How? I live in city of chicago and roads here are just terrible, there are potholes everywhere. Chicago Suburbs are a superior in terms of roads, sidewalks ect. Not sure if you are saying that people in city are "just fine" with poor infrastuture ?
The “ring of wealth” moves around over the decades due to the pyramid scheme effect.
It isn’t hard to find suburbs with far worse roads and infrastructure than the city of Chicago. Maple Heights, OH, Parma, OH, Euclid, OH. I’m sure Chicagoland has plenty of them, I’m just not familiar with them. You also won’t see any upper middle class people living in these suburbs, not anymore.
If Chicago seceded and formed a city-state the Chicago budget crisis would end overnight.
How well would such a thing scale, though, especially in a suburban/urban setting? IIRC sceptic systems need a certain amount/type of land to drain correctly, so that wouldn't work particularly well outside of relatively rural areas. Wells might not work beyond a certain population density due to insufficient groundwater recharge rate. And dirt roads still would require maintenance, especially if you want to support nontrivial traffic levels, not to mention relatively high-speed travel.
Isn't agricultural irrigation the largest source of groundwater depletion in places where it's an issue?
I believe basically all water here in Iowa is pulled from groundwater wells. I've never heard of it being something anyone was worried, but we also don't irrigate fields like they do in the Western states.
The main issue I hear about is people worrying about farm chemical runoff getting into the aquifers.
> I believe basically all water here in Iowa is pulled from groundwater wells. I've never heard of it being something anyone was worried, but we also don't irrigate fields like they do in the Western states.
Those are good points; I should have qualified my comment with "depending on location and local groundwater conditions". Evidently wells do work for at least some urban areas, but whether it's a viable option for all, I don't know.
Granted that probably varies a lot by region.
I've heard of a fair number of people that have their wells go bad and need to drill deeper to get clean water.
Found this page [2] that lists registered well depths here in Iowa. Seems that somewhere in the 300-400ft range is common. Deeper for municipal wells.
I am sure there are large numbers of lower income people who would be willing to try something other than a crappy apartment in a bad neighborhood if the per-month costs were similar. You'd need to deal with transportation issues (i.e. better buses, shared small electric vehicles or bikes, etcetera) and some other things, but it could be a promising method to explore.
Some people might even be willing to try things like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine-diverting_dry_toilet (incinerating toilets may be needed instead depending on the area) or agree to lower electricity usage for a reduction in monthly fees, among other things. I've been thinking about this idea for a number of years, and am somewhat surprised we haven't seen efforts toward it yet. Maybe I should do something.
I do know London, England is build on top of many many layers of obsolete sewer systems from a millenium of city living. Sometimes its best to abandon and rebuild.
Anecdotally, it seems fairly common for people to have municipal water and their own septic system in more "exurb-y" areas. Two of the people I work with (different states) have that setup.
It seems to be common because water treatment facilities are more efficient at scale, whereas a septic is pretty easy to maintain yourself.
The space requirements are actually a decent amount lower than I originally expected [0, 1], so it could be plausible for individual lots to have their own septic systems (unless the area above the drainfield can't be used for safety/other reasons). Not sure if there are other factors that make centralized waste treatment systems preferable over individual septic systems.
[0]: https://www.washtenaw.org/1722/Sewage-System-Sizing [1]: https://inspectapedia.com/septic/Septic-Drainfield-Size.php
Capacity is the main thing I can think of. If you get dense enough (e.g. 8-story apartment blocks) you'd need a pretty big septic field right next to the housing. Now that's land you can't use for housing or offices. At some point it's more cost-effective to whisk that waste away to some low-value land to do the processing.
I don't know at what level of density that's true, though. It could be pretty high.
Not with conventional implementations and funding, but yes, scaling is technologically feasible at this time. However in the US, getting people to learn the necessary skills and discipline to maintain such systems to the needed baseline operating standards will remain a significant challenge.
Water collection and sanitation could be automated into a closed-loop system, but I've yet to see a COTS solution. Even if you commercialized it, you just move problems around: there would be a significant waste stream of filtration cartridges to handle when scaled up, for example. Cradle-to-cradle design and implementation of such systems is neither easy nor cheap.
You don't need the portability of lithium chemistry batteries, so I recommend redox flow chemistries, with some kind of solid state magnetohydrodynamic pump if possible.
While there are more active septic designs for smaller properties, they're much more expensive, and require more maintenance to keep running. From speaking with septic engineers and techs over the years, Americans have awful habits in general around sewer systems, and a lot of that keeps the septic industry thriving. A sustainable on-site treatment of human black water into safe compost compliant as EPA Class A biosolids would require people be much more diligent about ensuring pharmaceuticals for example, don't make it into the composting stream and instead go to incineration. Even if people do that, it gets expensive on a small scale. Or we come up with ways to automatically sample and test each individual deposit for pharmaceuticals. Which again, adds expense and more maintenance.
I have no doubt we can engineer the shit out the technical problems. I don't have good solutions for the assholes who are The Reason We Can't Have Nice Things, other than isolate myself into a Dunbar Number of like-minded and build our own systems.
Grids arose for a number of good reasons, and the systems design issues surrounding decoupling from them at scale are pretty thorny.
Cities, small towns and rural locals have different costs. Rural areas maintain more kms of road per home, for example. Power/Data lines also cost more per home. Maybe these won't be necessary in the future, but they are for now. Obsolete is a strong word, still.
Like you though, the $10k price tag seems high to me. Is it really this high for the right reasons?
Honestly, I think it's hard to even discuss this without first understanding how road maintenance (sounds like this is the majority) adds up to $8000 per home.
Power... IMO, we're just not there yet. Maybe close, but even most rural homes use central power.
There might be some stuff that can be imported, but without more info it's hard to know what matters.
Similar question with dirt road - how long is the dirt road before it reaches a non-dirt road? How much traffic is on it? If you dispersed a major population center this way and still needed to deliver groceries and ship out garbage and septic, how quickly would any given segment go between needing to be regraded?
The 10k amount doesn't come about because they built a large community and infrastructure. It came because they built their large community in an unwise manner resulting in high infrastructure cost. While moving to individual or smaller communities reduces to possible scope of screwing up your planning, it doesn't reduce your ability to screw it up.
Seriously?
Panels + lithium battery does not yet make "traditional power distribution obsolete". I have a net-zero adobe house with its own grid-tied 6.6kW array. The additional cost at this time of sufficent storage to go off-grid without significant life style changes (none of which would be particularly awful, but still big) is substantial. I have no doubt it will decrease rapidly, but we're not there yet.
Sure, for rural and some kinds of suburban areas, your comments are on point. For rural, they're even more or less the default. For suburban, it can be hard to tell where "community service" would end and "what we do today" would start.
Let's not even start on the argument that not everyone can and wants to live on a farm. Also rural living is probably the most inefficient when it comes to infrastructure.
Its those areas that the article describes as the expensive areas because everything is so spread out.
The farmer is notoriously running around the farm fixing shit in between tending to the crop because living off the grid is hard.
Of course we should build less of it, but we can't unbuild what's already been built, and we can't account for city managers who aren't aware of this future problem.
If someone can solve the problem of the future being here, but being unevenly distributed...
My parents' farm is on a well and septic, and a dirt road. Water purification is done with a UV filter. The infrastructure costs are almost nil.
We are in an age now where houses don't even need to be on the power grid -- a set of solar panels and a lithium battery makes traditional power distribution obsolete.
If it costs a typical suburban house $10k a year to maintain infrastructure, that's outrageous. Move to individually or community based infrastructure.