[justanotherc]

Why don't we just stop building all this infrastructure, and move to a micro-community or individual model?

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.

[tehwebguy]

Probably because people simply don’t want to move to places with zero jobs, dirt roads, nowhere to shop, no power grid and no UPS deliveries.

[justanotherc]

I'm not talking about everyone moving to the country. I'm talking about localizing power/sewer/water infrastructure in medium density areas like suburbs. If you read the article you understand that its the suburban sprawl that is the expensive areas to maintain. High density downtown cores fund themselves just fine.

[dominotw]

> High density downtown cores fund themselves just fine.

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 ?

[dangus]

Strong Towns covers this: The whole “the suburbs are fine/better” is part of the pyramid scheme. Sure, they’re fine for the first 20-40 years. But then they deteriorate and the maintenance costs pile up. Tax rates increase to compensate. Wealthy residents who basically run their lives on tax avoidance simply move to a more recently developed suburb and the rest stay and suffer through a broke government, forced to do things like rely on police fines to sustain the budget (Ferguson, MO).

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.

[wpm]

Because Chicago is supporting the rest of the state. We have horrible return on investment on our tax dollars.

If Chicago seceded and formed a city-state the Chicago budget crisis would end overnight.

[rhino369]

The city really isn't severable from the burbs. Businesses based in the city create a lot money, but they are mostly staffed with people from the burbs.

[selectodude]

Depends on which suburbs you’re referring to. The north shore, full of old suburbs, has awful roads. Most of the side streets are un-maintained original cobblestone. It’s like driving on a wave pool.

[aw1621107]

> 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.

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.

[war1025]

> Wells might not work beyond a certain population density due to insufficient groundwater recharge rate.

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.

[aw1621107]

> 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.

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.

[justanotherc]

I'm not a well expert, but from what I've read is that chemical runoff could get into shallow sandpoint wells, but if you drill a 200ft deep well, that water is millions of years old.

[war1025]

Did a quick search, and this link [1] from what appears to be a reputable source says most household wells are pulling up water that is less than 10 years old.

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.

[1] https://agwt.org/content/how-old-your-well-water

[2] https://www.iihr.uiowa.edu/igs/geosam/depth_map

[justanotherc]

Yeah that's what I'm wondering... could decentralised water/power/sewer distribution scale? Like maybe not EVERYBODY has their own well/septic, but maybe every 5 houses or whatever share one?

[slfnflctd]

This sounds like a great model to try out in newly-built, 'experimental' communities. Retrofitting existing ones would require more cooperation among residents than you could achieve, I think, except in unusual situations.

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.

[justanotherc]

Yeah probably tough and expensive to transition existing neighbourhoods to this model... but is abandoning the current infrastructure and starting fresh more expensive than maintaining the already expensive existing infrastructure? Don't know.

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.

[war1025]

> Like maybe not EVERYBODY has their own well/septic, but maybe every 5 houses or whatever share one?

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.

[aw1621107]

> but maybe every 5 houses or whatever share one?

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

[titanomachy]

"Not sure if there are other factors that make centralized waste treatment systems preferable over individual septic systems"

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.

[aw1621107]

Yeah, density was the main concern that led me to make my original comment in this thread. I was thinking of a more suburban setting when I wrote the comment you're responding to, but you do have a point (unless local zoning laws allow septic drainage fields to be used for other things, but that I know too little about). If you can't build on top of drainage fields or dual-purpose them, then you'll need to sacrifice some building space, which isn't optimal from a make-the-most-of-a-land-parcel view.

[yourapostasy]

> could decentralised water/power/sewer distribution scale?

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.

[netcan]

I'm not sure this is practical. You can't have wells and septics at high density, though you could probably localize certain things more than they are now.

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?

[justanotherc]

But its not the high density that's expensive (the downtown core is actually the profit areas), its the medium density with sprawling suburbs that is what us so expensive to maintain for the very reason that localized infrastructure may work -- space between homes.

[netcan]

I still don't see how rural solutions apply. How is a dirt road a solution?

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.

[justanotherc]

Forget the dirt road. Rural solutions for water/sewage/power work because their viability is not dependent on close geographic proximity. Its apparent that the urban solution being applied to suburban areas is not viable, so why not flip things around the other way?

[netcan]

I think most of the $8k is for roads. Wells (shallow wells certainly) will go dry if an entire suburb is drawing on the spring. Sceptics... With enough houses, someone somewhere will have a stinky one, but these could probably work. I doubt most suburbanites wants one.

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.

[icegreentea2]

Is well water available at sufficient quantity and distribution for this to work? Lots of large population centers get their water from lakes or large rivers. If you disperse the population to the surrounding areas, is there enough ground water or small rivers nearby to sustain an ultra dispersed model? Or would you still need small scale infrastructure?

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.

[smileysteve]

We already have Americans not maintaining septic systems leading to outbreaks of hookworm.

[animal_spirits]

Article for the curious: https://yellowhammernews.com/life-threatening-hookworm-resur...

[RivieraKid]

Because it's inefficient, aka more expensive per person. Internet, canalization, public transport, etc., gets cheaper with higher population density.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

330 million people living with their own well, septic, dirt road and water purifying UV filter.

Seriously?

[justanotherc]

No. Re-read my comment. Suburban areas only. Try to keep up before you get all salty and make yourself look dumb.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

OK, I re-read it. In the last sentence you mention the cost of a suburban house. That's the only reference to "suburban areas only" I can see.

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.

[justanotherc]

Sorry I thought it was fairly obvious we were only talking about suburbia because the article itself points out urban areas are funded just fine. Its suburbia where the cost/tax ratio is out of whack.

[Jgrubb]

I'm sorry, it's not obvious to me why this would be downvoted. Would anyone care to elaborate?

[cycomanic]

Because it's completely orthogonal to the original arguments. Infrastructure is more than sewer systems, roads for example. Moreover everyone moving to septic tanks is a non environmentally friendly solution, and where are you going to bring the waste when the tanks have to be emptied (they need to be pumped out regularly), who is going to pay for that infrastructure?

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.

[justanotherc]

I'm not talking about everyone moving to the country, I'm talking about bringing localized infrastructure to suburban sprawl. I doubt that would work in high density urban areas, but why could it not work in suburbs where every house is sitting on a 60x120ft lot?

Its those areas that the article describes as the expensive areas because everything is so spread out.

[necheffa]

The claim that any of this has zero infrastructure cost is laudable. Either OP is extremely naive or being very disingenuous in there bias.

The farmer is notoriously running around the farm fixing shit in between tending to the crop because living off the grid is hard.

[morley]

This is addressed in the article: federal programs promoting infrastructure growth provided the funds. Building new infrastructure generates lots of short-term income to a city in the form of sales tax, permit fees, etc. It's harder to plan for the ongoing maintenance for these projects.

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...