Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolfretcrap | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com