I am living and working in Central London. Thank you.
Why can't you move? If real estate is twice as expensive, just pick a place half the size?
Don't you value your own time---wasted in commuting---at any positive dollar figure at all? If you spend an hour commuting each way for 21 days a month, that's 52 hours a month extra that you spend on `work', even if your employer doesn't gain anything from it.
I think there are a couple of forces at work here that aren't clear cut.
Perhaps there are families out there that need more space, would like to be self-sufficient especially in emergency situations and feel happier outside of an urban center.
I think if we build these types of communities/houses, we should have a way of sustaining them. This man wants to work and is not asking for a handout. This should be celebrated and the person should be given work to do to earn his keep.
It would be nice, if that person can find work. But I don't know what you mean by `should be given work'. I don't think we should force anyone to employ them.
That's not really doublespeak. And it doesn't have to be less efficient to own a house. Can't put solar panels on my apartment roof. Can't plant much of a garden to localize some of my consumption.
If you were really eco-conscious you could probably get more gains out of owning your own house. Especially since most houses have already been built, whereas most of the new construction I see in my city (Baltimore) is going towards mixed-use condos/apartment towers for all the trendy folks wanting to live downtown. If they really cared about the environment and efficiency they'd be fixing-up the thousands of run-down homes.
That's pretty small relative to the extra energy consumption from having to commute farther, and the land that you might live on could be used for solar power regardless of whether you live there.
Guess I was thinking more of my situation than the OP's in Seattle. I can commute downtown Baltimore in about 30 mins (~8 miles) from my suburban house. Leaf does it on a single charge. Guess I would have to do the math, but I'd think the drop in electricity consumption, especially in the summer heat, is enough to offset my commute.
It's definitely not typical since I'm in the minority of solar panel and electric car owners who are within commute range on a single charge. But there you have it. It's at least possible.
The subthread OP (antisthenes) was referring to the global (system level) inefficiency of large-home far-out living, not the inefficiency for a household's budget (which is distorted by policy).
For purposes of that calculation, it's double-counting to include the solar panel energy, because we can already put a solar panel at that location regardless of whether you live and commute from there; your choice to live there did not expand our solar energy capability, and you're still avoidably drawing down the supply of clean energy.
Just to clarify: I'm not criticizing your decision, only justifying why it's not an argument against this being a systemic inefficiency.
Sure, but I guess my point was that systematically we aren't building solar panels and creating the greatest possible efficiency of the overall system. You're kind of describing an ideal efficient system where we coordinated together perfectly. But that's not really how we as humans or a society work. If I moved out of my house into an apartment it's unlikely anyone will put up extra solar panels to offset the loss. My consumption would fall back onto the norm of the grid, which is mostly fossil fuels. But as an individual I can make choices which will create the greatest net efficiency.
But I guess I'm really getting into the definition of efficiency. I suppose in my mind I'm considering clean energy as more efficient even though from an economic POV fossil fuels are still more efficient based on price (though probably not for long).
So in conclusion, you're right. I'd just add the caveat that faced with the reality of a mostly uncoordinated system run by large groups of people with competing interests, you can possibly find higher efficiency (depending on how you look at it) from making your own intelligent individual decisions while living in a large home away from the city center.
I wasn't referring to price efficiency, but the general efficiency of the system's use of resources. And I agree that given the house, you are improving that efficiency by adding the solar panel. The point was, the system had to significantly distort the resource scarcity signals to make it look appealing to build the house to begin with, and adding some solar energy doesn't change that calculus.
But most the houses are already built. I live in a house that was built in the 30s. So in my mind the resource cost has already been sunk into homes across the country. Instead a lot of folks are moving into new developments being built in downtown areas.
Perhaps repairing the houses would be less efficient than building new apartment blocks, I'm really getting well beyond my knowledge or expertise. But I'd somewhat presume that instead of building new high rise apartments downtown it would be more efficient overall if we refurbished some of the crumbling residential areas.
Course that only applies to older cities mostly on the East Coast.
Building houses is relatively cheap. The housing stock on top of the land isn't what's so expensive in cities. It's the land underneath.
The cost of the housing stock is of minor importance in these arguments, and nobody suggest tearing down existing houses just for the sake of efficiency. That wouldn't make any sense.
(A house build and paid for once can stand for hundred years or more, but only with a constant expense on maintenance in either money or sweat.)
What we want is denser urban cores. That way there will be less sprawl, and even the country pumpkins would have shorter commutes, because the countryside could start so much closer to the city centres: given the same or even larger number of people in them cities, they would take up less space.
Guess I would have to do the math, but I'd think the drop in electricity consumption, especially in the summer heat, is enough to offset my commute.
Fully charging the Leaf should be about the same as my Fiat 500e, and that's roughly equivalent to running a space heater for 18 hours. I'd conservatively estimate your commute takes 1/8th to 1/4th that power. (There are lots of details I don't know that could affect that.) It is roughly the same going by that.
Yeah, it is pretty easy to offset that with a solar panel. On a sunny day, it would probably only take about 4 panels to do it for such a small commute.
He is not. He is wrong when he wants the government to force companies to bring jobs to his front door ("influencing companies", if you like smooth talk).
It is his choice to live in a good place OR next to a good job. It is not government's problem in any case.
Well, it's doublespeak for not wanting to actually trade-off personal lifestyle factors. Of course, nobody ever wants to do that, but we generally regard it as a Mature Adult Thing to do it anyway.
Those 52 hours of "work" can buy you a home, neighborhood and school district your children, spouse, (and you) enjoy living in. Whether or not those 52 hours are worth it is up to each family.
This is false. Go to NYC and you'll find some poor children that did, in fact, grow up in one-room efficiencies, or lower-middle-class families in Tokyo. Their houses become places to sleep, and the entire city becomes the house most of the time otherwise. It is not common in America but it is certainly doable. Whether or not it is desirable to the children or the parents is a different story.
That's the really annoying thing: there's no really good reason cities can't build more decent housing in high-rises. I suspect the problem is bad zoning laws and developers able to make more profit doing other things. Ideally, cities should be able to get developers to build lots of high-rises with moderately-priced condos and apartments, to pack more people in, which would also increase the efficiency of public transit. And these units should have a decent amount of space, by building up, so families can have a reasonable amount of living space. They just need to take action to clear out older, smaller buildings taking up valuable space (probably with punitive property taxes), and encourage development of high-rises (with property taxes which punish buildings that are too small).
Why can't you move? If real estate is twice as expensive, just pick a place half the size?
Don't you value your own time---wasted in commuting---at any positive dollar figure at all? If you spend an hour commuting each way for 21 days a month, that's 52 hours a month extra that you spend on `work', even if your employer doesn't gain anything from it.