As long we we keep building & being forced to live in low density, single-family houses, we'll keep consuming the huge physical and energy resources necessary to sustain them.

I'm not saying we have to turn every neighborhood into manhattan, far from it. But this is similar to the gas -> electric car change. Yeah, it's a marginal improvement on what we're doing now, but its so far away from the kind of changes we need to make that it's almost dispiriting to see it presented as some kind of remarkable progress.

>

There are several core technologies and products that go into creating a Zero Energy Ready Home. These include:

Advanced insulation materials: These materials are used to reduce heat loss and gain through walls, roofs, and floors. Examples of advanced insulation materials include spray foam insulation, rigid foam insulation, and blown-in cellulose insulation.

High-performance windows: These windows are designed to minimize heat loss and gain and to improve comfort and natural lighting. They typically have low-e coatings, multiple panes, and insulated frames.

Efficient heating, cooling, and ventilation systems: These systems use advanced technologies to reduce energy consumption and provide a comfortable indoor environment. Examples include geothermal heat pumps, air-source heat pumps, and energy recovery ventilation systems.

Solar panels: These panels are used to generate renewable energy and can be installed on the roof or integrated into the building envelope. They can provide enough energy to power the home and even send excess energy back to the grid.

Energy-efficient appliances and lighting: These products use less energy than conventional models and can help further reduce energy consumption in the home.

Building automation systems: These systems allow homeowners to control and monitor energy use and other home systems remotely, which can help optimize energy efficiency and comfort.

Producers of these products include a variety of companies, from large multinational corporations to smaller regional manufacturers. Some examples of companies that produce products for Zero Energy Ready Homes include Owens Corning and Johns Manville for insulation, Andersen and Marvin for windows, Carrier and Lennox for HVAC systems, SunPower and Tesla for solar panels, and Nest and Ecobee for smart thermostats. There are many other companies and products available, and choosing the right ones depends on factors such as climate, building design, and budget.

>

1: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/5-things-you-should-kno...

Even in rural areas you can get supermarket home delivery, it costs a few quid for the delivery but is considerably cheaper than car ownership.

Pretty much everyone has cars though.

But they’re not living/working on farms, nor are they living near where the food is grown. Our agriculture system is capable of delivering huge amounts of food for people (including the people who live near fields), but it’s not exactly trying to do that as doing that is not economically efficient.

I'm fully on-board with working to make suburbs more self-contained and walkable. As others have said, the issue may be zoning and regulations.

Strong Towns has an agenda (which I mostly agree with), and in order to promote their agenda they have a straw man argument that broadly categorizes _all_ suburban development as an unsustainable venture that is borrowing against the future.

I agree that there is (in many cases, but not all) some deferred costs and externalities that are not being fully accounted for in new development.

However, I'm not nearly so pessimistic as to think that the people living in those developments won't make changes to account for those deferred costs and even possibly some of the externalities.

I think it's naive to cry "the sky is falling".

I think in my HN comments I'd prefer a couple of facts and a conclusion, with citations for more detail.

I wish people would stop conflating low oxygen with high CO2.

Even at 5000 ppm CO2 (which "significantly impair" attention, executive function, and risky decision-making[0]), the oxygen has only dropped from 20.95% to 20.45%. This ~2.5% difference is negligible, equivalent to natural variations in atmospheric pressure.

The buildup of CO2 is the issue, not the depletion of O2.

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/13/6/891

Some years back, "sick building syndrome" was a prominent topic of discussion and there was a push for fresh air, windows that opened, etc. but this seems to have largely dropped off the radar, afaict.

No, that's silly. Build the panels. Build the solar. Fix the externalities, but absolutely pick the low hanging fruit. Every panel on a hippie's home means less total joules needed elsewhere.

To be blunt: the kind of argumentation you engage in is absolutely toxic, and HN is awash in it. Engineers love to scream about perfect solutions, but real engineering is about tradeoffs. And folks here are absolutely terrible, just really, genuinely shit-tier, at discussing them rationally.

[1] Depending on locale, obviously. In e.g. Arizona it's probably much closer to 80-90%

Before home generation, everyone needed both. The cost of the infrastructure was amortized over all of the customers. As it turned out, rich people used more power, so by having a single charge just based on usage but that covered the cost of both usage and the grid, rich people subsidized poor people.

But the home solar came along, and the rich people started getting it. So now the power companies have a problem. They still have to maintain all of that grid infrastructure, whether you're connected to it or not, and they need rich people to subsidize it.

The could have simply split the bill up and put the infrastructure on the property tax bill and then just charge people for their actual usage, but that would be complicated and would reveal how much they pay for each part.

So instead they lobbied for laws that don't let you go off grid and force you to pay a minimum "connection fee" each month.

Or if you can get away with having a power inlet on your off grid system and powering that system from the grid with an extension cord during temporary backup/maintenance conditions only, go for that.

For my own AHJ, grid interconnect has nothing to do with whether permits/licenses are required (and for homeowner work, they're not). So an off-grid system and grid-connected are under the same requirements there regardless. A grid-tie system that can feed back power to the grid requires additional signoff/agreement with the POCO though.

(I'm very sympathetic to the situations where the utility will demand some stiff fee to build out a grid connection to a new residence, while local regulations require this connection for occupancy. But this isn't what you described)

Every city has deferred maintenance and unmeetable promises, most of it is maintenance that it is more cost effective to defer. We don't need perfectly smooth streets, so defer minor maintenance makes sense. Most unmeetable promisees are things they never intended to meet.

Suburbs have existed for over 100 years. If there was a problem we would see it all over, not just in a few random ones.

You are talking about incremental improvements.

Well, yeah. So pick the low hanging fruit and sell it to the FAANG hippies. I still fail to see the problem here. No one is promoting rooftop solar as a one-stop-shop trip to renewable utopia, just as a effective and immediately deployable generation mechanism in a regulatory environment not well-suited to agile and rapid solutions of any kind.

If we get to the point where the hippies are buying up all the panels and the grid solutions can't get them cheap enough, that's the time to start complaining. Not now.

It could of course be much more aggressive, and likely will be eventually, but if you had a ACH2 house with those insulation values, minimum U-0.3 windows, >0.94 efficient gas furnace / high quality heat pumps, it would be a very efficient house.

Table R402.1.2 here: https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IECC2015/chapter-4-re-resi...

Further reading:

https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/nearly-half-america...

This is different. Many municipalities specifically require all dwellings to have basic utilities (water, sewer, electricity, garbage service), even if you're not using them. Not having that will get you in trouble pretty quickly.

Unincorporated areas are usually fair game.

I don't know exactly how many yards the breakeven point is. However, from what I've seen it is almost always monetarily cheaper to create your own services when possible - unless a neighbor has paid for services to get really close. It might make sense for neighbors to pool money for pulling services out. It all depends on the specifics, right?

Walmart and Kroger like having big operationally efficient stores that they can operate like all their other stores, and can’t scale their model well to oddball village locations. So they make or buy a big building with a giant parking lot and underprice all the local stores with their hyperoptimized business model until the village is dead.

At that point, there’s nothing left to do in your dense housing district and everybody needs a car anyway, so you may as well have some breathing room and a garage.

If people want suburban density, it won’t come from zoning changes (although that will help urban density) — it’ll come from somehow making village commerce more economical. But good luck getting that kind of effort past national-retail lobbyists!

Ultimately, again, the fact is that urban development issues are different than the issues in other areas and the solutions don’t need to come at the expense of each other or in competition with each other.

Note that in the context of the "half came from gas taxes," the article is only talking about highway funding. Local road funding isn't covered by Fed gas taxes at all.

It doesn't make sense as a description of where people live, but [English] language rarely makes sense.

Thanks for your reply.

A typical suburban subdivision will have city water and sewage, though depending on the details, you might have a couple community wells and individual septic fields (or a link to city sewage).

Notably, though, the HTF spends more than it earns in gas tax revenue; the shortfall comes from the general fund. And also Federal highway spending does not cover all highway spending; the rest comes from the states[1][3]. Federal highway spending also does not cover local roads at all.

[1]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/...

[2]: (Above image from https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57138 )

[3]: https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/

Clearly walkable neighbourhoods are highly desirable, and in the US people pay a massive premium to get them because they are so scarce. Yet, for some reason, new construction in the suburbs is all disconnected and almost never walkable.

There's a huge disconnect between what people want and what developers are actually building. The kind of density that leads to walkability seems to only occur in older and already expensive areas with infill development, never green field construction further from an existing city center.

Maybe it's impossible to build new walkable areas in the US.

Edit: Sorry, I can see that you're aware of these. Perhaps my point is just that all standard houses where I live in cold climate uses vapor barriers. Moisture control is part of the building code. Trying to solve the problem with overly dry air does not make sense to me - the whole point of a house is making a comfortable living space.

Thermal mass storage requires a lot of mass to do anything useful, or the ability to run exceedingly high temperatures. Or a phase change. Molten salt storage can store a lot of energy, but you're at "very hazardously hot" temperatures with "stuff that's mind-bogglingly corrosive when hazardously hot." It's not the sort of thing most people would want to mess with at home. Myself included, and my tolerance for experimentation is pretty darn high.

Imagine you see all the power being used up ahead of winter, and you predict this problem... Yet it seems like nobody else has noticed...

So you swoop in and, with profits in mind, you buy up some electricity futures contracts for December. They're quite cheap right now, and you suspect that when the blizzard hits they'll be really valuable. By doing so, you push the price of them up a bit.

Meanwhile, Fred over at the hydro plant sees that futures contracts for electricity are higher in December than now, so he'll make more money by switching off the generators now and using that water later in December when he'll get paid more for it.

Bob at the aluminium smelter sees that spot prices for power now are higher (because the hydro shut off), and futures prices suggest they'll be even higher in December too. So it's probably more profitable to shutdown the plant for repairs now, and restart production next year.

See how you noticing this problem started a chain of events that solved the problem? That's the power of markets - they can use the collective knowledge and intelligence of all the participants to solve a problem.

This isn't a uniquely Dutch problem. The longest commute you mentioned:

Utrecht -> Eindhoven: 1 hr 4 min (92.2 km)

isn't unheard of in the US. These are the commutes for a cousin, and a friend's uncle:

Colorado Springs, CO -> Denver, CO: 1 hr 19 min (113.5 km)

New Britain, CT -> New York, NY: 2 hr 4 min (177.1 km)

These are memorable though because they are so long. Many of the people I know have far shorter commutes. For example, my mom would drive 30 min (21km). But, these long commutes definitely exist.

In 2019, 10% of US workers had a 1-way commute of over 1hr. (The average times for transit are quite high in the US, but 90% of commutes are by car so a large portion of that 10% are by car).

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

In 2003, 8% of 1-way commutes were over 56 km.

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1006/ML100621425.pdf

Is a pretty general term that's hard to respond to.

Yes there are rural subsidies, but I'm unconvinced that the per-capita subsidization of rural and suburban dwellers is so much greater than their urban counterparts.

You may have a very good argument, but I don't know the numbers, and I haven't seen anyone provide the numbers for this yet either.

For example, most of the Santa Clara Valley is suburban, consisting of subdivisions of detached homes with front yards, driveways, garages etc. But the area is definitely not rural: millions of people live here and 4 of the 5 FAANG companies are headquartered here.

You could say similar things about LA, or the areas outside Chicago and NYC, etc. They are definitely suburban, and definitely not rural.

I don't buy that subsidization is what makes buying a house "in the sticks" so much cheaper.

Note, the above is as of 10 years ago. Now wind provides most electric so hours may be different to account for that.

Electricity is the biggest expense in aluminium production. There is a reason it is nicknamed "solid electricity".

It actually started in North America around the time of the oil embargo as a mechanism to reduce energy costs. (See the history section of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house). Once that shock passed, people went back to not caring.

Even at the time, and still today, most write ups are focused on harsh climates like New England or Canada in Winter, because it's harder. It's also the case that in milder climates, the cost to make your home passive has historically been higher than just paying the subsidized bills (and/or requires capital). So most of the US hasn't cared (again) until recently.

The aluminium smelter can heat to x+250°, let things cool to x° while people cook their evening meal, then heat up again afterwards.

A large supermarket chain can set their refrigerators to 5°, but by allowing the range to move between 3° and 7° can save significant power. (One of the big British supermarkets already does this.)

I'm all for it where it makes sense but it isn't a blanket statement.

For a plant to absorb 1KG of CO2, it needs to increase in weight by at least ~1Kg.

An average human exhales ~1KG of CO2 a day.

Unless your house plants are gaining half a ton of mass a year, they aren't meaningfully offsetting your CO2 exhilation.

Insulating cavities needs some skilled labor if you use mineral wool, but a skilled installer goes fast. Or you can use some kind of blown in product, which takes very little labor. (I have never seen competently installed fiberglass batts. I’m not sure they really exist.)

As an example, a smelter that operates half the year takes twice as much capital to produce the same throughput as one that operates year round.

That’s before we get into all of the reasons that seasonal labor is undesirable, or how much additional warehouse capacity would be required to stockpile the metal which will needed over the unoperational months, or the raw material being stockpiled while it’s unable to be processed, or the impact on just in time supply chains, etc.

Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.

We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it."

This isn't some immutable law of the damned universe.

I think that's a big part of it, but also people choose suburbs and rural living for reasons more to do with quality of life rather than cost.

I wanted to be a translator at one time. I've had Intro to Linguistics as a college class.

I genuinely have zero problem with people wanting to use the term passive house to refer to a distinct set of building techniques and passive solar to refer to a different set of building techniques. Living languages evolve. It's a known phenomenon.

And, yet, so far no one has suggested to me a better umbrella term than passive solar design.

I defined the term thusly in one of my comments here:

Passive solar design is about creating a home which needs little energy to stay at a comfortable temperature.

My best understanding of life, the universe and everything is that without energy from the sun, earth would be extremely cold. And also wind energy is a form of solar energy which arises from air movement caused by temperature differences.

So to my mind, any technique that tries to keep a home a comfortable temp using sunlight to warm it and air flow to cool it with a minimum of electricity, oil, and other energy sources is using passive solar. It's trying to primarily use energy from the sun in a passive fashion by means of elegant design suited to the local climate conditions.

I guess I need to start defining my terms up front on HN for this topic because I do understand why people want to make this distinction in building techniques, yet I still need an umbrella term for this and I don't currently know of a superior umbrella term to the one I'm currently using.

Is there a source for this? I live in Denver and am currently staring at a dozen Lyft scooters and a few bikes parked on the corner next to my apartment. Lime also operates scooters and bikes, which I usually see parked across the street at the apartments next door.

There are a few places that are geofenced (e.g. along 16th St Mall), but judging by how many people I see riding them on e.g. Cherry Creek trail as I'm biking, I don't think they're generally banned.

> Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.

This is an amazing example of the terrible disease that is Car Brain.

Instead of having a walkable city where you can walk to the shops/gym/restaurants, take convenient public transport to the theatre, and take the kids/dog to the park next door, live in a massive isolated bunker, drive your massive pickup truck to buy groceries, and wonder why the city is so congested with cars and trucks all doing the same thing. Madness.

Here's a list of US counties by per capita income:

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

Lots of suburban countries here— Arlington, Fairfax County, Marin, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Westchester, from the ones I know at least. The only two that seem quite urban in the top 15 to me are New York County and San Francisco County.

How can you say that? Usually nice suburbs pay huge amount in taxes that subsidize urban cores.

Dumping sewage into a creek is an externality that is bad.

Someone preferring to live in a suburb does not mean they're generating externalities at that level.

The very reason I pushed back on the comment was because of this black and white thinking.

Saying

> The fact that people dump their sewage into the creek instead of paying for proper sewage treatment/disposal suggests that there's something desirable to _them_ to do the easier and cheaper thing. Of course!

seems condescending to me. As though "those" people don't have the character or moral rectitude to live in the city. Maybe I'm reading in more than you intended.

When people talk about the “subsidy of the suburbs” they usually talk about the cost of maintaining suburban life, vs the tax base that supports it. Eg property tax usually goes to the town to pay for the town’s infra, while income tax goes to the state to pay for other thing. When the town can’t cover its cost and depends on the state’s money or when the state pays to build things in the town, that’s where the “subsidy” comes in. Often towns just can’t cover the cost of their basic infrastructure maintenance, but even when they can, the state usually still build highways and other big projects which can cost $10s to $100s of millions, and rarely can be affordable by the actual tax base of the town.

Again, that is something that might be true for some places but not others.

I know of suburbs that definitely pay for themselves. And it's not hard to see why -- the property taxes are high and many of the residents are paying high income taxes too. Plus, many residents of suburbs commute to work in cities, where they contribute to the success of businesses that pay taxes in those cities.

I also know that some of the new subdivisions outside of Sacramento have paid for all of their infrastructure via their HOA, so that all of the money to build and maintain the roads, sewers, and power lines was 100% paid for by the homeowners. That's also apparently a common model for new housing in Nevada.

These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.

Of course it’s not going to be on the same order as literally dumping raw sewage into the surrounding area. But there is an enormous body of research demonstrating the overall drain of resources from economically-productive urban areas out to costly suburban ones.

Then there’s the carbon cost of enormous, congested highways and stroads where people idle in traffic for hours of their day. Or the overall inefficiency of providing general city services (water, power, sewer) to people in comparatively sparse areas (which ties back into the resource drain imposed on denser areas).

"reduce the productivity of nearby lands, for example, by [...] driving up land prices beyond what local residents can afford."

What nonsense is this?

Now they're getting bought up and the people are literally building houses from every end of the lot, often time getting variances for setbacks. They've decided that yards and green space are no longer important. They want wedge a three story 5K sq ft house on the same lot where a much smaller home fit.

So, I would agree and say to an extent, people are already there in terms of dealing with no lawns, now its just getting them to accept several houses on the same lot instead of their massive mcmansion.

I think we are on our way there, most new developments around here have houses that are nearly the size of the lot, with a tiny back yard and smaller front yard, and little room between houses. Developers get more money by making lots small and houses big, so there’s little incentive to have the large suburban d yards that wises to be common.

Of course, the houses are much larger than their Japanese counterparts. My Japanese mother in law thinks we are wealthy based on the size of our house, but we’re one of the smallest homes in the neighborhood,

Not that there isn't a time for trying to bring a different perspective. But we should do it with humility, rather than assuming they're just wrong or misguided.

So... yes "stop convincing them" is a valid argument. "convince them not to" is slightly shakier moral ground.

In the case of your family member sure they lack sense, but I've found for lawns at least, to lean into that and use arguments like, 'hey clovers are better because you don't need to mow and barely need to water, this means you can sit on your ass more!' (something like that).

If these buildings were properly soundproofed, in many ways I'd prefer living in the city, but as things stand the only people who get to enjoy that in cities are those at the tops of skyscrapers renting penthouse suites, all of whom reside in a plane of existence entirely separate from my own.

The number one thing I've enjoyed about suburb life, particularly as a remote worker, is how much more dramatically quiet it is, primarily thanks to not sharing a wall with anybody.

I do enjoy walking on the grass and taking care of some plants, but I didn't really need so much land if not to keep neighbours away (I used to live in an apartment where a neighbour made my life hell, never again).

It’s in my self-interest to take everything you own and to dump my waste in the nearest available yard that isn’t mine. Nobody wants to live in a world where people act like that, so we collectively agree that things are better off for everyone if we respect one another’s property rights and pay someone to take our trash and sewage somewhere else to be dealt with.