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Comment by mindvirus | Hacker News Reader

I love the ambition. One thing I've been really amazed about China has been the willingness to tackle big infrastructure projects - building cities like Shenzhen in a few decades and all of the infrastructure projects in the Pearl River Delta in general. I think we need more of that in the west. So I wish them luck - I hope real estate speculation doesn't ruin it.

One thing I've noticed with US politics is that things tend to be viewed as local issues instead of national ones. For example, NYC's public transit is a key part of the US's financial engine, but still chronically underfunded and mismanaged, and New York's problem to deal with. So I hope people see projects like this as points of national pride, even if they don't live there.

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I just finished reading The Devil in the White City, which is about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and intercuts the story with serial killer H. H. Holmes’ crimes. What struck me most was how the event’s success was far from guaranteed, and it took a mix of national/civic pride, hubris, ambition, and luck to pull it off. We tend to think of massive engineering projects as guaranteed successes and scaling to fill their need, but I think we underestimate how much influence individual people have in pulling these projects off. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City

We already have lot of infrastructure projects here in America. It's called roads. Endless ceaseless expansion of roads.

I think we need to stop mindlessly expand roads, and reconsider our infrastructure priority before we can start doing massive megaprojects.

Isn't a new city an example of priority reconsideration? I don't follow your argument.

A new city _in the waterless desert_ is a vanity project.

The thing is we don't have the best part of a billion people living in a desolate backward, almost jobless countryside that needed to be funnelled into economically productive occupations over the last 30 years, as China has. Most of our populations are already urbanised. The majority of the people who would live in this city already live in cities.

We do have urban housing shortages and all sorts of demographic problems, I'm not saying a project like this is by necessity flawed, but the motivating dynamics for us are very different from what has been happening in China and SE Asia.

It's mind blowing how much land the US has. I live in India and here finding farmland is not easy to say least, while I see lot of cheap land available in the US all time with much more facilities than a small city in India would have.

I've always wondered why America has not built many more cities with all that available land.

Our problem is more about in-fill development then taking up land. Why would we want to make more cities? Better preserves the wilderness.

The path to building a city involves first building a small town with some kind of economic activity. Because of a lack of people (especially young people), it's hard to create a brand new city with a vibrant economy. Most of the existing young people in America move to existing big cities. Small cities are becoming bigger.

This is unlike China where cities were built en masse to house migrants from rural areas. America just doesn't have the same volume of workers.

America is still pretty empty.

Probably because America has only about a quarter of the population that India has? Also, the ideal of the American homestead or even suburban home is one that doesn't place a high value on sharing space or being close to your neighbors.

Most of that cheap land you are seeing available in the US is not close to what you'd consider farmland.

Consider the location of the 100th meridian as it somewhat bisects the continent. West of that line, you cannot really grow anything without irrigation. East of that line, and to some extent there's enough rainfall that stuff will grow on its own, albeit not optimally.

Most the cheap available land you will find in the US is west of the 100th meridian, and is dry largely inorganic dirt.

As for the cities, you may not be aware of this, but the southwest (and perhaps western) US is in year 21 of a drought that rivals the worst of the last 1200 years, and there is no sign that the situation is likely to improve in the next century or so.

This is the basis of the plot of The Sea of Grass, a classic Spencer Tracy / Katherine Hepburn movie. Tracy is a rancher trying to make this argument to some optimistic farmers. They see it as self-serving, which they are right about, but so is Tracy. Tragedy ensues.

This. The western half of the US is going to become useless for farming in the next 50 years because all the aquifers are drying up and they take tens of thousands of years to recharge. Which is another way of saying that farming in the western US has only been possible because it harvested fossil water that's now almost gone.

This is not quite true. Most western US (well, say CA central valley back to the plains) agriculture has been made possible by large scale irrigation systems backed by the construction of substantial reservoirs. From time to time, it has been necessary to pull from groundwater, and from time to time, some farmers have done so even when it wasn't necessary. But in general, most of the agricultural expansion has been based on collected rainwater, distributed via huge systems. This system has worked "well" as long as the snow and the rain has kept coming (and flowing, rather than being absorbed into warm-weather baked soil). But the rain & snow are not making it into the rivers and reservoirs, and so this system has serious problems now.

By contrast, plains and some midwestern ag. has been drawing down the Ogallala aquifer at an insane rate, and that really is "fossil water".

Correct. I overgeneralized; the coastal western states might be able to continue some farming. Assuming cities like LA don't continue to appropriate more and more water that fell to the ground hundreds of miles away.

The goal isn't to pack people on the planet like sardines.

There are already lots of cities with declining populations and lots of empty houses. We dont need new cities.

Also lots of old computers that still work!

I'd be interested in moving there, depending. I love the idea.

I moved my company to a new city "GIFT city" in India. It's awesome.

I have a coworker who cries about everything the government spends money on because it doesn't directly put cash in his pocket.

How do you explain that things like this are still beneficial to him? That a rising tide lifts all boats?

in this particular example (NYC subway), it is kinda hard to understand how that benefits people outside of the NYC metro area. I live in a much more distressed mid-atlantic city, and NYC already has one of the best public transit systems in the country. why would I be happy about my federal tax dollars subsidizing transit in one of the wealthiest US cities while my local public transit is barely off the ground?

NYC is about 8% of the US economy (and much more if you consider second order effects) - so their successes and failures are inevitably going to impact the entire country. At the very least, NYC (for example) being successful is something that I think should be of national interest not just local interest.

There are a lot of places like this in my opinion, where a large investment in a seemingly local thing would have national impact.

Interesting, because I hate ambition when it's used to do destructive things that only benefit the very rich.

> So I hope people see projects like this as points of national pride, even if they don't live there.

Why wouldn't this be a national _shame_? "We can't even keep our own citizens alive. We won't even try to protect you against climate change.

"Droughts are going to be a permanent feature of life for a lot of America, and our response to that is to spend billions on a city in the desert for the rich."

In my experience growing up (in Asia) almost every city that created by a government saying "let's build a new shiny city in the middle of nowhere" was an utter flop at getting people to move in.

People have families, livelihoods, businesses, kids that need schools, grandparents that need care, friends, and emotional attachments to cultural things like food. "Shiny new buildings" are great to look for an hour but it gets old quickly. After that you start missing that noodle shack at the end of the street, the park the kids play in, and the sights and sounds of a bustling street market. Homes being 3X the price just because they are newly built, and a lack of jobs for both parents, doesn't help make people want to move, either.

I think with NYC it is the mismanaged part more so than underfunded. Limiting cities (and people) by having them live within their means forces better management. When that doesn’t work I feel the solution isn’t to pump more money in but rather to seek out alternatives. The market does that automatically - people will choose to live elsewhere to avoid ever higher local and state taxes, or to avoid an inadequate subway system. The country addresses the problem by decentralizing away from NYC, in your example. Of course in reality it doesn’t quite play out in a perfect idealistic way. The alternative is that the nation pump money in but also control NYC. Shenzhen may be a partially planned city but it isn’t also independent in the way American cities are.

> Limiting cities (and people) by having them live within their means forces better management.

New York State takes New York City's state taxes and gives a lot of them to a tiny number of upstate voters.

The US government takes New York City's federal taxes and gives a lot of them to do-nothing Republican states.

If New York City were allowed to keep all the state taxes it pays, it would not just "live within its means", it would run a huge surplus.

> the market

Here we are in 2021. "The market" is literally destroying our biosphere, and this only keeps accelerating. Surely no adult believes in the "Invisible Hand" by now?

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