Ask HN: Capping population for cities, a thought experiment | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Capping population for cities, a thought experiment

27 pointsNoRagrets24 comments

Hypothetically, would capping populations of cities and towns be a better way to utilize resources as well as distribute resources so everyone can have a basic quality of life?

There are pros and cons to this..it is certainly an over reach of govt, but that exists now too in a different way.

As a thought experiment, would this help to develop model self sustaining cities?

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>Hypothetically, would capping populations of cities and towns be a better way to utilize resources as well as distribute resources so everyone can have a basic quality of life?

Isn't that what many cities in the US are doing with their zoning laws? The "cap" is being enforced by the number of housing units that's available (although not perfectly), and the result is that the housing units available are rented/sold to the highest bidder. Whether that resulted in "everyone can have a basic quality of life" is... doubtful.

I assume they mean to cap it so that we don't see that fierce competition. We may be zoning to reduce the increase in housing, but there aren't any limits on number of jobs in that locale (which is largely what draws people in the first place, for many cities). Ie, zoning addresses a symptom and not a cause. Redistributing the jobs to cities where populations have shrunk could be a more efficient system (as mentioned, politically untenable).

>I assume they mean to cap it so that we don't see that fierce competition

Sounds like internal passports[1] to me. The article does not paint a pretty picture of its consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_passport

Nah, you don't restrict the people, you restrict the businesses.

There's no reason people should want to go to SV to start up a company or to work for one of the big name (they do have other offices). It's that mentality that snowballs and causes problems.

So your main problem here is that cities (and larger cities) are more efficient than less dense places. Less energy use, easier to get around etc.

Sure it takes an hour to get to the other side of town but you have millions of people reachable in that hour. If they were all in small towns the number of people in a one our radius goes right down.

Also think carefully about why big cities are growing everywhere and villages, towns and small cities are struggling.

> Also think carefully about why big cities are growing everywhere and villages, towns and small cities are struggling.

That’s not entirely accurate. People are clearing out of urban cores for other areas, and are clearly choosing lower density locales when their income situation affords it (whether that’s remote work or retirement income streams from a combination of social security and investment income). Florida and Texas have grown by about 200k people in the last year.

> “The patterns we’ve observed in domestic migration shifted in 2021,” said Dr. Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for estimates and projections in the Census Bureau’s Population Division. “Even though over time we’ve seen a higher number of counties with natural decrease and net international migration continuing to decline, in the past year, the contribution of domestic migration counteracted these trends so there were actually more counties growing than losing population.” In many cases, there was a shift from larger, more populous counties to medium and smaller ones. These patterns contributed to population increases in 1,822 counties (58.0%), while 1,313 (41.8%) lost residents, and eight (0.3%) saw no change in population.

> Florida trailed only Texas in population increases from 2020 to 2021, while the nation had the slowest growth rate in its history, according to information released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

> Florida grew by 211,196 residents from July 1, 2020, to July 1, 2021, to a population of 21,781,128, the census estimates show. Texas grew by an estimated 310,288 residents to a population of 29,527,941.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2022/comm/wher...

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/populati...

https://www.orlandoweekly.com/orlando/florida-saw-second-hig...

Suburban counties are heavily subsidized in a number of ways. You can't really compare migration flows for that kind of analysis

It’s immaterial if the long term economics of the suburbs or rural living is unsustainable; that’s where people are moving today, and the economics issue will be someone else’s problem in 20-30 years (metro Detroit comes to mind).

Complaining about wide swaths of the population migrating to medium to low density suburbs and exurbs is like fighting the Fed. You can’t. Builders build, buyers buy and migrate, and you’re stuck with the resulting development.

Tangentially, StrongTowns’ efforts (which argues against sprawl) is like arguing with someone who is racking up credit card debt and has no plans to pay it back. People want their low density housing and will fight you for it (see California for example, and their efforts to try to make upzoning possible at scale), and as long as one lives in a democratic country, you can move to and live what your economic means will support.

(my comments are observations of the system and its participants, not my personal opinion of an optimal master planned community configuration)

Strict efficiency, cities are better. But if we're discussing quality of life, are cities still the best? Personally, I don't think so (and wouldn't want to live in one). But others may have different views.

They are already doing this by refusing to build. It obviously isn’t working unless you are a homeowner looking to maximize the value of your home.

Most people want their kids to be able to live in the same area, and their extended family to stay there. Both may move away if prices go sky-high due to low supply.

I’m not sure why so many people are anti-city. If you don’t like living in a city, don’t live in one. But please don’t handicap all of us trying to start our lives because you want everything to stay the same as it was two decades ago

Er, why?

I live in London. It's quite big. Why would I want to cap its' size? I live there precisely because it's big; it has great connectivity.

~0.2-0.3% of the world population are within an hour or two of my front door. If that were 0.5% I'd be happier.

Do you like to live in totalitarian world, where some statesman make decisions, who should live where, etc?

In democracy world, exists local government system, where all citizens of one community could make agreement, for things like you say. Because in this case, community is closer to private property, where (co)owner(s) decide, how to use their property.

Some democracy countries implement this idea so extensively, that their central government MUST make agreement with EVERY community on foreign policy.

That's all. For example, Switzerland live with such idea, and north European countries mostly share it. Because of this, Switzerland situated inside Europe, is not member of EU, and similarly, Norway is also not member, but have special agreement with EU.

And yes, Switzerland is one of the most effective countries in the world.

I was thinking about something similar: What would happen if the countries were smaller (with a maximum of 1000 people per country)? it would be more appropriate to call them micro-countries, the 1000 people would work together so that their taxes go to improve only the quality of life of those 1000 people, the social and economic laws would be specific to that area, people would have the opportunity to be someone important in their community and not simple fish in the ocean like most workers are...

The logistics in many areas would be very simple... The current governments cannot solve all the problems of a country because the countries are gigantic and each area has its own problems... All this brainstorming could be turned into a more serious analysis if you had the help of experts in sociology, politics, philosophy, history and economics.

There are a few problems with that:

We instantly lose economies of scale. While a software company might be able to scale up with 100 so employees, the same does not apply to most other industries. Goods will be more artisanal, but also more expensive.

It's already hard enough to solve problems of a global scope. Increasing the number of countries from ~200 to ~7.9 million will make this impossible. Sure, microcountries could band together for a specific purpose to become macro-countries of a size large enough to solve a specific problem, but such an arrangement would be highly unstable: I can imagine a farming micro-country and the fishing micro-country that lives down-river having major disagreements on fertiliser run-off, for instance

I don't think economies of scale will be lost, they would have more complicated logistics since each country would have its own policies and a deep analysis of the laws of each micro-country would have to be carried out to export... This would be solved with new technology (Imagine consulting a global database if your product is accepted by the policies of most countries, everything would be automated and would have no extra cost).

The micro-countries could create trade agreements with each other (as currently occurs in the countries), such as eliminating import taxes on a product that is in high demand, exchanging resources, pooling wealth to work for a common goal...

Another important aspect would be the judicial system, there could be criminal countries that make theft legal in their territory, if that micro-country is in a strategic place, sooner or later people would have to enter the country... One solution would be for the micro-countries to adhere to a centralized judicial system made up of members from each micro country, similar to how the European Union works.

I have a lot more ideas on this topic, but I am not an expert and cannot validate my hypothesis, or do a deep and detailed analysis of this topic.

Decentralizing populations was an official policy in many countries prior to 1980 or so when I think there was a lot of concern major cities would get shot up in an atomic war.

Also there was a sense that countries like Britain and France had too much power and wealth in London and Paris and that something had to be done about it for the sake of fairness.

Post 1990 the fear of atomic war is reduced (e.g. there are dramatically fewer missiles and warheads) and the triumph of Reagan and Thatcher brought us globalization, so now London has to beat New York as a financial center for the good of the whole U.K... In the last few years there is talk of "leveling up" the hinterland but let's see where that goes.

Unless you force people not to give birth, no you can't cap the population of a town.

If you mean restrict new residents from moving in once some limit has been reached, sure that is possible, but ultimately what issue does it solve?

Since no one has mentioned China yet,I'll go ahead. What you are suggesting was done in China through the hukou system, to devastating effect. Paired with top-down mismanagement of farmland, it led to widespread famine.

Arizona tried to do that around ’02 or so with a bill that made new developments have to show where their water was going to be sourced from.

Didn’t pass and then the building frenzy leading up to the economic crash was a sight to see.

Centrally planning cities is famously a great and successful idea.

It’s a great idea. The vast majority of cities and towns in America are far too small and too sparse to support a basic quality of life. Yet we all pay for their ridiculously inefficient infrastructure and are slowly dying of their vehicle-miles-traveled. Many of their economies would collapse in weeks without federal transfer payments. Consolidating this sprawl into fewer, larger, more sustainable, more productive places would be a huge improvement for most people.

Any info on that? Many cities get large federal aide as well. It seems the areas with housing issues are the largest/densest ones, right?

You have that backwards. The cities economies would collapse without all of us living in sparsely populated areas, using our land to grow your food. The consolidation already occurred, over the last 100 years as the farming was made more efficient, people did move to cities, and what is left in the country is the minimal amount of people needed to support everyone else.

We'd actually get better if more people came back - the small towns would have more customers, their economies would improve, small town main streets would be revitalized, and we'll have to drive less miles because our local shops would have what we need instead of doing weekly/monthly trips to town to stock up on the things we don't grow and make ourselves.

10% of American workers are in agriculture. I’ll admit that’s higher than I anticipated.

50% of Americans live in metro areas smaller than Birmingham, AL or Rochester, NY [0]. Although some of these places do have picturesque old main streets, they are also highly decentralized, and we’re talking about the metro area. So most Americans are even more dispersed than that.

Farmers are not infantry soldiers; it would be very surprising if they needed 5:1 non-agricultural support staff. Many of these places are not about farming anyway, but about some industrial plant, old-economy corporate headquarters, prison, military installation, etc. which may or may not still be around.

[0]: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-50-someth...

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