[Grovenet] America's Trillion-Dollar Baby

[David Morelli]

If you want to get everyone into the same compact location, you could  
strive to reach the population density of Lagos, Nigeria; Bandung,  
Indonesia, or Surat India.  They get as many as 47,500 people per  
square mile in cities of millions of people.  We are pretty low  
density in the Metro region by comparison.

To duplicate that kind of density here, almost the entire population  
of the state of California would need to move into Washington  
county.  Then all of the rest of the Californians and all of the  
residents of the other 21 states West of the Mississippi would need  
to move into Clackamas county.

I was going to say that I doubt that anyone proposes that density  
here, until I looked at the numbers.  Surat, India was listed as  
having a population of 47,539 persons per square mile.  That is about  
74 persons per gross acre.  When Metro pushed for a High Density  
designation on the Rau property they were shooting to allow up to  
20.28 units per acre or 22.31 with a Planned Residential  
Development.  At 2.88 persons per owner occupied home that could be  
64 persons per net acre.  Fortunately, it should come out closer to  
14 persons per net acre on the contested area.

David

On Jan 24, 2007, at 8:12 PM, Steven wrote:

> I was thinking of the prop 37 landowners vs county and FG's Morelli vs
> Metro stuff. We can't seem to get the 'who is in charge' thing  
> straight.
> I notice that we seem to be focused on commuting to work. Live  
> close to
> work. Stuff us all closer to work.
> Is that the largest consumption of energy? Is the goal to have a
> bazillion employees making widgets? Who would be the consumer ins  
> such a
> world?
> Is the goal to stuff us in close to a job?
> We could easily live in 300sqft per person units. A building 320' x  
> 320'
> would have about 100,000sqft of living space. Enough for over 340
> people. Multiply that by 30 floors and you have enough room for 10,000
> people. If it costs too much to have this in the cold north of  
> Oregon or
> North Dakota, we could decided to move all living to temperate  
> climates.
> The entire population of Oregon and Washington could live in less than
> 1000 of these buildings in eureka, CA. We could move all manufacturing
> from the northwest to there, too.
> Food transportation? Convert all organic mater to hydrocarbons. We can
> recreate the perfect food, EcoFu. It would have all the nourishment  
> the
> body needs.This could be manufactured local to the residences so that
> transport would be minimal.
> Manufacturing needs would be minimal, there isn't a lot that will  
> fit in
> my studio apartment.
>
> Now, on the other hand. I remember a book about how to be self
> sustaining on 40 acres of land. Maybe it is more or maybe it is less.
> What if the answer is for each person/family unit to have a certain
> amount of land that they are in charge of. Oxygen production from  
> plants
> might be a bonus. Or maybe we could each have a garden, like a Victory
> Garden. Maybe we don't commute to work, but use technology to work  
> from
> home.