Tag Archive for: megacities

Mega Cities Require Mega Suburbs

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Housing is unaffordable in California, and, increasingly, housing is becoming unaffordable in every other part of the United States where Democrats control state legislatures and city councils. And in the spirit of nonpartisanship, it is fair to say that when it comes to housing, far too many Republicans share the same agenda and goals as their supposed Democrat opponents.

The shame of these policies is not only the misery they impose on growing proportions of Americans, but the pessimism they represent. Read beyond the initial recitation of mundane obstacles to share a positive vision of the future. The economics of affordable housing do not have to be complicated. Awesome housing for everyone can be realized merely by changing the conventional wisdom.

Here are four policy choices that have turned millions of Americans into slaves to their home mortgages, and pushed additional millions into cheap rentals that cost them most of their paycheck.

1 – Punitively high fees for building permits. These exorbitant sums are necessary to pay for infrastructure such as connector roads and utility conduits that cities used to pay for out of their operating budgets. But out-of-control expansion of government combined with overmarket pay negotiated by government unions has changed all that. Now local governments have to charge developer fees that can easily exceed $100,000 per home.

2 – Laws that require “inclusive zoning,” whereby low income people are given subsidized homes and apartments in high-income neighborhoods. This pushes up the costs for housing that people have to actually pay for without relying on government handouts.

3 – Endless litigation by environmentalist attorneys bent on collecting settlements for themselves and their organizations, as well as environmental litigation used by labor unions as leverage to force developers to use union labor.

4 – The policies of “urban containment,” whereby for environmental reasons, vast expanses of land that could be used for new homes are off limits to developers.

While the first three on this list are quite enough to push home prices up, it is the fourth that delivers the fatal blow to any hope of changing the equation and making homes affordable again. This one truism, that housing must be dense and packed within existing cities, is the conventional wisdom that has destroyed affordable housing and corrupted a generation of policymakers. It must be shattered.

Only when cities can build out as well as up can there be less expensive construction costs and lower land costs. And this policy, supposedly required to save the planetary environment, is based on two fundamentally flawed premises.

Urban Containment is 21st Century Green Apartheid

The first false premise is the density delusion, the idea that we are running out of land. In nearly every region on earth, this is false. In California, the urban footprint only consumes 8,200 square miles, barely 5 percent of the total land in the state. If you put ten million people into new homes on quarter acre lots, four per home, with an equivalent area set aside for new roads and new commercial and industrial use, you wouldn’t even consume an additional 2,000 square miles! California’s cattle ranches consume over 25,000 square miles. There’s plenty of room.

In the rest of the United States, the same surprising statistics apply. The lower 48 states in the U.S. are less than 4 percent urbanized. Even worldwide, there is plenty of available land. If you put ten billion people into new homes on quarter acre lots, four per home, with an equivalent area set aside for new roads and new commercial and industrial use, you would only consume 3.8 percent of all land excluding Antarctica. Most estimates of urbanization currently worldwide are around 2.7 percent. Allowing suburban dispersion of global population is very unlikely to require even 3.8 percent of available land. Not only will many people prefer to live in the high density urban cores, but breakthroughs in indoor agriculture and aquaculture, along with ongoing improvements in crop yields, will likely allow global reserves of farmland to shrink at a faster rate than mega suburbs expand.

The other false premise used to justify urban containment is that more single family homes means more “sprawl,” which will mean more “vehicle miles traveled,” which will contribute more “greenhouse gasses” to the atmosphere, leading to catastrophic “climate change.”

With apologies for the sarcasm quotes, and as Sleepy Joe Biden would say, “but here’s the deal, folks:” You can believe that greenhouse gas is a planet killer all you like, but building entire new low density cities will not cause an appreciable increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The studies that make this claim are biased, ignore crucial variables, and make no allowances for dazzling new technologies. Zero emission vehicles are just the beginning.

What we can barely imagine today will become passe by the middle of this century. For starters, the advancing world of virtual workforces, which just took a quantum leap forward during the pandemic lockdown, will become the rule rather than the exception. And the jobs that require physical presence will increasingly be jobs that are by their nature dispersed to where the people are – schools, restaurants, services, trades.

By the late 21st century, and contrary to Malthusian fearmongering, magnificent mega cities will be vital and evolving. Building materials will be more abundant than ever, with concrete harvested from desalinated ocean brine, and precious minerals arriving from mining the asteroid belt. With fusion power finally perfected, energy will cheap and inexhaustible. And connecting the mega cities to the mega suburbs will be not only next generation roads, but air lanes filled with passenger drones.

What motivates opponents of the single family dwelling – apart from their misanthropy, greed, and blinkered fanaticism – is a poverty of the imagination. Many future suburbs will be disbursed in areas inaccessible by road, with only flying vehicles providing access. Modular homes with almost no footprint, custom designed and mass manufactured at affordable prices, will be air dropped into place, sparing most of the required on-site construction. Other suburbs, more contiguous with major cities, will have the required connector roads and residential streets, but these roads will be fewer and smaller, since many residents will telecommute, and others will travel by air.

Space Travel, Spin-off Technology

Back in the 1960s, when the U.S. was in a desperate rush to beat the Soviets to the moon, dissident Americans bemoaned the fact that we were spending billions to conquer space while there were still people living in poverty back down here on earth. Gil Scott-Heron, an artist of unimpeachable integrity, but more than a little bitterness, wrote the classic “Whitey On the Moon.”

With respect, Gil Scott-Heron was wrong. Everyone benefited from the moon landing. The American space program of the 1960s paved the way for everything from semi-conductors to integrated circuits, dramatic advances in rocketry, breakthroughs in civil, electrical, aeronautical and engineering science, complex software, durable and lightweight composite materials, and, for a few specifics—everything from CT scanners to liquid-cooled garments to freeze-dried food.

Maybe an overt cold war with China can’t come soon enough. A new space race could channel some of this six trillion dollars of suddenly manufactured money into building a permanent base on the south pole of the moon, to use as a jumping off point for asteroid mining. And it isn’t just abundant minerals that will result from the industrialization of the solar system. The spin-offs will be more sophisticated systems than ever to process and recycle air, water and waste, manage energy, and grow food. Imagine how these space technologies will translate into self contained and inexpensive, low footprint modular homes that can offer residential comfort anywhere on earth.

We have no idea today how many transformative innovations will come from a revitalized space program, but if the legacy of the 1960s is any indication, they will be miraculous.

Any examination of how cities and suburbs will look or should look on this planet one-hundred years from now must take into account these promising trends. Global population is leveling off. Science and technology is advancing at an increasing rate, and every year it offers new breakthroughs, solutions and cures. An optimist would look at the last several decades and conclude, despite the challenges, humanity is on a relentless march towards a better quality of life for everyone. An article published by the BBC last year lists several reasons “why the world is improving,” including rising life expectancy, falling infant mortality, falling rates of fertility, ongoing GDP growth, less income inequality, the spread of democracy, and fewer armed conflicts.

This argument for what Wired once called the “Long Boom” is embodied in the philosophy of “New Optimism,” with its principal proponent the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg. According to Lomborg, “air and water are getting cleaner, endangered species and forests are holding their own, and the risks associated with global warming are exaggerated.” He contends that “more people than ever before, living in all parts of the globe, are becoming healthier, richer, and better educated; that the human race is living longer and more peaceably; that we’re considerably freer to pursue our happiness.”

As we await permission to venture outside our dwellings once again – or, for that matter, as we defiantly venture outside before they issue the all-clear – we have an opportunity to reflect on the many types of confinement we must overcome. Confinement to our homes. Confinement within politically contrived barriers around our cities, Green Bantustans, where our lives are needlessly dangerous and expensive. Confinement on this world, when treasures await in the most mega of the mega suburbs, the Habitable Zone, all around the sun.

The worst possible move that human societies can make is to panic now, as our species stands on the cusp of more options, more enlightenment, more freedom and prosperity than ever before.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Sustainable Megacities

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Modern urban centers around the world now have neighborhoods that house well over 100,000 people per square mile. The Choa Chu Kang district in Singapore, defined by boulevards lined with 10 to 12 story mid-rise residential buildings, has a population density of more than 125,000 people per square mile. The entire borough of Manhattan has an average population density of more than 70,000 people per square mile, with far higher densities in areas of midtown and lower Manhattan.

According to a 2018 report released by the United Nations, today 55 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is estimated to increase to 68 percent by 2050. At the same time, the United Nations projects the global population to increase from 7.8 billion today to 9.7 billion by 2050. These projections lead to a surprising calculation: the absolute number of people living in rural areas is expected to decline, from 3.5 billion today to only 3.1 billion in 2050.

What should not be surprising by now is that people around the world, voluntarily and inexorably, are migrating from rural areas to cities. But the corollary effect is relatively unheralded; that around the world, open land is slowly depopulating. For the most part, this is happening absent government coercion. It flies in the face of the conventional wisdom—heard endlessly in the United States—that we are running out of open space. We aren’t.

If we have a sustainability challenge, it is not to preserve open space—not only because the world’s population is already moving into cities faster than the world’s population is increasing, but because the absolute urban footprint on the planet is relatively insignificant.

This reality was explored at great depth in “The Density Delusion,” and can be distilled down to this: If 10 billion people were all to live in four-person households that were each on quarter-acre lots and everyone had an equivalent amount of space allotted for commercial and industrial use, that would equate to a population density of 5,210 people per square mile, and at that density would only consume 3.8 percent of all land area on earth. Actual estimates of worldwide urbanization as of 2018 are only 2.7 percent of global land area excluding Antarctica, and some analysts believe this estimate is grossly overstated.

But not everyone wants to live in a home with a yard that big. Most people would be content living on a smaller lot, and a large proportion of the population prefers to live in homes with no yard at all. Billions of people, for that matter, apparently prefer to live in high-rise apartments. It is not suburban sprawl that constitutes the prevailing sustainability challenge to humanity, it is building megacities that are resilient to environmental and economic threats, and constitute an inviting destination for migrants from rural areas.

Cheap Energy Is Vital 

The consequences of environmentalists making “climate change” their central focus instead of population growth are epic. Two factors, more than anything else, induce people to voluntarily limit the size of their families: prosperity and urbanization. Both of these require cheap and abundant energy.

It is estimated that as of 2020 there are 38 “megacities” on earth, defined as a metropolitan area with over 10 million inhabitants. Of these, only six—Tokyo, Seoul, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and London—are located within high-income nations. Moreover, nearly all the forecast growth of megacities will be in developing nations, in places like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi, Lahore, Lagos, and Kinshasa.

So what innovations being pioneered today will enable megacities in the future to provide a high quality of life, and how will cities of such size and density reduce their vulnerability to economic or physical disruptions?

The biggest variable governing the success or failure of megacities is energy. Abundant, affordable, and reliable energy is not only a nonnegotiable prerequisite for prosperity around the world, but it is also the only way megacities are feasible. Environmentalists typically observe, correctly, that per capita energy consumption is lower in cities, but they ignore the converse—if you make energy too expensive by curtailing the use of fossil fuels, you prevent people from vacating rural areas where they can forage for energy—unsustainable, dirty, and free—by stripping the biosphere.

Global prosperity and peace, glorious destination megacities, abundant water and food, voluntary population stabilization, and plenty of open land for those who still want to live under a big sky—all of this could be just around the corner.

If the energy challenge is addressed realistically, meaning an “all of the above” energy strategy is adopted worldwide, all the other building blocks of megacities can be assembled. But this means that the legal and financial obstacles that are preventing developing nations from exploiting their oil and gas reserves and building nuclear power plants will have to be lifted.

With abundant energy, for example, the challenge of creating water abundance is manageable. This is because for nearly every type of water infrastructure, the biggest single operating cost is energy. Investing in 100 percent reuse of wastewater, augmented by desalination of seawater, offers nearly every megacity on earth the opportunity to never experience water scarcity. Closely related to this is the rapidly maturing technology for indoor agriculture, including high rise agriculture.

Making Cities Self Sufficient Food Producers

Since a megacity, by definition, is an epicenter of human habitation, then by definition, it is also antithetical to the notion of being “off-grid.” But on the other hand, the megacity needs to be as self-sufficient as possible, since having 50,000 or even 100,000 people per square mile means that any resource that needs to be imported, stored, or removed is going to have to be handled in very high volumes.

Energy efficiency, waste management, as well as energy and water harvesting and treatment are technologies that are extremely important to the megacity—along with smart systems to interconnect all of them. Fortunately, water supply and treatment can be synergistic with indoor agriculture.

Indoor urban agriculture makes a lot of sense. It is possible that using hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics, industrial agriculture operations sited within urban areas can produce enough food to feed the inhabitants, reducing the need to import food from farming regions. These facilities would also be able process wastewater from elsewhere on the utility grid—using it to water the plants and to reuse as drinking water.

Here’s how: The grey water extracted from sewage would be subjected to biological and mechanical filtration, then it would be used to water the plants. The plants, in turn, would transpirate heavily in the indoor environment, and dehumidifiers would harvest this water as pristine drinking water, able to be pumped back upstairs or into the utility grid for reuse.

This concept of using transpiration from plants in a commercial high-rise agricultural operation to provide the last mile of greywater purification in the urban environment is revolutionary. Along with the surprisingly low—and dropping—cost of desalination and advances being made in primary sewage treatment, this innovation could help solve the issues of potential water scarcity in the urban environment.

The quantity of food that a high-rise farm might produce is also surprising. Because the plants are grown in optimal conditions—optimized light and water, and no pests—they can yield three to four crops per year instead of one, and each crop may require only a few vertical feet of space. This means each story of high-rise space occupying an area of one acre, for example, could produce several times as much food per year as an acre of ordinary farmland.

This multiple order-of-magnitude increase in potential productivity per unit of land, combined with the proximity to market, means high-rise farming is merely waiting for economic and political conditions to align in its favor. The technology for high-rise farming continues to commercialize and it will be available when we need it to feed the burgeoning megacities of this world.

Building Up, Out, and Down

It is common for the smart growth crowd to say “build up, not out,” but this ignores the fact that building out as well as up increases the overall supply of dwellings, making them more affordable, and reduces the pressure to increase density in suburban areas where the people living there want to preserve their way of life. But what about building down as well?

It isn’t as if building down hasn’t been tried with success already. The New York City subway system. The London Underground. The Paris Metro. What about Boston’s “Big Dig?” Mistakes were made, to put it mildly. But today, anyone who tries to get to Logan Airport from downtown Boston during rush hour will have nothing but good things to say about the much-maligned project. It’s too bad we don’t have more big digs—in the heart of urban centers we could put freeways and rail underground, our cities could reach for the sky, and there would never be traffic jams.

Tunneling on a grand scale may seem mundane, but the industry is rapidly innovating—incorporating new technology across multiple disciplines as fast as it becomes available. From GPS systems that allow a tunneling machine always to know precisely where it is beneath the earth, to better cutting bits, to debris removal conveyances, to mechanical conveyances that simultaneously bring forward shoring material, to worker shelter and control rooms, modern tunneling machines can exceed a mile in length and cost billions to acquire and operate. The global leader in tunneling systems is Herrenknecht AG. An emerging and very disruptive new competitor is Elon Musk’s The Boring Company.

Tunneling, like blasting payloads into low earth orbit, is extremely expensive. But The Boring Company claims tunneling costs can be dramatically reduced. The Boring Company proposes five innovations on its FAQ page: 1) Triple the power output of the tunnel boring machine’s cutting unit; 2) Continuously tunnel instead of alternating between boring and installing supporting walls; 3) Automate the tunnel boring machine, eliminating most human operators; 4) Go electric; 5) Engage in tunneling research and development, “the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.”

Skeptics may consider the fact that Musk’s Space X brought the price of delivering cargo into orbit down from $26,000 per kilogram in 1995 to $1,800 per kilogram by 2017, courtesy of the 100 percent reusable Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon Heavy promises to drop that cost by another 50 percent within the next few years.

As the megacities of the future are built, tunneling machines will play an integral part in endowing these cities with efficient transportation systems. Tunneling underground to create upgraded, higher capacity, and smarter utility conduits to transport water and energy will also be necessary in cities of ultra-high density. Using the volume of underground space to host much of the physical plant of megacities will make the surface areas less congested and more pleasant.

The implications of building upwards and downwards as well as employing novel technologies ranging from enhanced geothermal systems to high-rise farming hold forth not only the oft wished-for promise of attracting humanity’s billions off the land and into densely populated megacities, but also the promise of cities that live nearly off the grid—cities that may, despite their magnitude, require very little from the rest of the world.

This is the optimistic scenario that is altogether feasible. A planet of megacities that might actually export power and food, along with culture and technology, in exchange for raw materials. There are many paths from here to there, but none of them are easy even with abundant and clean fossil fuel remaining an unhindered and major part of global energy supply until replacement energy technologies are fully competitive at scale.

Global prosperity and peace, glorious destination megacities, abundant water and food, voluntary population stabilization, asteroid mining, restored wilderness, and plenty of open land for those who still want to live under a big sky—all of this could be just around the corner.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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