On the Direction of Evolution for American Cities

I used to be a big advocate for so-called bedroom communities, but I'm not so sure anymore. There are some huge systemic problems with the way many towns and cities are built. I now believe this means many of them will inevitably become useless. 

In the US, towns were built or vastly expanded in the post 1940s around the concepts of automotive transport and suburban lifestyles. This creates "wide" city plans that build "out" and not "up," since it is assumed everyone can just drive a car to get where they need to go. Public transportation languishes in the same environment. Simultaneously, suburban aspirational living drives the workers and their money out to the fringes of the city, looking for new developments on large lots in convoluted street plans that abandon the grid street system literally in order to prevent their neighborhood being usefully navigable. This devalues whatever holdover main street "walking" district remained at the center of the city, moving the business money out to what I call "secondary main streets" - large avenues connecting the city on the limns of the new low-density housing areas, lined on all sides by strip malls and box store lots. This is encouraged because it looks "open" and "big," is cheap for the businesses to build, and is developed relatively quickly so long as the city planners agree to let the businesses develop this how they want. This works great for our civilization right up until the 2000s, when the following developments occur (or continue to pick up steam alongside the other developments):

• Gas prices go up
• Family sizes go down
• Agriculture and manufacturing become less important to our economy than services, knowledge sector, and logistics
• Wages stagnate while inflation continues, making car and house ownership more difficult while ultimately decreasing property tax income for the city
• The Amazon Effect guts malls and box store companies, further decreasing property tax income for the city
• Limited IT infrastructure rollout largely bypasses rural and suburban areas in favor of cities (as you already mentioned)
• "boom" infrastructure not designed to last begins to crumble, exacerbating the maintenance costs of low-density housing

In the end you are left with a city that is expensive to live in and maintain, without a population financially capable of enjoying it or having a real use for the size of the houses outside of pure aspiration, with a bunch of empty box stores that are difficult to repurpose - not only by their nature but because of their location and basic low-quality construction. People living there will realize they are living in a city imagined by corporations instead of city planners, and that nothing around them is beautifully architected - they will have no sense of ownership. The historical geographical reasons for the city's existence have dried up and now, unless it is a hospital or university town, or has heavily invested in IT or commuting infrastructure and can parasitize the incomes of a larger neighbor city, it has little path forward. Its costs will continue to compound while its sources of income will decrease, driving out citizens able to do so to more densely-packed megacities without these structural issues. The remaining population will be even less able to cope with the structural doom imposed on them, and the city will die a slow death over the course of the next century, making all those cornfields and forests they paved over to build it look like pretty great carbon sinks in comparison.

I don't see a way out of this. The only thing you can do to reverse it is compel people to literally act against their own interest and stay; to gain control of their local governments and get them to do drastic shit like build municipal IT infrastructure and buy out box store lots and pave them over to build high-density housing, open public spaces, and whatever kinds of commercial development make sense (probably logistics-related stuff and office buildings). That's scary because it requires you to put yourself even deeper in the financial hole in order to drag yourself out of it, so many places will not do it (politicians who increase city debt will be voted out by a population not educated enough to realize they're doing what needs to be done). You can try to attract businesses, but without a compelling workforce or geographical reason to exist, you are not going to get a lot of them without selling out completely (offering them utterly unfair tax incentives to invest in your community which ultimately destroy a lot of the immediate benefit their investment would provide!).

A lot of small and mid-sized cities in America, especially those which expanded quickly during the baby boom years, are now entering a death spiral that will see them contract or even snuff themselves out. Their populations will migrate to the bigger cities and continue to drive housing prices up there. I see this all as a fundamental and practically insurmountable change.

In the future, our landscape will be dotted with the hollow ghost town corpses of towns and cities - and as nature reclaims these spaces, and people burn less gas just to exist, we will actually realize this was a good thing.

SOURCE: am living in Rockford, IL

Internet Corollary - the ISP Angle

As a sidenote to the earlier navel-gazing about the future internet that outrgrew its parent thought, how does one serve up that media? I got into a discussion on Reddit which involved just that. I did a fairly in-depth amount of analysis for a total amateur on the subject, which I think should be posted here lest I ever forget why it would be a super-bad idea for me to attempt to start my own ISP.

A local/municipal ISP is responsible for the "last mile" connections around town to the residences, businesses, and government buildings it serves. These connections converge on a local data center (basically a building with switching and routing equipment that supplies IP addressing to its client connections and converts whatever media used for the last mile to fiberoptic via a router with SFP cages populated with fiber adapters). From there, the fiber out line needs to connect to the "backbone," which is inevitably going to be a fat fiber pipe owned and operated by an intermediate provider or a top-tier operator company (Comcast is one of these AFAIK, so if you're doing this where they operate the backbone you might STILL end up beholden to them to a lesser degree). Your ISP pays the backbone operator a fee for some amount of bandwidth up to the limit enforced by the number of fiber strands your datacenter has connecting it to their nearest backbone splice closet/datacenter. As I understand it these fees are not trivial. From there your ISP is allocated one of the IP ranges reserved for these sorts of things and you finally have a connection to the World Wide Web.

It should be noted the above summary only handles the basic problem of connectivity - not how you bill clients, not how you optimize your connection and cache data (caching is going to be important in order to not get raped by that backbone rent agreement, which typically charges by data used from what I've gleaned).

Yes, we all know what switches and routers are, and we may even know how to properly architect and provision IT infrastructure to avoid stupid bottlenecks in the transition from last mile media to backbone fiber, but there are technical, financial, and strategic problems with setting up your own ISP that make it such a bitch to get into, few ever do:

TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS

1. Redundancy and Disaster Recovery - when you're an ISP, people depend on you, sometimes with their finances, sometimes (as in the case of hospital patients or law enforcement officials) with their lives. Significant periods of downtime during inevitable equipment failures practically require ISPs to use geographically distant backup facilities with separate power (not just UPS/generator; ideally all the way to the plant), backbone uplink, and staffing. If one goes down, the other one needs to automatically come up within milliseconds, or you will face an unholy amount of network traffic congestion that could well overwhelm your backup site, killing that too as a knock-on effect. Expensive network engineers and linesmen need to be kept on retainer to handle the damage at all levels, even when they're not necessarily doing anything for you for the same reason.
2. Quality of Service - Because of the exhorbitant fees and expenses associated with getting that sweet, succulent backbone data to your subscribers and a desire not to pass that directly on to the customer who has competing offers from others with bigger pockets than you do, you pretty much need to get clever about how you cache, prioritize, and otherwise shape traffic. Load balancers, carefully-tuned QoS rules, ethically-questionable caching decisions, and other solutions must be leveraged to get the most out of what you've paid for in order to deliver a cost-effective service. Indeed, AFAIK ISPs commonly rely on these technologies to such an extent that they don't actually buy enough bandwidth to the backbone to literally serve all their customers to the utmost all at once; if everyone came online at the same time and couldn't be QoS'd adequately, they wouldn't have the pipe to handle it. A delicate balancing act.

FINANCIAL CONSIDERATIONS

1. Comcast and AT&T gon' find a way to sue you.
2. The startup costs of an ISP are very high because of the physical infrastructure and fees. The smaller your market gets (e.g. a 3,000 person town), the less likely your consumer base will be able to cover your expenses. Outside investment is typically not thrilled about a complicated business with high initial expenses, moderate year-over-year maintenance costs, plenty of failure points, a long wait for ROI, significant potential for competition, and significant hurdles to expansion into larger markets.

STRATEGIC PROBLEMS

1. Marketing expenses are difficult to swallow when you work in a market where tried-and-true is generally preferred by consumers over new and cheap.
2. Choice of infrastructure can have profound implications for the businesses' ability to expand with difficult tradeoffs in startup costs and future-proofing. A company with millions sunk into gigabit internet provided last-mile via coaxial MOCA technologies has to dump all of that infrastructure if customer expectations for bandwidth rise above what that technology can provide - this is partly why even though their technology can do it, cable companies have been loathe to tee up to what marks the last possible limit of throughput on their last-mile infrastructure. New capital expenditures will slow growth unacceptably, so ISPs need to make sure their wires and boxes will stand the test of time right from the outset. Additionally, opportunities to expand into new market areas may be missed if your infrastructure isn't adaptable enough to integrate more distant or heterogeneous endpoints - neat ideas like wireless mesh networks quickly die as the network grows because QoS and latency costs scale faster than the size of the network, making expansion untenable.

It's not that I think it's impossible to do, but I know we don't have the necessary smarts and money to do it. If I were going to try, though, I'd try something like this:

• Find 3rd party backbone-served area like Northern Illinois and its iFiber.org non-profit backbone organization with a decent potential market already served by Comcast.
• Coordinate with cooperative local governments to allow me to lease tower space on local water towers and other municipally-owned tall shit geographically near the backbone - they will earn a cut for this. Possibly build towers where potential for serving a juicy slice of the market is high.
• Get funded by investment from local businesses and possibly some kind of profit-sharing organizational vehicle that essentially crowd-funds me via local investment from stakeholders. Grassroots work a must to build this.
• Build out a 4G or even 5G infrastructure to serve business and residential traffic with wireless last-mile connections - this will likely require licensing, fees, and other government shit to be able to do.
• Customer plans do not go above 30mbps down/10mbps up to start. This is going to actually be fast enough for most people.
• Sell (at as close to cost as is feasible) transparently SSL-bumping cache boxes to customers with built-in 4G hotspots, 2.4/5ghz wireless APs, and 1x gigabit ethernet (remember that future-proof your infrastructure thing?), preferably with no ongoing service fee involved. This helps deliver perceptually faster service to customers, simplifies their network, reduces bandwidth utilization, and does so all without ethical compromise, as the device resides on their home network and uses off-the-shelf, user-auditable software/firmware/hardware.
• Hopefully utilize already-extant 3rd-part datacenter facilities and staff in the area to do the uplink from last mile to backbone.
• Focus on residential service over business customers at first, to soften the impact of inevitable learning mistakes leaving a bad impression about my reliability on my potentially most-profitable customer type.

a simple thought about where the internet is headed

In the beginning, the internet was used by individuals.
Over time, advertisement was used to support useful services which became structurally significant within the community of internet users.
Ads generated enough revenue from this community to justify serious commercial utilization of the internet as a medium for the commercial exchange of goods and services.
Due to features inherent in the structure of the internet, its community was able to drastically curtail the effectiveness of advertising.
Advertising was slowly supplanted with data mining as a means of supporting services which drove customer engagement in the online community.
It remains to be seen whether users will be able to restrict this mechanism of commercialization.

If they are, what would replace it? If not, would it be bad to revert to a Web 1.0 experience for the user community, with corporations mostly using the medium for interbusiness communications?