LlamaLawyer

Oh, large parts of ancient Rome were ABSOLUTELY slums. Many of the insulae (what they called the tenement buildings) were five or more stories tall. They obviously didn't have steel beams, so collapses were (at least relatively speaking) common, and several emperors tried, not always successfully, to limit building heights as a result. Nothing else throughout history will compete with the density of this monstrosity though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City Anyhow, obviously life today is much more luxurious than life way back when, and for many different reasons. But anybody who asserts density like we have today is a modern invention is simply mistaken. We've been living in dense cities, on rural farms, and in small villages since time out of mind. The only one that's new is the bedroom-community suburb.

I had a discussion with a colleague about urban sprawl and zoning recently. The specifics of the discussion aren't important, but my colleague's sentiments echoed similar critiques of urban density I hear like "it's unnatural for so many people to live close together" or "being that close to too many other humans is dehumanizing and makes people angry all the time" etc. He specifically brought up the example of San Francisco as a place that (in his judgment) simply has too many people. It caused me to do some thinking and research, and I retrieved some statistics that are very interesting. With the advent of skyscrapers and the high populations of modern cities, people just assume that we live at a level of urban density today that is unprecedented throughout history. But the statistics about ancient cities are actually pretty shocking. Ancient Rome, in its heyday had roughly a million people who (according to the census) lived within its city walls. If you take the dimensions of the city and the estimate of inhabitants you can do the math and find that ancient Rome, if those figures are to be believed, the density of ancient Rome was more than 180,000 people per square mile. This would mean ancient Rome was more densely populated than any major city on earth today--nearly 2.5 times the population density of Manhattan. Now, did all of those people actually live in the city wall? Maybe not, but if even half of them did you still get a density figure significantly higher than Manhattan. Surveys of Pompeii and other well-preserved Roman cities also give quite high estimates for their density as well, not estimates as high as Rome, but still in the range of 20,000 people or more per sq. mile. The same patterns hold true when you look at even older cities. Uruk, the ancient Samarian capital which reached its apex over 5,000 years ago, had a population estimated at 50,000-80,000. That sounds tiny compared to the size of modern cities. But the walls of Uruk encompassed an area of only about 1.7 square miles. This gives a density estimate of anywhere from 30,000 to nearly 50,000 people per square mile. For comparison, San Francisco's density is 18,000 people per square mile. I think the above is underappreciated and worth considering. While the modern metropolis and the modern suburb are creatures of the industrial revolution, the dense urban core is not. For thousands of years, people have been living in walled cities and many (if not most) of those walled cities were more dense than the cities of today.

I actually really like some of these as concepts. Some of the crowns have a sorta nuevo-baroque dome style that's real cool.

Huh? I don't see this as risky at all. The affordable unit residents aren't going to be panhandling in the lobby or something. It's probably mostly going to be young adults.

Sounds like they’re open to having more than two bidders lol.

Very hard to know where this all ends as the developed world is in demographically unprecedented territory. We (the U.S.) only now passed the milestone of 50% of employees being back in the office, which raises some red flags for me. The U.S. labor force is extremely tight, but with a participation rate that's only now at 62% vs. a rate of more than 66% fifteen years ago, and down from a peak of 67% back in 2000. Services seems to be the really sticky part of inflation, and given the still-monumental labor force gap, I'm not sure how much it's going to take to drive it down. This, on the American side, is paired with a rapidly aging Europe, Japan, China, and SKorea. And all the while, public debt to GDP ratios are as high as they've ever been following a decade of la la land interest rates. You've got the fed trying to fight unprecedented inflationary demographics, Europe and part of Asia staring down the barrel at unprecedented deflationary demographics, and central banks across the world looking at unprecedented debt service to GDP ratios coming down the pike. I'm not sure how well our past experience on economics guides what will happen next, but it sure is interesting!

I would sort of doubt GE Healthcare is going to leave Chicago, where they just recently put down roots. I do think the idea of a medtech/R&D hub is a good one though. There are LOTS of other big players in this field, it's not just GE and Canon.

Read: "There are five of us who are really unhappy and we're going to post about it every other day on facebook and Nextdoor for the next three years."

Dang this thing is huge. I only just now realized the concrete part is an elevator bay, NOT the whole tower. 🤓

New Orleans is roughly 100,000 below its 2005 population.

I hear the above critiques, but I'm a little skeptical of the implication that hurricanes are really net positive for Florida's infrastructure.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/12/01/hurricane-ian-was-costliest-disaster-on-record-after-katrina-in-2005.html If this is accurate, I’m sure the FEMA money is just a drop in the bucket compared to what the damage actually is.

Do you have data on per capita infrastructure grants by metro over the last 10 or so years? I looked and can’t find it. I always assumed infrastructure in the south is better because (a) the cities are newer, and (b) they don’t deal with repeated freezing and thawing / road salt, both of which really wreck stuff. I’d be very interested if natural disasters is actually a major cause of better infrastructure.

https://www.zillow.com/research/2023-hottest-market-31982/ Seems promising. Also--grain of salt.

I wonder if the changing household demographics may also affect the advantage of owning vs. renting. Being married with three kids, I can't really imagine renting because there's basically nothing I can rent that has 3/4 bedrooms and is even remotely as affordable as my mortgage. But if I had no kids, the cost calculus for amount of space needed would be totally different.

Thanks for the very thorough summary! What about the potential of pumped storage hydropower (given we have a huge lake with mines underneath it) as an alternative to chemical batteries? Or is that not practical here?

Did not know that was your background! What do you think the long-term mix of wind and solar generation will be in Northeast Ohio -- on a scale from 0% wind with 100% solar to 100% wind with 0% solar? And if you have sources (studies, articles, etc.) for your estimate, I'd be very curious about that too!

You're definitely right that battery tech isn't there yet. I think the medium term plan with building a bunch of wind turbines should be that they can supply up to 100% of the power needs, with natural gas stepping in to supplement during peak demand or times of low wind. Then eventually, maybe, somehow, someday if we get amazing high-capacity solid state batteries/iron batteries/whatever, you can phase out the natural gas. I think we can definitely work on building out cost-effective (or at least borderline cost effective) green energy now, recognizing that there are no silver bullets and there is no actual plan for carbon neutral 2050. Offshore wind, it seems inevitable, will be a major source of power in Cleveland in the future. So we might as well start building up the expertise and knowledge base on how to make it work now.

Is it really though? I think wind is a better option for us.

Anyone know status on this project?

Wow, this is big. Hopefully a huge improvement over Cupp, though that is a pretty low bar... Although it's easy to get discouraged, one thing I like about Ohio politics is we have a sizeable number of Republicans at the top who are fundamentally SANE (e.g., DeWine, Husted, Faber). Agree or disagree with them, like them or hate them, they're not crazy people.

I think these cities are getting the microgrid first just because the legislation is ready. Obviously the big goals are downtown and UC, but it would be great for every neighborhood to have its own microgrid. A microgrid has nothing to do with this. What I think they're intending to do are "islandible microgrids" which are typically part of the wider grid but can also operate independently in emergencies with widespread dysfunction. You can generate power from any source for the microgrids. They're hoping to connect these microgrids with the ice-breaker project, but the two projects are totally independent of each other (i.e. you could have a microgrid with just existing power generation and could have wind turbines with no microgrid).

I’m assuming by “Northeast Ohio” they essentially mean Cleveland metro. Since I doubt a lot of refugees have settled in, say, Ashtabula and Portage Counties. If most of the 3,000 are in Cuyahoga County (highly probable) then we’re getting a very outsized influx since Cuyahoga is ~0.3% of the U.S. pop. How does one become a sponsor?

Strongly disagree.

Cleveland's reputation in healthcare is pretty widely known now. Certainly folks who work in healthcare in other parts of the country think of Cleveland as one of the big players in my experience. I also think the blue collar reputation is still helpful because it should cause us to benefit more from the next copule decades of onshoring.