This article’s details are good, but I found the argumentative route misleading: the specific example they chose wouldn’t have been improved by bid-design, since the whole problem with NYC’s gas and steam networks is that they’re (1) undocumented, (2) critical infrastructure that can’t be disrupted, and (3) regularly responsible for mass casualty events when the city doesn’t gingerly fix them via independent projects. (1), importantly, means that the city doesn’t even know who else to bring to the table until they break ground and see what’s below the streets.
The area they chose to highlight typifies this: that part of the East Side uses the steam network for hospital disinfection, and had a massive, deadly, costly stream explosion within living memory[1].
The city absolutely does need better contracting processes. But the parks, MTA, public housing, schools, etc. are all better examples than the one they chose.
Why would a new city preclude maintaining our existing ones?
I don't necessarily disagree about building new cities, but I don't understand how that would solve the problem here: NYC is still the financial and entertainment capital of the world, and it's not like we can just let it decay. People live and stay here for a reason.
What if the infrastructure is (economically) unmaintainable?
Ancient Rome had a million people at the turn of the 1st century and was the financial and entertainment capital of the world too. People lived and stayed there too, until they didn't.
How many steam systems are left in the U.S. (outside college campuses)?
I don't think comparing Ancient Rome with NYC makes for a serious comparison, except in the broadest strokes.
As for the steam system: it's an integral part of Manhattan's residential and commercial heating system. My understanding is that it pays for itself in charges to apartment buildings and businesses (including hospitals as mentioned), so there's no current question around its financial sustainability.
> Comparing cities doesn't makes for a serious comparison...?
No; comparing antiquity Rome (a city whose collapse is a subject of ongoing historical debate) to NYC (a city that was built 2600 years later) does not make for a serious comparison.
Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc. These cities have similar infrastructural problems that they've been able to solve in ways that NYC hasn't, sometimes for political or historical reasons (e.g. being bombed so thoroughly that building new infrastructure is the only reasonable option).
> And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic.
I don't love it, or hate it. I recognize that it's a piece of infrastructure, and that infrastructure comes with assumptions. You can either pay to maintain those assumptions, or pay to upend them. Either way, you pay. With NYC paying to maintain them is frequently optimal, since upending them requires revisiting other, even more costly assumptions.
For NYC's steam system, concretely: there's been no real public noise from ConEd about the system's unmaintainability or unsustainability. They recently agreed to a new rate/fee schedule with the state PSC[1], on which I can find no significant controversial reporting.
Edit: to make it more clear: ConEd's steam network provides heating and industrial steam to around 1500 buildings in Manhattan. That's 1500 buildings, most of which are near or over a century old, that would need to have steam boilers retrofitted into their basements (or have their entire steam plumbing ripped out and replaced with something else). That's a lot of time and money in already one of the world's most expensive labor markets.
Sounds like what an ancient Greek might've said if you suggested comparing contemporary Athens with ancient Thebes. I don't see why not. You can certainly compare, say, square pyramids with equal sides, be it the Great Pyramid built around the 2600s BCE, or the smaller Luxor pyramid in Vegas and that scar on the face of Paris built 4500 years later. It's only been a few thousand years, what's really changed that much?
The Romans didn't quite get to an urban steam system, it's true, but they were quite close with the hypocaust (central heating), Aeolipile (Hero's steam engine), and Cloaca Maxima (sewer system).
> Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc.
Of those it looks like only Paris has a steam system. Do any other major cities (still) have steam systems? Have there been any new recent installs outside college campuses?
I don't think so. It's a legacy technology, and legacy technologies are such mostly due to cost. Old infrastructure generally gets more expensive, until it becomes unsustainable. But people expect continuity and push back against changes that compromise the perceived identity of the place (like steam in Manhattan), hence most historical cities are no longer around at all.
I can assure you, as a life long New Yorker, that most of us do not have an especially strong identity connection to the steam system. Most people don't even know about it, besides the steam cones.
Again, the point is economical: the cost of a technology is not defined solely by its age, but by the cost of replacing it with the newer thing. For Manhattan, the cost of replacing the steam network would be immense, with marginal-to-net-negative consequences (larger demands on the city's electrical grid, higher emissions, waste of steam from local cogeneration plants, additional local emissions from per-building boilers). This doesn't mean that district steam is shiny, new, or particularly good technology (and it doesn't mean the opposite, either). It just means it isn't worth replacing, and probably won't be for a while.
(By all means, if you want to run on the "kill the steam network" ticket, I'm sure someone will vote for you. But I think that money would be better spent finishing the SAS, IBX, and building some more crosstown lines in Brooklyn and Queens instead.)
I'm a Midwesterner in New England who's taken maybe a dozen trips to New York. I wouldn't mess with the steam system if given the chance, just see that it gets documented I guess. There's a steam system at the college I went to, Manhattan-style steam in the Maine woods was pretty cool...
Personally I care more about bringing NYC-level transit to more of the country than further optimizing one of the few pretty good systems we have.
If I ran, I'd run on a transit ticket, with a platform of mostly cutting subsidies for private passive transportation, and increasing subsidies for public and active transportation.
Let's build out a national high-speed rail network. It's been great to see the economic development along the Downeaster tracks since reopening in 2001, and exciting that it looks like a new Black Hawk line will happen in northern Illinois near where I grew up.
Automobiles have been a disaster for the country. I didn't see a noticeable improvement in safety metrics from seatbelts in the data: the only correlation I saw was reduced crashes during periods of economic decline... Pedestrian deaths keep climbing. Emission and safety (hood height) standards are a clown show. EVs don't solve for MPs in TWPs/RWPs. One more line in New York isn't where I'd focus my energy, but I'm all for those lines and improving connections with NJ and New England.
Americans have never moved less, and more and more intense hyperlocal squabbling seems a result. Historically, if you didn't like local decisions or wanted better opportunities, you moved. That's not really the case anymore. (I previously cofounded a moving and storage startup.)
Imagine if the Chinese had spent the last twenty years keeping the 19th century alive like veritable steampunks in Shanghai [1] instead of building out the world's best high-speed rail system.
Just to add to this: NYC generates a lot of its electricity from natural gas power plants, which produce both electricity and waste heat. The steam system captures the waste heat and puts it to good use. As a result, the steam system is extremely efficient.
Can we please drop the sappy self promotion of "financial and entertainment capital of the world" and get real i.e. the old but good side of American empiricism? Thanks.
Articles mentioning the plain incompetence of America's civil engineering projects always hit me hard. It's so bad. You'd think with the number of MBAs we graduate or time we'd get our act together. But no.
The Gothamist article runs the same old story trajectory here: a bad example, then drilling a bit closer to root cause, then pointing people know the current situation sucks and why, ending with a time will tell or variation on same. It's underwhelming.
Another example: 108th street in queens has been ripped up, some plumbing or electrical work done, then repaved about once every 1-3 months for the last 10 years.
I also fairly familiar with nyc subways and how it's run day to day. It's embarrassing ... it's 10 parallel universes from European standards.
Escalators are slow, and down a lot. More money is spent I feel sure telling you what isn't working, and what all the schedule changes are, than what the normal schedule is.
This is a 6 train running on the 4 line ... this is a F train running on the E line ... is often heard.
Then there's moms -- what I call them -- ladies usually on bullhorns telling you how to get off the subway and which escalator to use. That's their job: yack into a bull horn and tell you the stunning obvious.
Another unsightly subway aspect: temporary closures of platforms. Some moron uses plastic tape in the most unsightly way to cordon off access ... it's straight out of a slum. A temporary gate, or better yet, using electronic signage to redirect people would be better and a damn sight look better.
It wasn't intended as a promotion, more of a "we can't drop everything and start a new city; there's a lot of stuff here."
I don't think we disagree materially about the city's general lack of coordination (or demonstrated incompetence) with respect to construction. But the example in the article is a pretty bad example, all things considered.
(I'll note, however, that the comparison between NYC and European metro areas is typically faulty, for reasons that you probably already know: the Subway runs 24/7, is pathetically underfunded relative to its size, and hasn't benefited - perversely - from a reconstruction period following a global war. European metros tend to have all of these things going for them, in addition to better and less incompetent governance.)
Huh? When has someone built a new city? Nearly all attempts fail long term. Cities are located where they are for geographical reasons first and foremost, and so nearly all attempts fail. Where a new city did work it is either because it was a suburb of an existing city; or it has a good geographical reason to exist. The only cases I'm aware of where a city has moved is when the river it was one moved and so the people who lived there followed.
Note that politics will sometimes create a city for a short time, but the city rarely sticks. Eventually a new king/dictator/government will come along that doesn't see a need to support the new city and it dies (usually to a farming village since those are needed all over, but in places where there are no farms they can disappear)
Again, you can explain those newer cities by either politics (meaning I question how long they will last - though short of a medical breakthrough we will all be dead before we can see their death), or there are geographical reasons for a city to exist there. New York city has to exist there as a city - you can change the name, but the harbor is to useful to ignore.
There are at least two active cargo ports in the New York Harbor: the Port Jersey Marine Terminal in NJ, and the Red Hook Marine Terminal in Brooklyn. I believe the city has also been slowly reactivating the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal.
I don't know if the average resident on NYC benefits much from living near a cargo port. But there are significant benefits to living in coastal areas: water has a moderating effect on climate, provides either natural sewage outfall (or fresh water, depending), and brings in tourists. It's not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of cities exist on sea or lake coasts, followed by navigable rivers, and that there aren't all that many choice locations left.
Ah, good point, I stand corrected on New York Harbor, glad to see that.
That seems true for most cities that made it through the Age of Sail, but less true before and unclear going forward. It seems trade routes by land were generally more important, and conquest and shipping were more carried out on land than sea until the technical developments of the 15th century. Most large ancient cities seem to have lied along the Silk Road, and many large (and late) ancient cities that still exist (Rome, Paris, London) aren't right on the sea as in the Americas.
Going forward the bigger issue seems to be insurability. Who's going to hold the bag on all those high rises in Miami...
Rome is on the Tiber, which flows directly into the Tyrrhenian Sea (via Ostia, which was Rome's "Oakland" and had its own sizeable population in antiquity). London, Thames. Paris, Seine.
(Closer to MENA and the Levant, and you'll find that antiquity cities almost entirely exist on the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, etc. You can find inland Silk Road ksour in countries like Morocco, but these too exist along seasonal rivers, and have correspondingly lower and nomadic populations.)
I don't particularly disagree about climate change, and I think a lot of the coastal Southern US is in for a rough awakening in the next 15 to 30 years. But things haven't been so peachy inland either (the Midwest has had both more numerous and more severe floods, tornadoes, etc.). NYC's weather is also certainly going to become more extreme, and the city's response so far has been unimpressive.
Rome is over 15 miles from the coast, London over 20, Paris over 90. OTOH, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and Antwerp have direct sea access (and benefited early in the Age of Sail).
Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore, and DC all have direct sea access.
Agreed. To me New England and the Great Lakes seem the best positioned U.S. regions for the 22nd century.
Where would you put a new city, and what would be the point of going there?
There are already settlements in every place it makes sense to live. Any new city would have to be developed on the strength of some newly-discovered resource; what would that be, and why would you not simply expand whichever town already happens to exist nearby, instead of going to all the expense of starting from scratch?
I'd connect the country with high-speed rail and focus entirely on manufacturing, just like China. Lots of cities and towns would pop up along the rail corridors, as in the UK and the first time we built out our rail infrastructure and everywhere else it's been done. The U.S. stopped building new cities around the same time we started adopting automobiles.
Our highway system has enriched incumbent cities and created a nation of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and billboards.
Let's build Hyperdrive City, Nebraska, where you can rent an apartment on the 93rd floor of the mall for $200 a month:
Or let's give Washington back to Maryland (like Alexandria to Virginia), move the federal district to Lincoln, and build a new Capitol to accommodate a House with representation more like 70k:1 than the current (abhorrent) 700k:1.
IMHO, all governments create a map of their infrasructure and require utilities to update it with as built information within 1 week of the work (if the work takes more than a week they must update weekly!). They should also be putting "as-planed" information in to this. When someone calls the "one call" they need to update existing infrastructure as found. And within 15 years they need to update the entire database.
Once the database is created (that is you call the one-call number a week in advance for your proposed project) contractors who encounter anything else are justified in cutting the pipes/wires since they are not used. When two projects are planned in the same area the designers are required to contact each other and make plans - they are encouraged to work together to save money (dig one hole...)
I realize finding something in the ground is hard. There needs to be a reasonable amount of tolerance for measurement errors and the earth moving (half a meter?). However that the above is hard isn't an excuse to not do it.
I love this sort of nitty gritty article with good details. That said it would be more convincing if the writer followed the maxim of Chesterton’s Fence: if design-build is a better process than design-bid-build, why was the latter law created in the first place? It is almost certain that something went wrong when design and build were bundled.
They are making a claim that design-build is better, but when you look at the evidence it doesn't pan out any better. Design-build means contractors design something expensive (contracts are often cost plus some profit margin so the higher they can make the costs the more profit they get - if it is a fixed price contract they will look for places where they can build to the letter of the contract but obviously fail to meet the intent, then charge a lot for the change order)
Someone should really do a study to compare private infrastructure works vs public ones.
A local Hofer (=Aldi) here can repave a whole parking lot and the access road in basically a weekend, while the same thing (parking lot) for a local government office can take a year or more, at approximately the same size.
Ten years ago, my city decided to repave a stretch of a local street. The contract stipulated that work must begin in April and must be concluded the same year, and the city awarded it to the lowest qualified bidder, a local contractor.
The contractor crews showed up in April, closed the road with detour signs, tore up and removed the previous pavement, and left. All summer and fall a third of the city choked through a residential detour around a road project nobody was working on.
With their deadline so far away, the the contractor was free to chase lucrative summer work elsewhere and returned only in late November to meet their contractual obligation to the city. They hurriedly poured the concrete and left it to cure in freezing winter temps, undermining a good cure and ensuring it'll need to be redone decades sooner than would be otherwise necessary.
For all the sub optimal contract writing, construction work, and traffic inconvenience, there was no news story, no outrage, and no politicians lost their jobs. People are too busy to punish incompetence if things start to work _eventually_, so the incompetent can keep calm and carry on.
This sounds like two things: a badly written contract, and a company working in it's singular best interest. Making it so that best interests of all parties aren't at least somewhat aligned is usually a recipe for disaster.
On example of this going right: there was a local public works project to widen a highway. The contract was written so that if the company working it completed the work early they got a small % bonus depending on how quickly it was complete.
It got done early - the incentives were aligned properly.
Yes, there are all the obvious caveats about correct quality standards and corners weren't cut, but that would be the case anyway.
After the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, rebuilding the elevated freeway was expected to take over 12 months. The "Fix The 10" plan offered a $200K bonus for every day ahead of schedule. The project was finished in 3 months.
Ironically, there's a decent chance that they were required to pick an incompetent contractor by regulation. Many places in the US have requirements that public agencies go with the lowest bidder without permitting them to consider things like "is this contractor capable of performing the work" or "has this contractor screwed us over in the past," generally because discretionary choice is seen as a vehicle for corruption.
> This is a failure at the city contracting level. Incompetence or corruption or both.
Solely? Editing out the contractor's actions seems to leave an incomplete picture.
edit: I suggest there is a fault with society, when society gives a pass to a business operating unethically - simply because it leveraged (or purchased, fed/state) loopholes that allow it to do so.
City contracting office failed to specify the requirements correctly. In particular the curing schedule/temperature.
If this was a homeowner getting a driveway paved, it would be one thing. But a city needs to employ people who know how to write contracts. If they do not, and bad contracts are legally fulfilled, then yes I'd argue that it's entirely the city's fault.
And the contractor's unethical exploitation, of course. But that's contracts.
To your edit: I agree, and it sucks! But this is not a novel problem, and people in this business know how to get their desired results. I would argue that this kind of error does not happen accidentally.
I'm pretty sure a homeowner would want his driveway repaved much faster than that, and done properly
You either must really not care about the job, or be corrupt (and get some under-the-table money) to sign something like this. Somehow in the private sector people complain, and once it comes to someone high up, heads fall until it's solved... but not in the public sector.
These were private companies doing the work. The article argues that the problem was that the private company who is doing the construction is on a cost-plus contract and is different from the private company who designed the project, so the construction company has no ownership of the problems and no incentive to get it done.
As far as private infrastructure, I don't see how that would make much of a difference here, other than that a private company would probably have a harder time with permits to dig up the street on and off for 8 years.
There have been studies. In the public transit realm, there was a comparison of the Vancouver Canada Line that was built for the Olympics (an elevated train/subway to the airport) and the Eglinton Crosstown in Toronto (mixed underground surface light rail).
The TL;DR is that the Vancouver line was mostly on time, on budget, and is working well, while the Eglinton line is massively over-budget, still not ready (should have opened in 2020) with an "indeterminate opening date".
The big difference between the two? Vancouver's doled out ONE contract to design, build, and operate the line. It was up to the one company to decide how and where to contract out or subdivide, only being held to certain conditions with reasonable flexibility for unexpected issues. Toronto had a (notoriously bureaucratic provincial government organization called Metrolinx) subdivide a bunch of contracts and essentially act as a project manager (of which a lot was also contracted out) with government-level accountability. The results were all over the place. Tracks were installed with slightly bad gauges, signalling software was bought and didn't have interoperability with other components, substandard construction was used, some contractors were probably hired for political reasons, etc.
There's plenty of studies from all over the world that compare cost differences for infrastructure between countries. The French are actually really good at it - they tend to spend a fraction the cost of infrastructure compared to England. https://www.bcg.com/united-kingdom/centre-for-growth/insight...
Do you mean the time it takes to actually do the paving is a weekend? Or the process of going from "I want this repaved" to getting it completely done is too long?
I'm saying that the time the cones come up and the parking is closed to the time it's reopened it takes a weekend... and it takes a year for the approximately same sized parking lot on a government propery.
That does make a difference, but not that much of a difference. Reading between the lines, the issue here seems to be that the city doesn't keep records of what is underground that can be referred to during the planning process - the "they unexpectedly found a maze of Con Edison gas and steam lines" quote sounds expensive.
Possibly they should consider engaging some sort of dial-before-you-dig program - https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ sounds promising on a quick search - or keeping better records. This situation sounds a bit weird to me, I'm not sure how they made the mistakes the article is suggesting they made.
I've done some work with big hospitals on big campuses. Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers.
Big construction projects also routinely did as-built drawings, and this was a cost built into the contracts. So if the physical plant people didn't have, or had lost the record drawings, they knew which architect or engineer to call. This happened all the time. I can recall pulling out a drawing from the early 80s to answer a question in the early 2000s.
However, all of this was a cost center. Starting some twenty years ago or so, everybody has been rooting out these cost centers as cost-cutting measures.
Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril.
> Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers.
Some of this infrastructure in NYC is old enough that there likely isn’t anyone alive who remembers what went there.
Not to mention the fact that NYC is orders of magnitude bigger than a hospital complex. Good luck finding anyone who worked on that exact section decades ago, even if they were still alive.
> Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril.
There is no possible way a city could store their institutional knowledge spanning more than a century within employees.
Institutional knowledge is how they got into this problem, not a solution.
The drawings should exist though - they should have been created and kept. Someone should be in prison if they were destroyed (including via accidental fire - keep backups is important for paper as much as electronic data!) Where drawings don't exist the city should demand they be created.
Well, FWIW, the campus I'm familiar with has been around long enough that it has outlived many employees. And yet the institutional knowledge remains.
Not sure where you get the idea that I think the answer is solely institutional knowledge as you seem to imply. It is but a part of the whole solution, which includes record keeping, standard practices, etc.
The articles shows a single example of a more persistent problem plaguing NYC. Not being able to deal with 500 feet of water and sewer in 10 years and millions upon millions of dollars indicates a deep problem, and there is no acceptable excuse for it. NYC has kicked the can down the road for a long time, and now they are paying the price for that. My issue is that many places and institutions have been doing this as well, and it will bite us in the ass.
> Reading between the lines, the issue here seems to be that the city doesn't keep records of what is underground that can be referred to during the planning process
They keep records of modern infrastructure.
It’s the extremely old infrastructure that is missing records. It’s part archaeology project, with potential missteps creating outages for many people who depend on the infrastructure.
Yeah, but the dude thinks that sitting down with the utilities might help and it is a bit ... how would that help? If they don't have records either then that doesn't make things better. You have to go exploring whatever happens. And their plans should account for that.
The costs should be on the utility to do the exploring though. They are the ones who via incompetence (likely cost cutting) don't know where their pipes are.
It was a repaving job, just the top 20centimeters removed, and new asphalt added and some cement blocks/barriers, edge pieces etc.
I was just comparing a project length (while price should also be compared) between a private business needing something done and government needing something done.
If con ed wasn’t a private org this wouldn’t be an issue. The people who live here gain absolutely nothing from their acting as a profit seeking middleman: indeed all we get is a totally unaccountable actor who can hide surprises all over one of the most densely populated places on earth.
NYC's government is entirely comprised of profit-seeking middlemen. Every mid- to high-level politician gets rich in office. That happens for a reason.
This is one of the things I find so blatent that it almost passes through being blatent into degrees of blatentness that need some new word to describe because our brains can't even process how blatently obvious it is. Our "public servants" routinely retire with public net worth that is multiples of all the money they were ever supposedly paid, 10x, 20x easily. It is prima facie true that they must have been corrupt in order to do that.
$2.5 billion per mile of tunnel, not track, on the SAS project[1].
(This is an outrageous number, but it's not a "true" benchmark for what a mile of subway construction costs in the city: similar crosstown construction in Brooklyn or Queens, which badly need new lines, would be significantly cheaper due to both lower density and the possibility of cut-and-cover instead of tunneling. Plus, no steam pipes in the way.)
Edit: for comparison, the IBX is expected to cost around $400M per mile[2]. Which is also obscenely expensive given how much of the right-of-way exists, but demonstrates that there's no clean apples-to-apples comparison here.
That's just another example why we can't remain urbanized in the modern era. In the past there was no choice, now we can choose and meanwhile tech evolution have pushed the needs of so much infra that being dense instead of costing LESS than being spread it cost more.
Nowadays a MODERN a big apartments complex cost more than an equivalent of single families homes per unit (HVAC, seismic, fire-safety, ... costs) and while single family homes can evolve (a single owner, a single family to relocate for rebuilding when (not if) needed, a bit of ground to actually work around without creating traffic nightmares and so on) big condos, towers etc practically can't.
It's time to recalculate the narrative "being dense cost less". The reality is that cost much more and can only substantially evolve being totally rebuild, so practically can't substantially evolve. Big dense cities are needed only for finance capitalism, but we can't sustain them, nor humanly, nor technically nor environmentally.
Try to elaborate: land use, as long as the soil is not sealed (so humus remain alive) it's not a "cost" nor an issue except for some hyper-dense countries. The Nederland and Belgium are very dense as a nation, yet most live in single-family homes, Spain or Italy are LESS dense and most live in condos, France and Ireland are far less dense and most live in single family homes so well, there is room for homes in most of the countries.
In efficiency terms I was living in a big dense city, now I'm living on mountains, you can state "hey just to buy bread you grab the car and made a ~10km trip instead of going by feet for 1km round trip", true. But the 1km round trip was a daily one, the ~10km one is a weekly one because hey, the freezer works beautifully well for bread. Similarly I buy in much bigger quantity now, so with much less packaging and stock at home. I spend less, eat better (much less ready-made and ultra-processed foods/carbonated beverage) and produce less waste. Oh, and the trips are in a BEV recharged mostly from my p.v. thanks to remote works. I simply discovered I need to move FAR LESS here than in a big city, yes individual trips are much longer, but the overall distance is not much bigger. Also modern life works better, online retail having room for delivery van works better here than in a big city downtown. They run more, but with much less stop and go and parking issues not counting the fact that a new fully electric home is easy (technically) to be made while converting an old building is next to impossible or at least cost MUCH more for much less results.
Try to compute the TCO not of a new city entirely designed today vs a new spread area entirely designed today but over 50 and 100 years with all the evolution we have. If you just look at the past, yes in the past being spread means wasting much oil to move, we need the office for anything, so we have to move, homes was far simpler so a condo was cheap than a set of single family homes, but things changes. We do not need the office anymore, we can centrally schedule a vast efficient spread logistic and so on. Now being spread meaning consuming far less, while in cities we still consume much more. We can't evolve cities without rebuilding them and that's why they keep consuming more and wasting immense amount of resources trying to evolve just a bit.
Sorry you’re saying land use is not a cost? It absolutely has an opportunity cost and is the primary constraint for your vision. There straight up is not enough land for everyone to have their own little rural estate while also leaving enough agricultural land for everyone to eat. Additionally, most of the available land that isn’t already taken is either undesirable due to climate, remoteness, etc or is protected for some other reason. Without significant wealth, for most people the dream of living in a mountain getaway off the grid is beyond reach.
Even though things are more complex in large cities it still generates so much money that it is cheaper per capita then building in low density neighbourhood.
> Nowadays a MODERN a big apartments complex cost more than an equivalent of single families homes per unit (HVAC, seismic, fire-safety, ... costs)
>> Nowadays a MODERN a big apartments complex cost more than an equivalent of single families homes per unit (HVAC, seismic, fire-safety, ... costs)
>Isnt that because of the price of land?
Citation needed first of all.
From what I can tell, a high rise apartment building - that is more than 10 floors costs substantially more to build per floor area than a single family house. This is because to go that high you need stronger building materials than a single family house and that adds cost.
However a shorter building - is a similar price per floor area (at 3 floors slightly less, but more than that elevators start adding cost but still only slightly more). You can use similar building materials for the most part. However the apartment still wins because people who live in them share common areas - one shared laundry room is enough for several apartments, often there is a community room, exercise room, and pool - expensive spaces/equipment not used much by most individuals but as shared spaces the cost is shared and so cheaper per apartment.
So you design a small condo, where still you can't evolve, because it's extremely hard to reach and agreement to rebuild at a certain point in future, you put something in common, something much more costly than individuals machines, who need external services for anything, with much more stringent norms (let's just say common laundry machines requirement for high temperature wash for sanitary reasons, while individuals one do not), still being unable to implement the new deal without making new buildings for what? To spare a little bit in capex significantly enlarging the opex? No thanks.
I do not have studies to cite because there are none on that subject both pro and against urban, only PRs stating that's certain something not giving any reproducible proof and it's extremely complex to measure real costs because we should build real similar communities living a significant amount of time to compare, it's not just an initial bill of materials comparison but a whole different economic model.
What I can say is that in EU some countries have most people in single family homes, some others the opposite, some very dense, like the Nederland 425.4 humans/km² with 81.3% in homes, still being a significant producer of meat and cheese, Belgium 381.79 humans/km² and 77.6% in homes, France 117.52 humans/km² and 62% in homes, Ireland 71.47 humans/km² and 89.4% while on the other side Italy with 200 humans/km² and 42.9% in homes, Spain with only 34.3% in homes that's to say except few very small, very populated countries there is room for both model, it's not a matter of density nor of mean richness, nor of industrial vs something else development and so on, it's a choice. This variety is not technically a proof but it's enough to say that both models are perfectly possible and mean Gini index, mean happiness level, financial stability and so on suggest that being less dense pay back better.
I'm European I do not know much about the real USA situation but I have been in the USA some times and... Did you see SF recently? All "the city" essentially in a decadent state, all "wealthy" spread around, mostly in single family homes, some in very small condos who honestly seems to have no reasons to exists seen their prices compared to those of the homes and the relative opex and resale value. NY? I've just seen a very small part of NY, but that's enough to say "I have no damn reason to be here". Of course I know USA suburbs failure but that's not due to the density or the fact they are made of single family homes, that's due to the fact they are built to IMPOSE commuting for the sake of automotive industry. They are residential ONLY. Here (France Alps behind the Riviera) anything is "a suburb" since there is no big city and actually no city at all but anything is intermixed. I'm in a residential are, but a 3km (1.9 miles) I have a supermarket, about the same distance a golf, a blacksmith and a window installer main office and few shops all being single family homes scattered around and small sheds or little buildings. This is essentially the "strong town" real world modern model, their own was the old far west model, witch was working indeed, but was a spread one of small villages dispersed in nature.
SF is a bad example as they do not allow building or changing anything. They have high demand and limited supply and so cost are high for everything.
people move all the time hen the market isn't messed up so as long as someone wants to live there you are fine. Condos change, the logisics are complex but workable if it is allowed.
In technical terms Indonesia is trying to rebuild Jakarta deep in mountains since they can't evolve their drowning and unlivable capital, Turkmenistan have created/actually create Arkadag a novel Fordlandia equally distopic and a similar failure, the Saudis have started Neom then they reduce their goals from original 170km (105 miles) to 2.4km just trying to keep the prestige. The fact you technically can does not means it's not a nightmare, with unbearably high costs for a very poor return.
The main point here is why building/living in a city. The answer in present modern time is: just to be slave, all other good reasons are not there anymore. In the past cities was needed for many reasons, the second last ones was for the economy of scale, a big number of SME and large enterprises nearby so ideas who travel, ferocious market that push innovation and keeps the cost low, workers and customer in a short range. This collapse in the '80s when logistic evolution reach a point that cost less build things around the world and move them instead of doing anything nearby. The last one was the office. Things was done on paper, and you can't have nth copy of the same archive at home nor have customers at homes of every workers, updating their addresses as they move. Yes, we have had some forms of TLC and IT, but nothing really widespread and even if since the '80s we formally have enough to be spread that's not practically doable till very recently where videoconferencing, and screen sharing from The Mother of All the Demos became something most people use here and there or even daily. Now the city have no more purposes except one: the finance capitalism. Uber can't exists in a spread population, anyone have cars or something else to move and there is no parking issue. Just Eat the same, if you live at home, working from remote or in a spread area you have no reasons to look for ready made food in most cases and when you want there are only 2/3 options nearby, no need for an app to choose. No usable distance for ready-made food delivery robots and so on. No need for cloud+mobile. The "home world" is a distributed ownership society, there is no room for giants except for some industries NOT IT, nor finance between them.
Here the reason you here so much propaganda about green (dollar, not spring grass, or stereotypical toxic waste leaking from rusty stems) cities, "in 2030 you'll own nothing" and so on. Finance need the ability to control people, the economy is the lace, the zero public ownership the key to use that lace because in the 2030 WEF model the 99% are not entrepreneurs but employees and the 100% of their income will be consumed to live in services, being bound to obey since without a regular income they can't survive for more than a very little timeframe, of course no heritage, that's why inheritance taxes are so high where the WEF have more power and the narrative state that's good, because they know the "social lift" demand more generations to lift someone from poverty to richness and if you erase that the poor will remain in poverty without even knowing that because they have a handful of services like drugs to consume like junkies. For similar reasons educations reforms have built more and more specialized people, unable to see the big picture, unable to march on their own feet.
I fail to see any other reason for cities. Oh, yes, a teenager need to be together many others of his/her age, but that's easy done with campus model from high school, like Sweden (try to) do, giving students a flat in dedicated areas like small cities in the end. Similarly we can't make steel at small scale, so workers of this sector, during their working life have to live nearby a large factory so in a kind of city and since they do work there for a significant period of time they will have families there, but still as a temporary settlements. In the modern world doing more than that is untenable like original Noam design, the entire India is needed to built the Modi's 100-smart cities, while living spread we can be much more, so producing and innovating much more.
But in more practical terms: try to find a project of a MODERN condo, meaning one build with all current "energy regulations" of the western countries, let's say build in the last 10 years or so. Try to elicit the bill of materials, than try to do the same for single family homes of similar "luxury" of the apartments and simply multiply the single home bill of material times the number of apartments.
In infra terms try to visualize how much infra a modern city demand, including highways and so on vs simple roads on a spread area.
You'll find that some elements do cost much (like roofs) but overall single family homes cost less in mere raw materials. If we add the need of renewables and the lack of the mere ability to build a nation-wide smart-grid, while we can build smart-microgrid in homes, and we actually have them in all modern p.v. systems with storage/self consumption, you'll easily visualize that we can't create a "green new deal city" without falling in projects like Neom, Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis and others modern Fordlandia distopic and disfunctional like the original one. Then you can add evolution, the fact we do not really know how climate change will reshape us humans, with migrations, wars and so on.
Those who know try pushing air mobility https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... not because it's cool nor cheap alone (so far such drones consume the equivalent of a tank vs a car) but because they do not need roads, and roads alone cost too much and can evolve too slowly. We try to push water transports for similar reasons. We know large infra can't be maintained and evolved for long.
However finance capitalism needs dense cities where humans inside own nothing and have to obey simply to eat and sleep.
But my first reaction to your above comment is that modern commercial/urban/residential builds are intended for longer lifespans, higher use, and lower maintenance than suburban-rural/SFH. Also the tools/technology available to the builders of each are very different. Materials selection is consequently also very different.
And there are stricter zoning and permitting requirements (as well as different risks and goals that drive them) in cities than in rural areas, which definitely increases costs -- but the overarching intent is that a city build becomes part of the fabric and should serve (and be safe for) not only the builder/seller/owner but also the community.
Cost is almost never the limiting factor for building though. So I'm not sure it makes sense to look at it through that lens.
> my first reaction to your above comment is that modern commercial/urban/residential builds are intended for longer lifespans, higher use, and lower maintenance than suburban-rural/SFH.
Yes, that's WAS the case. Was, because it's not anymore. In usage terms, just observe a thing: you have the office and the condo (stereotypically) and well, you use the condo for less than 12h/day, and so the office, the rest of the time you keep moving around. Is that a better usage than WFH not necessary from remote? Let's say a dentist can have his/her own cabinet at the ground floor while living at the first one in a small village. Isn't that building (witch is still small and easy to evolve) much more used than the same person who live in an apartment and commute to another one in a tower?
If you really see "strong towns" explanations they tend to show "towns" who actually are old villages of small buildings, and yes they was working very well. But modern cities are not like that.
Now imaging a small or medium or large condo built in the '60s, I do not know how they was built in the US but in southern EU at that time insulation was an unknown concept, fuel was VERY cheap, summers not much hot. Things change, people have changed the windows for 1-2 glaze to 3-glase low emissive ones, some have insulated the roof and so on, but the overall benefit was VERY limited and the cost high. Single family homes was not built differently of course, but insulating them, adding rooftop p.v., a water-water heat pump for the winter and minisplit for summer is far simpler and cheaper, also rebuild the home is doable.
We can build durable homes, not the USA/JP cheap one, as we can build not durable big buildings, like most modern due to speculations, but we can't evolve the big one much and tech change fast as climate change fast so even a long lasting building is not a good thing, it can't evolve and we need to.
> Cost is almost never the limiting factor for building though. So I'm not sure it makes sense to look at it through that lens.
Really computing costs it's extremely time consuming and complex. But just try to imaging a different world in the current state of tech and climate. You can't get the numbers with such mental model, but you can get an idea.
In making sense terms: with spread homes, let's be clear not too spread, there is a small and medium player economy, giants can be only certain industries, in a dense city there is room for the service economy by the giants. You will not use Just Eat nor Uber in a spread area, you'll not buy ready made foods delivered by Amazon robots and so on. Of course you will benefit from an autonomous lawn mower robot, a home floor cleaner robot, the industrial part remain, but the service part disappear.
> Single family housing externalizes the costs of transportation
I've bought my car, I recharge it from my p.v. and the grid, so transportation costs are mine. Instead I do not makes some big companies profit moving me with subscription based collective transportation means, who are economically a nonsense.
Collective, improperly named public, transport was born to move workers to/from the factory and for this purpose it's very efficient, it normally run at nearly-full capacity. But a broad one is uneatable, and that's why all of them are expensive and heavy subsidized. We, the people need to move from any place to any other anytime, surely there are certain "common patterns", like the one generated by the office to/from downtown, but serving such patterns and forcing the society to follow them, forcing cities and offices for instance, means having built a big machine to move just few hours a day efficiently, while the rest of the 24h it not move or it waste energy being nearly empty. Private cars are still needed because we still need to move, bringing stuff with us and so on. It's an IMMENSE waste of resources. Instead WFH for all eligible jobs we need to move FAR LESS, and those who WFH spread enable others who can't to live spread as well and locally move at a short distance for local services and others jobs. Those who lose are Black Rock, Uber, Century 21 and so on. Not the average Joe or the society at a whole.
> utilities
They do not. Being spread means having p.v. in a large slice of the inhabited earth where p.v. make sense, this means being interested in shifting loads, typically in hours that the grid is strained, shifting them on local microgrid in self-consumption. Right now I have aircon on for the whole home (it's a new one, so all electric and very insulated) and car recharging (1.6kW absorbed) plus the basic home loads for a total of 4.3kW while from the grid I absorb 0-10W. If you tell me that large energy reseller suffer loss because of that, because they suck less money from us, yes, that's true, and that's why in many countries they try to impose laws against self-consumption or metering production to tax it. But in SOCIAL terms living spread we ease the life of the grid.
> overall environmental impact
I think you agree that a new home consume much less than an old one. Now try to imaging how we can rebuild cities to makes them all electric respecting modern low energy needs vs how we can rebuild single family homes. Imaging the environmental TCO considering that single family homes can be made in wood with small light foundations instead of consuming large quantity of steel, cement and so on. Do you imaging in not so hot climate heating in the winter from geothermal heat pumps for a city? It would generate no less earthquakes than the oil fracking... For spread homes? It have negligible impact especially if we have local energy production so we can waste it reversing the cycle in summer even if we do not need to cool the home. Do you imaging the environmental impact of a large mass of concrete, glass and asphalt of a modern city in mere terms of thermal mass exposed to the Sun light instead of the thermal mass of spread homes made in wood with p.v. on the roof NOT integrated in it (meaning there is free air underneath and they shadow the underneath roof? Do you imaging the large alteration of water cycle a big city makes tapping any source for a vast area and rejecting an immense amount of water instead tapping and rejecting locally? Did you know the fakir's carpet of nails, why it doesn't sting? It's the same principle in toxicology or the one of the concentration: dilute enough cyanide and you can drink it without being harmed. Concentrate enough and you are dead. Similarly hit the earth with sparse big nails and the earth will suffer, hit with an immense amount of nails all spread and you'll made little damage.
Really try to reason alone instead of assuming the PR you know are right. You'll came to similar conclusion.
The area they chose to highlight typifies this: that part of the East Side uses the steam network for hospital disinfection, and had a massive, deadly, costly stream explosion within living memory[1].
The city absolutely does need better contracting processes. But the parks, MTA, public housing, schools, etc. are all better examples than the one they chose.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explo...