth. Now, federal projects went from checking with nobody else to having to consult everyone in obscene detail.

Anyhow, agriculture is the 1000-lb gorilla of water usage, dwarfing any other aspects by 3-1. Sure, you need a lot of water for generating power, but nowhere near what agriculture uses, often to grow crops in places that make zero sense where they're being grown.

Cities have one supplier of water and can set water rates and actually formulate and enforce saner water use policies. Since the 1990's more water utilities have gotten religion about promoting xeriscaping and restricting water usage.
Agriculture OTOH draws water from many sources and there's a multitude of players using private property claims on water that make it next to impossible to formulate and enforce a sane water-use policy.
Agribiz has a damned effective lobby to prevent any effective federal or state actions to change that too.

LSS, you'd have to butterfly a lot of things for sprawl not to happen. Since sprawl usually involves farmers selling out to developers you'd have to butterfly the reasons those farmers near cities sold out.

As I said before, it'd also have been nice if you didn't bottle up residential construction for sixteen years so housing stock in the Midwest and East Coast cities didn't get so dilapidated from 1929-1945.

 

[history nerd]

Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation had some pretty broad mandates in the 1930's to radically transform what water goes where in the name of flood control, building drought-proof reservoirs, providing irrigation water, and damming whatever looked halfway good for generating hydroelectric power as public-works projects during the Depression and ameliorating/preventing another Dust Bowl with an extended middle finger to both environmental effects and property rights it took forty years to address via NEPA, ESA, and so forth. Now, federal projects went from checking with nobody else to having to consult everyone in obscene detail.

The mandate that they had was truly awful, here in SD the intentionally flooded reservations without adequate prior warning just as a big F U to the natives... honestly if you cant fund something on the private level or through the free market it likely means it shouldn't be done. Rerouting rivers is one of the worst things we have done to this planet/country.

 

[history nerd]

Perhaps. If towns were superior in all ways, we wouldn't have cities... I'm not well-enough versed in psychology or demographics, or whatever science is appropriate, to know why cities arose, & why they persist. Since there appears to be an appeal to greater opportunities in cities, thanks to greater concentrations of population, I suspect economics is at least part of it.

That's interesting, if true. (IDK either way.) I wonder why that apparently piecemeal approach is superior to the economies of scale of unified processing. This sounds to me like a recipe for higher costs all the way along the supply chain.

True. I don't think that was the point. Nor was I suggesting state or federal oversight isn't sometimes required, just comparing city to town: more/less like v like.



Let's not forget that's in no small part because L.A. has scant regulation on wastage, not least because CA won't enact or enforce it. Nor because there's a lobby of lunatics irrigating the desert to grow cotton.

Nor because the farmers, & Angelinos, don't pay the full cost of their water, thanks to a federal subsidy... More bad policy decisions.

If the US ever breaks up the first thing that will happen will be a massive war between CA and the rest of the west when the water gets shut off... I would love to see a future TL based on that actually.

 

[phx1138]

LA's truly an interesting case study. LA's metastasizing thanks to Hoover Dam, WWII's need for skunk works and insistence on building everything everywhere and various other factors allowing it to grow pretty much unchecked, you wouldn't haven't seen the explosive growth of NV, Phoenix and other Southwestern cities.

Some of that, during the war, was for really good reasons: lots of sun & clear weather meant you could test fly on a whim. (It's one reason Piper thought of relocating up here.)

You touched upon the third rail of what makes California's agriculture possible- the complete diversion of both NoCal and Colorado River watersheds so the Inland Empire through the Imperial Valley can be truck garden of the gods.

Worse still, they allocated the Colorado flow at a peak year, not realizing it was unlikely to stay that high...

Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation had some pretty broad mandates in the 1930's to radically transform what water goes where in the name of flood control, building drought-proof reservoirs, providing irrigation water, and damming whatever looked halfway good for generating hydroelectric power as public-works projects during the Depression and ameliorating/preventing another Dust Bowl with an extended middle finger to both environmental effects and property rights it took forty years to address via NEPA, ESA, and so forth. Now, federal projects went from checking with nobody else to having to consult everyone in obscene detail.

Yeah, there's some over-reaction. At the time, I don't think most people, even most conservationists/environmentalists, understood just how serious the impacts could, or would, be.

In the Depression, I'd bet the idea of jobs took such dominance, it wouldn't have mattered a lot.

Anyhow, agriculture is the 1000-lb gorilla of water usage, dwarfing any other aspects by 3-1. Sure, you need a lot of water for generating power, but nowhere near what agriculture uses, often to grow crops in places that make zero sense where they're being grown.

Entirely agree with that. Seriously, cotton (the #1 most water-intensive crop being grown) in the desert? Even lettuce is pretty nutty.

Cities have one supplier of water and can set water rates and actually formulate and enforce saner water use policies. Since the 1990's more water utilities have gotten religion about promoting xeriscaping and restricting water usage.

I had a feeling that was a city responsibility, but didn't know. Thx for clearing it up. Also glad to hear it's changing.

Agriculture OTOH draws water from many sources and there's a multitude of players using private property claims on water that make it next to impossible to formulate and enforce a sane water-use policy.
Agribiz has a damned effective lobby to prevent any effective federal or state actions to change that too.

Word, & then some.

you'd have to butterfly a lot of things for sprawl not to happen. Since sprawl usually involves farmers selling out to developers you'd have to butterfly the reasons those farmers near cities sold out.

IDK. AFAICT, it takes quite small changes in tax treatment, like not making it so unattractive to farm near cities (or so attractive to sell to developers), or so attractive to buy larger houses.

As I said before, it'd also have been nice if you didn't bottle up residential construction for sixteen years so housing stock in the Midwest and East Coast cities didn't get so dilapidated from 1929-1945.

Agreed. Do you think there were opportunities for developers to buy up old stocks & rebuild? So an incentive, or a visionary developer, in the Depression, with the aim to rebuild, at a time when prices are very low & demand for jobs is high?

if you cant fund something on the private level or through the free market it likely means it shouldn't be done.

So you think the TVA was a bad idea? (I might also ask about commsats, which were gov't funded in the first instance...)

Yes, some of the consequences were unfortunate. Also unanticipated, AFAIK.

Rerouting rivers is one of the worst things we have done to this planet/country.

I'd generally agree with that. The consequences may be more dire than anybody anticipates... Frex, did you know, if you take enough river flow out of the Arctic, which the Soviet diversion schemes proposed (& some U.S. proposals did, too, IIRC), you could shut off the Gulf Stream?

Meanwhile, we hear Congressmen & Senators from Arizona & New Mexico talking about how Canada "has to give us water". Take some advice from Bill Maher: turn off the damn fountains. Tear up the golf courses. Then maybe we'll talk.

Better still, why don't you do what Niven & Pournelle proposed, & go grab some icebergs? Tow them into L.A. or Galveston, melt them, & pump the water where you want it...

If the US ever breaks up the first thing that will happen will be a massive war between CA and the rest of the west when the water gets shut off... I would love to see a future TL based on that actually.

I'm waiting for the first water pipelines from Canada. Expect them to get blown up pretty fast...

 

[Workable Goblin]

honestly if you cant fund something on the private level or through the free market it likely means it shouldn't be done.

So...no transcontinental railroad (significant government support, even if the results were privately owned)? No interstates? No space program?

Well, there's lots of things I could put here, things which were funded by the government and not private industry and turned out to be kind of important or useful, but those are three pretty big things.

 

[Cryptic]

The Interstate Highway System has taken a lot of the blame for urban sprawl in the U.S. Conspiracy has been blamed for destroying the urban & interurban tram systems.

So: how would you prevent it?

Prevent sprawl, or the highway system? Sprawl could be limited by state laws that make it difficult to sell / subdivide farm land for other purposes. At the federal level, the hinderance could be tax based.

In an alternative scenario, perhaps such laws were put in place inthe 1930s as a means to alleviate pressure on small farmers.

 

[history nerd]

So...no transcontinental railroad (significant government support, even if the results were privately owned)? No interstates? No space program?

Well, there's lots of things I could put here, things which were funded by the government and not private industry and turned out to be kind of important or useful, but those are three pretty big things.

I haven't studied interstates or the space program extensively (although I have a feeling that the space program be politicized has caused it to be strangled by debate over funding and polo tics being placed over science.)

I can however comment on the transcontinental railroad, the policy implemented by the US government alongside the homestead movement (don't even get me started on that one) royally screwed up the west. While the transcontinental railroad did a great job of connecting the wealthy west and east coasts it broke up grazing and cattle drives in the west by giving huge chunks of land to private industry and the federal government basically making it impossible for large scale ranching and grazing wich is really what the high plains are suitable for, and encouraged farming and higher population density. This not only directly contributed to the dust bowl but kept the west from reaching its potential for beef and wool production. Not to mention the fact that it is THE MAJOR FACTOR that caused the Bison to nearly go extinct, even more than over hunting, because it split the heard. And that isn't even to mention the exploitative nature of the railroad. It was commonly cheaper to ship something from Chicago to Washington through Montana for example than to ship something from Montana to Washington. Basically the Federal government and industry purposefully turned the rocky mountains and high plains into an internal colony.

Without the federal government a transcontinental railway system would have eventually happened, albeit much later when it would actually be profitable (probably once oil started to be produced in high volumes) and once the west was able to become self-sustaining with its own system of property rights, and land usage rather than having one imposed on them from DC.

 

[history nerd]

Yes, some of the consequences were unfortunate. Also unanticipated, AFAIK.


I'm waiting for the first water pipelines from Canada. Expect them to get blown up pretty fast...

1) I'm of the opinion that you get more unanticipated consequences when you encourage large scale changes like the kind large governments seem to love. Small organic change is better than large scale institutional change because you can notice unintended consequences as you go along and usually it can be noticed on a local level before the cause is exported to other areas.

2) Oh yeah it would get crazy! Imagine the mass migration out of CA, most likely to the north (more hospitable than the Mojave) displacing norther Californians. The Willamette Valley better be ready for the southern horde!

 

[Beedok]

Municiple governments are always a horribly corrupt joke.

 

[Workable Goblin]

I haven't studied interstates or the space program extensively (although I have a feeling that the space program be politicized has caused it to be strangled by debate over funding and polo tics being placed over science.)

Your last statement makes no sense (as in, I can't really figure out what you're trying to say). However, I can say that no (sane) private space program would ever have spent a dime on science or scientific missions. For that matter, and what I was alluding to given phx1138's post, the extensive government-funded R&D and government-subsidized launches that allowed the development of the large communications satellite industry could not have taken place in a purely free market regime. Large monetary losses would have had to have been absorbed before any commercial activity could have taken place.

 

[history nerd]

governments are always a horribly corrupt joke.

fixed it for you

 

[history nerd]

Your last statement makes no sense (as in, I can't really figure out what you're trying to say). However, I can say that no (sane) private space program would ever have spent a dime on science or scientific missions. For that matter, and what I was alluding to given phx1138's post, the extensive government-funded R&D and government-subsidized launches that allowed the development of the large communications satellite industry could not have taken place in a purely free market regime. Large monetary losses would have had to have been absorbed before any commercial activity could have taken place.

Like I mentioned I am far from an expert, I welcome any knowledge on the subject you have to bestow on me. I have literally never studied the space program other than the "we beat the reds" line I got in high school. So please, enlighten me!

 

[Workable Goblin]

Like I mentioned I am far from an expert, I welcome any knowledge on the subject you have to bestow on me. I have literally never studied the space program other than the "we beat the reds" line I got in high school. So please, enlighten me!

Well, the thing is that virtually every space launcher developed up until very recently has been a direct derivative of an ICBM or IRBM. For example, the commercially very important Delta was directly based off the Thor IRBM until the Delta IV, the unsuccessful Europa project was based off the Blue Streak IRBM, of course the R-7 family was directly derived from an ICBM (the R-7), and so on and so forth.

Even the ones that haven't been ICBM/IRBM-derived, like Saturn, the Shuttle, or Ariane have benefited very heavily from extremely large amounts of governmental R&D done to develop said systems, often for military purposes. For example, SpaceX could look at a large number of experiments done since the 1950s and conclude that liquid oxygen and kerosene were a good combination for a cheap rocket engine, and that gas-generator technology was also a good bet for that, since the United States and (especially) Russia had done an awful lot of experiments with alternative technologies that showed that those alternatives weren't necessarily as good, whatever their theoretical advantages, and a lot of other entrepreneurs had tried and failed to build more ambitious projects (Gary Hudson, for instance). So even beyond the subsidies they have received for things like COTS, they have benefited heavily from past government R&D spending.

That's just launch vehicles, of course. Plenty of other space systems have benefited from huge government investments, again often in the name of national security.

 

[history nerd]

Well, the thing is that virtually every space launcher developed up until very recently has been a direct derivative of an ICBM or IRBM. For example, the commercially very important Delta was directly based off the Thor IRBM until the Delta IV, the unsuccessful Europa project was based off the Blue Streak IRBM, of course the R-7 family was directly derived from an ICBM (the R-7), and so on and so forth.

Even the ones that haven't been ICBM/IRBM-derived, like Saturn, the Shuttle, or Ariane have benefited very heavily from extremely large amounts of governmental R&D done to develop said systems, often for military purposes. For example, SpaceX could look at a large number of experiments done since the 1950s and conclude that liquid oxygen and kerosene were a good combination for a cheap rocket engine, and that gas-generator technology was also a good bet for that, since the United States and (especially) Russia had done an awful lot of experiments with alternative technologies that showed that those alternatives weren't necessarily as good, whatever their theoretical advantages, and a lot of other entrepreneurs had tried and failed to build more ambitious projects (Gary Hudson, for instance). So even beyond the subsidies they have received for things like COTS, they have benefited heavily from past government R&D spending.

That's just launch vehicles, of course. Plenty of other space systems have benefited from huge government investments, again often in the name of national security.

1st paragraph: way over my head with those acronyms.

whole post: I always have trouble with the fact that technology is so often driven by the desire to kill people more efficiently.... a hard reality for a peace lover.