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To open federal lands or not?
Most people in the US are unaware that the Federal government owns like half of the land in the western states. In states like Utah and Nevada, the ratio is even higher. Some people, mostly on the right, have proposed opening up this land for settlement and development. I'm of two minds but mostly against. Here's some arguments I see against and for.
Against:
Development is permanent. Once land is developed, it is almost never returned to its natural state.
Development is ugly. I love the beautiful wide open spaces in the west. In the east, there is very little true wilderness. Everything is someone's private property, with the associated buildings, trailers, junky cars, trash, etc...
Development turns public spaces into private property denying citizens of their birthright to enjoy the open spaces
For:
Development is pro-natal. Cities are fertility and IQ shredders. Density increases prices and decreases fertility, especially among high IQ people. If we want people having 3, 4, 5 kids, we need cheap housing with lots of space. But states like Utah, Colorado, and Nevada have relatively expensive housing despite lots of open space.
Development is good for the economy.
Should we open the public lands?
The United States pretty much has three main qualities that redeem it in my eyes.
\1) It’s a global powerhouse of scientific research, 2) it has vast tracts of public lands, and 3) people tend to earn more here than in other places.
Current stances toward subtracting 2/3 of those might be enough to make me forgo the third in search of greener pastures.
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As an Alaskan, I have definite mixed feelings on this topic.
On the one hand, I like our wilderness, our "wild" character, the vast tracts of nature. My natural inclination is to say "no" and favor protection of undeveloped land.
On the other hand, the Feds own something like 2/3 of the land, and together with state parks it comes together to something like 90% of Alaska. And then, on top of that, you have further lands that are off-limits due to Federal regulations (like the Wetlands Act) written with the Lower 48's climate in mind, and which apply poorly to our very different climate.
Further, our economy has been in shambles for decades now, because the primary economic base* for our state has, historically, pretty much always been resource extraction (
as is the case with the economies of the Scandinavian countries[I stand corrected]), which has been slowly strangled by environmental law and activism pretty much my entire life. So we really need some more mining and/or oil drilling opened up, or we're pretty screwed.*note that "largest sector of the economy" ≠ "majority of the economy."
No, it isn't. While Alaska has at points had over 50% of their economy be resource extraction that isn't true for any Scandinavian country. Norway, being an outlier with more than 100% more resource extraction than the next in line is only at about 20% resource extraction.
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As any hunter will tell you, a lot of public land has no public access. It's land locked entirely by private land owners and there's no implied easement to allow access. You are trespassing if you cross private land to get to public land, even if there's no other way to get to it.
Unless you have a helicopter, a lot of public lands are de facto private extended gardens for their neighbors.
So, the public land stats are somewhat fake.
I'm open to reforming this but a lot of private land owners will go to war.
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Is it ? I believe the causation is reversed. People who want kids move to suburbs because American inner-cities are the shame of the 1st world. Mormons moved because they wanted more kids, but more land won't magically create more mormons. Fertility rate is a super-national phenomenon. Intra-national fertility shows low variance (eg: Europe) and at times clashes with the more space = more fertility assumption (eg: France)
83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas. So, at most, people would move to suburbs or exurbs. Suburbs and exurbs are already quite sparse and privately owned. People are tied to their job and profession. They move to cities for work. As long as jobs exist in cities, people aren't leaving urban areas.
Blatantly false. High demand and low supply increases prices.. Density increases supply, and therefore decreases prices. It's just that the densest places have such a high demand, that no amount of density can limit housing price increase. Places like Austin and Auckland have seen slower housing price growth because of permissive zoning (densification). On the other hand, Bay Area suburb prices keep shooting up because it's already full with single family homes, and rezoning isn't permitted.
Name one 1st world nation with a fertility rate above 2.5. The decline in fertility is relentless & global. I appreciate every genuine attempt towards increasing fertility. But, there is no evidence that more space leads to people having more kids.
Israel may count, but zoom in on any Israeli exurb/suburb and it's vastly denser than most American cities. Clearly density was not the issue. I want to offer a counter-solution for the same problem. Densify aggressively instead.
Jobs are in cities. People won't move and they can't move. But, you can make it easier for them to own property near where they work. If space is the issue, then going from 2 -> 4 bed apartments should solve those issues.
Is it ? First the multi-year infrastructure spending sink & then the annual drain on low-density infrastructure. All for a bunch of people who were unemployable enough to move to the middle of nowhere ? How is it any different than social science fake-jobs in the govt. It creates temporary jobs, with negative long term value.
The US needs to aggressively build out family-sized apartments within its existing cities. SJ, SF & LA should be the first targets. Boston, DC & Miami should be next. Austin & Phoenix (Tempe) area already in the middle of a build out, so non-coastal America is covered. In the north, I think Canada (Vancouver & Toronto) will cannibalize growth potential from Seattle & Chicago....so imma leave the north out of this.
"own"? I thought you were talking about apartments.
Anecdotal: the families I know all - all - fit into either families who managed to own a house, or fled from cities precisely because they were fleeing from apartments and condos. The main issues being stability was not within their control (e.g. if things are tight this month you can put off properly patching your driveway - but not if the condo association voted to do so), and moving was expensive both in direct financial cost and indirect impacts from e.g. children having to move schools.
Remember that something like 1-in-4 American households live paycheque-to-paycheck. If you're in that position, unexpectedly having to move can financially ruin you.
Yeah. Around the world people buy apartments and own them. I personally know friends in Mumbai, Delhi, Geneva, Singapore*, Zurich & Paris who own apartments. The apartments are as liquid as any other type of housing. Because the apartment complexes have large shared facilities, it promotes a natural sense of belonging and community. Makes it great for families.
Here are some attainable upper-middle class apartment complexes that I have personally visited. Hongkong, NYC, Zurich, India, Paris, Geneva and Boston. (generally, ignore the ugliness of some of them. They were built during a tasteless modernist era. But they're quite pleasant once you're there)
These are all fairly dense family oriented complexes. Here, people do not own cars or have a single hatchback for out-of-town trips. You'll notice how the density doesn't mean compromising on green space. Instead, consolidating people into vertical spaces means that the remaining flat land can be used for green space, community gardens and playgrounds. Also, the condos are distant from arterial roads, so quiet and safety, that's associated with suburbs, aren't compromised. The gated nature of many pseudo-public spaces facilities as communal sense of child supervision. You can leave your kids alone, but they're never alone or vulnerable.
Admittedly, I didn't grow up in the US. I grew up in a less fancy version of my above examples, back in India. I don't have the same visceral dislike for apartments like some Americans. I know that American apartments are usually sad motel-esque setups, premium millionaire homes or yuppie share homes. Not a lot of normal 30-40 something families in cities.
That being said, suburbs don't seem all that great either. From my experience living in American suburbs, every house I around me was cookie cutter. Yards were empty. Kids were always supervised. No one walked. I frequently visit French and Swiss cities. Here, people live in apartments, but I see a lot more kids outdoors. Parks are well used. From my anecdotal experiences, European city life is superior to American suburban life in every way.
How is that different from an HOA or interest payments on a loan ? Maintenance costs are constant. Once enough has been collected, condo associations spend from their budget. Random one-off bills are unheard of.
Wouldn't missing your loan payments put you at the same risk ?
This is not an out-of-the-blue unexpected additional cost.
(A sudden spike in interest rates can be - but tends to be on a significantly longer lagtime, and fixed-rate mortgages are a thing.)
Interesting. I am mostly unfamiliar with international housing. Does 'own' here include:
The right to know if maintenance is being deferred on the building?
The right to remain in the building if the building has e.g. been condemned due to deferred maintenance outside your control?
The right to remain in the building if someone buys the land to tear down the building?
The right to replace appliances / flooring / roof / etc?
The right to decide on which ISP will service your unit?
The right to have accurate forecasts of the cost of rent in the future?
The right to have a friend stay the night at my place?
The right to store my bike inside my place?
All of these I have seen violated by landlords in the US. (Which makes sense, as these normally are not rights. They are, however, all control that is normally given up by renting versus owning.)
This is one of the major reasons why fixed-rate mortgages exist, yes. To allow for better planning and mitigate tail liability.
This is one of the pushes away from buying property in cities, yes. Not the only one.
On the contrary: random one-off bills are common, at least in the US. You may wish to look up the term 'special assessment'.
Condo association decides that the parkade really needs redoing now instead of next year on schedule, majority of condo owners agree... welp there's a sudden unexpected 4-digit bill outside of your control regardless of your personal financial situation. To name an example a coworker went through.
Yes, they have monthly society meetings for communicating these things. It is similar to an HOA, but with significantly less power. I grew up in an apartment, and we never faced sudden costs. All one-time spend was delayed until the collective 'savings account' had enough in it. The monthly maintenance bills stayed constant. (adjusted annually) Also, because the housing society consists of your peers, they're generally receptive to late payments in a way that banks simply are not.
If a family stops paying maintenance (electricity, water, building upkeep, heating are often pooled through common systems), then the building will cut off electricity and water to the apartment. But, that's about it. You can continue living in Squalor if you so wish.
Yep. Your house is your house. The building's rooftop and the outsides are upgraded with collective investment and decision making. But once you're indoors, it's all you.
Yep. The ISP have already put in the cables. But, we always had a choice among 2-3 different providers. I was quite surprised to find out that people in the US often do not have choice of ISPs.
Doesn't apply to ownership. Maximum rent increase/yr is generally capped by the city govt. So, buildings don't play much role here.
Yes, it's your house. Why would the building need to know or care ? Similar things were very common back home.
Hope we're talking about the same thing. There are no landlords here. There is usually a housing collective or housing society. It's like being a joint shareholder. All decisions are made by committee.
Sounds like a USA problem. Not sure what would cause this. It's very rare for large apartments to need sudden spending. Any scheduled upgrades/revamps are planned 3-ish years in advance. Monthly maintenance rates are accordingly increased, but the pain is distributed over years. So when the time comes, the money is already there.
Yes, this happens. But, I've never heard of it being a sudden bill. Always distributed over many years. Also, major expenses in our colony requires a super majority (66%+).
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The fatal flaw of the American suburb for kids is the total lack of mobility. About a quarter of the drivers in my area drive trucks with lift kits that have enormous front blind spots. The roads don't have bike lanes and most are too busy to ride on the road. I live on a quiet street and kids play here sometimes with their parents supervising, but they have no ability to go anywhere outside the neighborhood and they can't even get to a park without crossing a five lane arterial and walking another mile through another neighborhood. The only thing they can do is wait until they turn 16 and get a license.
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The typical argument is that fertility is closer to an AND/ALL relation, not an OR/ANY relation, and that we have a limited enough sample size compared to the number of pertinent variables that every nation is doing something or other to negate the statement. In which case strict demands for evidence before doing anything are utterly doomed to failure.
("Draining the coolant out of all our cars has nothing to do with cars breaking down - see, the next nation over has cars breaking down all over too and they don't take the coolant out. What? Yeah, they drain the transmission fluid out, but that's irrelevant - we don't take the transmission fluid out and we have cars breaking down all over the place!")
Fair, I'll state my claim more clearly.
Jobs force people to agglomerate around cities. Sprawl forces low density, which then forces low supply (high prices) or longer commutes.
Space, time & disposable income affect fertility. Leaving cities comes with a high cost on time and disposable income. Building larger apartments is the answer. IE. large towers, densely packed within the city, but not within the building itself. We don't want to have a canned tuna situation.)
Examples above. It allows people to be near their work, school and amenities Taller apartments allows for larger apartments on the same footprint/number of families. Staying in the city means disposable income isn't at risk.
We can do both. Sprawl horizontally and vertically. But both groups always find each other on opposite sides of arguments. I've conceded that this phenomena is inevitable. Therefore, I find myself opposing your proposal of horizontal sprawl in favor of my desire for vertical sprawl.
Absolutely. You seem to be under the misimpression that this 'space' is just 'square footage (or number of bedrooms) of the private indoor living area'. It really isn't.
I spent a chunk of my childhood in a fairly large apartment complex - that my parents moved out of the instant they got the means to do so, because it was terrible for raising a family in. It did have a fair few families - who were ubiquitously there because they had no other choice.
We then moved to renting a house that was much smaller than the apartment (yes, really)... that had far more space.
...because the population density was lower, meaning that the cul-de-sac had little enough traffic that the neighborhood kids could and did play on it.
...because the population density was lower, meaning that the number of people we had to trust to e.g. allow kids to play was low enough to be feasible.
...because there was a yard, and we had reasonable confidence the neighbors weren't going to be replaced tomorrow with someone my parents didn't trust.
...because when kids were jumping on the floor it didn't annoy anyone except the parents.
...because we could go out and garden in the yard.
...because we could go places that weren't just the basic necessities and box stores.
Here is the kind of apartments I would like in cities. https://youtube.com/shorts/Lqqtb1hE8L0
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You're correct. The kind of place you describe is a hellish sardine can. Building vertical with no considerations is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, post 1970s white flight, many American cities have become hostile to things families care about.
I mentioned in another post that I frequent French and Swiss cities. Even in Paris proper there is an abundance of parks, rentable gardens, playgrounds and just generally - open space. Go away from the touristy parts, and Paris gets fairly quiet, car free and residential. The Swiss cities have all of this but 1 level better.
Car death numbers are so high in sprawling America, that at some point suburbs are creating the problems they claim to solve. Parisians dont have to worry about cars, because it's impossible for maniacs to drive 50 mph in residential zones. Similarly, violence and child safety is organically taken care of when there are a dozen observers around at any given moment.
I would let my kid qander by themselves in an American inner city with 4 lane arterials in every direction. But, thats the outcome of the destruction of American cities....not a property of city by itself.
To me, America has less than 10 cities. Everywhere else is a downtown mall and business area surrounded with endless suburbs.
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Only under the assumption that e.g. single-bedroom apartment rentals are indeed substitute goods for e.g. owning single-family homes. This may or may not be the case, but is worth stating, as it appears to be a load-bearing assumption for that argument.
(If there are a thousand families wanting a two-bedroom apartment, and 1200 two-bedroom apartments, and you replace 600 of said two-bedroom apartments with 900 one-bedroom apartments... I can easily see the price of two-bedroom apartments increasing drastically.)
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I don't think this is true. Certainly all the East Asian countries show a large amount of TFR difference between the big cities (0.6) and elsewhere (1.2). Brutal numbers overall obviously.
I think it might be good to follow @morebirths on Twitter who digs into these details frequently and is a big advocate of lower density environments.
To a point, more building will equal lower prices. This is evident in Texas for example, which builds lots of (low density) stuff and has low prices. But if Dallas became Manhattan, prices in this new city would be much higher. Ultra dense building is space efficient, but not cost efficient. New York is structurally expensive and it's not just regulation that makes it that way. The cheapest major cities are ones like Dallas and Houston that are very spread out. There are no dense, cheap cities in the First World.
This fails to understand half the fertility crisis. True, we need more people to have kids. But we also need the ones that do have kids to have more. I'll have 4 so that you can have 0 and average at 2.
I think so. Greenfield architecture is easier and cheaper. Cities with medium density (like 2-5k per square mile) can provide good government services with low tax burden. My parents live in one of those cities and their property taxes are like $1,500/year.
Rural areas are probably net drains, but lowish-medium density is a sweet spot.
Agree. But how much is a 4 bedroom apartment going to cost in a major urban area? It would likely require an income far beyond what the average family could pay. Nevertheless almost all most new development inside dense cities is studios and 1 bedrooms. More large apartments would be an improvement.
By the way, none of this is a strong claim that we need to develop empty government land, only that it might help some things, and too much density is bad, actually.
Ah, come on! First and most famous example is Berlin - it's still relatively cheap today, when compared internationally, but it was fantastically cheap for 25 years.
Germany is actually full of examples like that. Dresden is following the Berlin playbook, and Leipzig is the new cheap/dense/hip city for now. There's also Dortmund, Dusseldorf and Essen, but those are cheap for a reason (they're ugly dumps, but they are dense - and there are jobs there, so they aren't cheap just because the region is totally economically destitute).
There's also Vienna, which is an interesting case, because Vienna has cheap housing mostly because the city owns tens of thousands of apartment units and is actively using its market position to push down prices. Austria also has a couple of other cities that are cheap and dense, and so does Italy, but going in detail isn't that useful if nobody has ever heard of them.
My conclusion is that you can have cheap and dense Tier 1 cities if you expend some effort, and there's great value in boosting your Tier 2 cities.
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It is an appalling injustice that Nevada is something like 90% owned by the Feds, and Virginia is, roughly, 0% owned by the feds.
The Federal Government should not own so much land. It should be returned to the states, and those states can make the land into state parks if the residents there choose to value the land in that way. But assholes in Pennsylvania and New York and Virginia, whose states are entirely private, should not be choking out Nevada and Utah and Idaho because of some desire to arrest development.
Isn't that because most of the land in Nevada is desert with no water access though? The rare bits of it that I've seen for sale are practically free and not being developed any time soon.
That said I would love to see ten more cities like Vegas get built that aren't dedicated strictly to gambling, with lots of indoor public spaces suitable for biking and running.
In the desert? How many nuclear reactors are you going to dedicate to hydrating that place?
It's time to build baby
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Why does justice suddenly begin factoring in? Is it just that Utah and Idaho residents have 10x of a NYers political power in the Senate ? Don't even get me started on DC.
I hear the similarly-framed arguments in NY, NJ & Massachusetts about the North East subsidizing the lives of Middle America. Either ways, I don't federal control of land has anything to do with low demand for moving to Vegas or Reno
Utah and Idaho are the relevant entities, not their residents.
Within each state is where the residents become relevant political actors.
The states were made for the people, not the people for the states.
The states were made for people.
The Federal Government was made for the states.
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There's no returning what was never owned by the states to begin with. Either way, it's not practical. The average rancher is going to have a coronary when he finds out that he has to buy a grazing permit for every cow that might wander into another state or risk fines.
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My observation in New Mexico is that the federal government, while not very good, is still a lot better than the state at managing public lands.
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Or the Native Americans/Indians/First Nations/whatever the preferred nomenclature is this week.
No. They are not American. They were driven out and their lands conquered.
As well as give Alaska back to the Russians and California to Spain.
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The Navajo nation is some 27,000 square miles for a population of 400,000 people; there's enough land, anyway.
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Only the ones who didn't take it from someone else first.
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No.
BLM land can already be utilized by the public in a myriad of fashions, and I am content with this.
I am also biased, as I wish I lived in a state with more BLM and National Forest land to take advantage of. Sadly, I do not.
This is one of the few instances where I feel governmental intervention is beneficial, as the land in question would not be able to be developed well. Best to leave it as-is.
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I think you could satisfy both 2/3 by dividing the land between privatization and public park/monument/wilderness area rather than the current status of BLM leasing. A world in which the BLM leases to a rancher satisfies neither efficient usage nor preservation of natural beauty.
The real impediment is the lack of water. We need to force California to repeat rules against desalination, especially since the excess of cheap (even free!) power during the middle of the day is an excellent match for plants that can use ~infinite excess power on a moment's notice and then give it back later. A win/win for growth and clean energy -- of course CA can't fucking do it.
Of course, you'd have to let them buy power at the actual market-clearing price, by the hour. That's a minor technical glitch.
Can you steelman California's argument against desalination? Or at least explain it. It just seems absurd given their situation.
I don't know enough to steelman, but the usual concern is what you do with all the high salinity effluent. Opponents claim that dumping it in the ocean raises the salinity and kills marine life in the area.
Presumably, extract useful minerals, turn the rest into salt palaces and make it a tourist trap.
I'd assumed based on prior discussion that efficient desalination would require enough power output that it'd require either lots of fossil fuels, or nuclear. Are renewables in California competitive enough for desalination, now?
There are some plans along those lines. Presumably you can't turn it into salt palaces because you're gonna run out of land to stack the salt.
He's assuming batteries at 10c/Wh, which is... Remarkably optimistic because the support infrastructure (chargers, wiring, BMS, disconnects, inverters, housing, etc.) is going to quadruple it after all's said and done. You need a climate controlled environment for batteries with costs closer to a data center than a warehouse: lots of power electronics active during the day means a lot of cooling, especially in the desert!
I've gotten cells and a BMS alone for 8c/W, but only due to a pricing error.
Lots of very naive napkin math from someone who needs to get a few micro solar projects under his belt before planning macrogigamega-projects.
You don't even need to keep desal running 24/7, it's not that capital intensive. Although he hasn't covered pumping costs either, which is tremendous when you're going both ways (and pumping brine all the way back to the ocean apparently? Why not just do the desal on the coast? It's a hell of a lot easier to ship electricity than water.)
All in all storm water recovery and more reservoirs is going to be a hell of a lot cheaper.
TL;Dr I think this guy might be retarded
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Desal has gotten both more energy efficient and more capital-intensive. So if you want the advantages of the new tech it's no longer a simple dump load you can afford to only run 3 hours a day in summer.
That's the problem with a lot of suggested uses for excess solar and (especially) wind power, really.
If you used the cheaper kinds of thermal desal, it's possible you could run it on solar-electric during the day and waste heat from gas turbines during the evening. Dilutes the capital costs of a plant that would otherwise spend a lot of time sitting idle. Makes use of the idle gas plant's electrical infrastructure during low demand hours too, nice bonus.
Thermal's out of favor, but RO has a lower efficiency advantage for treating seawater, which is like 5-10x worse than the worst brackish groundwater. Gets to the point where you may as well just evap the stuff.
If you had plenty of nuclear or coal in the mix you could use the cheap nighttime power to run it too. And if you get the utilization up that much you could afford a proper modern membrane system running 24/7
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I'm going to dissent here and say sell it all.
Yes, it would be great to just build upwards and create skyscrapers and parking garages and multiply the number of lanes on every highway, but we are not going to do that. If the only thing we are allowed to build are suburbs, then we need more land.
And yes, some of that land is very pretty, but I don't ever get to visit any of it, because I have to work and only get 2 weeks of vacation per year. America's wild beauty only exists on paper to me. Going on hikes through the Appalachian trail or whatever is only for rich professionals. I'd rather have lower rent.
I’ve worked retail for 22 years at the store level and just did a third hike (not a full hike - just a jaunt!) on an Appalachian trail. I’m literally sleeping in a cabin with a jacuzzi and it’s snowing outside ( I live in SFL ) !!!
You can definitely go hiking.
It’s very affordable and you have the time.
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For one thing, the people who want to build skyscrapers don't want parking garages or highways.
Wrong half of the country; much of the area around the Appalachian trail is quite built up. It goes through New Jersey, even.
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Rural development is not limited by space, but by reasons for being there. If you just want to life somewhere with nice scenery and you dont care how far the grocery store is or if youll find a job, you can already have a lot of space very cheap. Cities are space-limited because theres only so much space thats a given distance from the rest of the city, which is the reason for wanting it.
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Maybe we should try developing land that’s currently held up by permitting first?
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Don't open it. There is enough land to build houses already.
What about ranches? What about farms? What about self-sustaining homesteads?
What about terraforming Deseret with ruminants until it sprouts green?
Did you ever read Red Mars, and agree with the Reds?
The BLM leases out land for ranching, oil, and mines.
A lease is not a homestead.
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Pastures and croplands account for two of the three biggest land usage categories. It's not clear what the marginal benefit of adding even more is.
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I support the building of Freedom Cities, California Forever or any other project on federal or private land that aims to shake up our current land use paradigm, but that's because I want better urbanism in this country, not more sprawl. Imagine Guantanamo Bay as the Hong Kong of the Caribbean instead of a prison camp, or an EPCOT that was an actual living community instead of an amusement park. Perhaps many of them would crash and burn for want of funds, residents, or effective policing, but we won't know until we try. To not make the attempt at all would signal a depressing lack of ambition.
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I'm more or less completely against it. The vast tracts of unspoiled land are an amazing part of the United States being what it is and speak to our history and our values. There is plenty of space for humans to live and settle within currently available land. Land shortages just aren't an actual problem that needs solving.
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