There is nothing fundamentally unsustainable about suburbs, single family homes, low density, or cars. 50% of the USA is totally uninhabited, and it is possible today to build a totally off-grid and sustainable single family home / suburb in the majority of it.
You can even capture carbon in concrete. Don't prescribe solutions just because you prefer them, set incentives and goals to favor the right outcomes and let people decide and optimize how to do it.
Your urban utopia is my hellscape, and my suburban utopia is yours. The good news is, this is America, and we can both live here. Good fences make good neighbors.
P.S. most of the $2 trillion real estate market in the Bay Area where I have lived for 12 years exists precisely because our politicians DON'T promote further development, sustainable or otherwise. Most of what's here is decaying, old, unsustainable, whether it is high or low density, and nobody can afford to improve it because all the tradespeople got priced out and left years ago.
US suburbs are heavily subsidized with federal dollars[1], this is a huge reason why PGE can't effectively maintain the infrastructure in California. The ratepayers & tax base cannot afford to repipe a suburban neighborhood when the water service lines hit end of design life, let alone repaving, maintaining gas, electrical service, telecom & cable[2]. This is also why Fiber buildouts are so uncommon in suburbs (for-profit companies won't make their money back within a decade).
We have designed an extremely expensive mousetrap of suburbia where you get degrading public services (as maintenance & replacement bills accrue and go unmet), nearly mandatory car ownership, and higher rates of health problems caused by the poor design of these neighborhoods[3].
1 - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/we-have-always-...
2 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/27/a-texas-sized-...
3 - https://www.webmd.com/women/news/20040927/suburbs-may-be-haz...
We don't need PG&E. The sun gives us free energy, and batteries + thermal energy storage can cover the cloudiest of days.
Well-designed suburbs don't need to be subsidized. And they can also be healthier and happier for you and your family (quiet, safe, better air quality, elbow-room, &etc). Just decentralize large cities by building smaller mixed-use "downtowns" surrounded by layers of variable density housing. Single family homes with yards are a part of that.
I'm moving and will be putting this into practice, instead of sitting back and seeing what happens. My cost of living will go down even though I am self-providing all of my family's utilities.
I might even use the savings to build more than just my own needs... creating opportunities for those with less capital to make the same choice to enjoy a better life at an affordable cost.
P.S. I have done the carbon calculations, and burying it in concrete is a good part of a total solution. "Deluding." Hah. A head not in the sand can more easily look in the mirror!
While I think the rest of your response is orthogonal (albeit valid), I think this is the heart of the matter relevant to the article. Californian infrastructure is aging and politicians have only made it more difficult over time to build new anything, whether that's power, water, internet, transport, or housing infrastructure. I just wish I knew what the solution was.
That said, intelligent legislation to encourage all types of housing and development (with externalities like carbon priced in as taxes, not government prescribed solutions to mitigate them) would go a long way to bringing back affordability.
The solution in the interim is to vote with your dollars and feet, if you can. And really think about it if your answer is "I can't". Most of the time, that's not really true.
I'm leaving next month. Bye California and your awful policies that literally burn us to death at worst, and make us poorer and stingier zero-sum competitors at best. And for those of you who say "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out" ... check in with me in 10 years and let's compare stories! <3
Sure, fundamentally nothing is sustainable because eventually the useful energy gradients where life can thrive will run out as the universe expands into a cold dark empty vacuum.
But before that let's try to spend the already fixed tax income a bit more efficiently. Compact cities can be more efficient than the endless sea of cul-de-sacs and occasional golf/sports fields.
That said, I have no real horse in this race. If the people of those particular cities want to live like that, let them live like that. Self-determination is important. If they feel that they don't want better mass transit and less sitting-in-traffic, no worries.
Citation needed on cities being fundamentally more efficient. A suburban home can be powered by pure solar, rainwater/groundwater can be captured and recycled locally, an electric car can carpool, and mass transit (sure, let's build more of that too) can easily reach out to the suburbs. You can even telecommute, and that sipping straw of electrons makes the public transit users look like energy-guzzling planet-killers in comparison (Ooh! We all love some tasty moral superiority!)
Even if that weren't the case, there is such a concept as efficient enough. At some level, sanity factors in, and trying to raise a family while dodging needles and poop in San Francisco is enough to make some people say "enough is enough."
I'm all for spending smarter and more compassionately. San Francisco spends $240 million per year on homeless programs, or $30k/yr per individual. And it doesn't even make a dent; the local living costs are so high that $30k evaporates in the blink of an eye.
We need policies/infrastructure that encourage building up AND out to relieve this pressure and better care for the less fortunate people ... while still allowing for sustainable urban and suburban lifestyles.
Making small things are rarely efficient (transformers, inverters, heating, cooling, insulation).
Moving people one-by-one more distance will always require more energy, EVs also have to carry themselves, and thus the more people you can move per trip the better. (Hurray for electric buses.)
I already telecommute (our company already works full remote).
I mean if you have problems with needles and poop, but we don't, and most cities also don't, then it's probably not because SF is a city.
Anyway. I have no problem is people want more personal/private space, better sound insulation, a garden, a pool and whatever. But those luxuries should be priced in, so it encourages building up and compact, so more people can enjoy living in nice places. (Like next to a forest, lake, on a hill, in a valley, whatever).
SF doesn’t have that by a long shot. That’s the actual point.
Also, I didn’t say I had a problem with cities, far from it – I have liked living in the city in the past, and I can understand why someone would want to live in a good city. But [citation needed] on cities being fundamentally and meaningfully cheaper under the externality-adjusted capitalism model.
Urbanization can increase total living costs compared to lower-density living, for example through disease spread, crime, power density and transmission requirements, high-speed waste processing requirements vs composting opportunities, food production locality, and etc.
Whether the efficiency scales balance out in favor of a particular density or not is a mystery to me. I am just not as sure as you seem to be.
Let’s find some data that shows a TCO per capita for a well-planned/well-run suburb vs a similar city. Or, do what I’m doing and get out there and mold your local environment into what you need while letting others do the same – there’s enough space and energy for all of us here and probably >10x if we fill the Earth and Mars.
P.S. While I don’t know for sure, I suspect that the answer to efficiency vs density is: it is either a wash or a small enough difference that it doesn’t matter compared to living the life you want as sustainably as possible.
I agree that there's enough energy and stuff in theory to be green and live anywhere, but currently in practice there isn't. (For example just now with the PG&E blackouts the very real cost of living spread out shows itself.) At the same time you are correct that if some pandemic strikes it might be better in a log cabin, but ... for how long? Are you ready to hunt? Grow your own wheat, and so on? And HongKong seems to be doing fine, after SARS they are doing a lot of proactive stuff.
PG&E's failure is because of poor capital investment, bad infrastructure decisions, and lack of federal antitrust intervention into a mismanaged California-ordained private energy monopoly.
You don't have to live in a log cabin, I am not talking only of pandemics but also the mental well-being of people who want to spread their elbows a bit using the copious land available on Earth, and you don't have to hunt or grow your own wheat to live in a suburban or semi-rural place and buy food and products locally (although there is nothing wrong or crazy about hunting and growing some of your own food, if you want to... we just also have this thing called "money" that you can trade for goods and services that you don't want to provide yourself).
I'm only responding now in an attempt to get you to reconsider the frankly baseless assumptions that you are asserting as facts – the truth is, and the point is: there are ways for people to live efficiently enough in urban, suburban, and rural settings, and we should stop judging that very personal preference and instead focus our time and investments on improving efficiencies across the spectrum (and fighting always to enforce legislation that engenders more competition in every marketplace).
Where have you seen this happening in practice?
A political science professor first showed me 25 years ago something I still see in US national politics: a "winner-take-all" voting system that creates a polarizing dynamic, typically resulting in a roughly 51:49 split -- with the potential for radically different outcomes hinging on tiny pockets of voters.
Also, both parties are institutionally corrupted by the dominance of money (cf Lessig on "Fix Congress First", highlighting campaign finance as a fundamental threat to democracy).
But only one of the parties is exhibiting blatant, explicit, direct opposition to the principles of democracy (eg voter suppression, rule of law, etc) from the highest level on down.
The degree to which state politics are tied to the characteristics of the national party makes it difficult for powerful governors or even mayors to deviate from party lines.
Don't get me wrong; the idea of a free marketplace of ideas and the positive value of principled opposition are things I'm sure we'd agree on. But that's not what we have. Wish I knew how to fix it.
What does Kentucky have?
Especially because if you want to tackle local problems that require local service providers (education, healthcare, craftsmen) you'll have to pay local (very high) prices.