[epistemic status: significant fatigue is being masked by caffeine and other effects]
The best time for your city to be built for efficiency is the year 1950, when it was initially laid out. The next best time for your city to be built for efficiency is now.
Rent - Housing is a very significant expense. It can range from 22%-50% of income. Every dollar that your citizens spend on housing is a dollar that they cannot spend on something else.
There must be enough housing units, but they must be built in a way that is intelligent, and which does not conflict with other goals of efficiency. The regulatory regime for both renovation and new housing construction must be both effective and efficient.
If median household income in your city is $50,000, each one point reduction in rent frees $500 per household per year. If the city has 500,000 households, this amounts to $250M annually, which could be
- spent on another government program (or infrastructure)
- used to potentially lower wages without lowering standard of living, making the city more competitive for employers
- allowed to escape untaxed, raising standard of living for citizens
Transport - In the US, a car costs over $8,000 a year. If the average household in our city has an income of $50,000, this is 16% of total annual income. At one car per household for 500,000 households, this amounts to $4,000M annually.
We can work to make car usage less frequent or necessary, which prolongs car lifespans and reduces accidents (and associated costs). However, the real binary is deciding whether to own a car at all.
For every 5% of our city that does not own a car, we free up $200M, minus the cost of our public transport network, to spend on something else that could be making our city more competitive, each year. If our public transport network were free, we could send 5% of our city’s population to university with this money (using a series of expiring loans that only have to be repaid if the person moves out of the city).
At the regional level, our city should have good commercial (airport) and industrial (seaport, river, rail) transport options, for cost-effective shipping of raw materials and goods and cost-effective business meetings.
Regulations - Regulations do not have to be non-existent. If we let companies step all over our city too much, the resulting social and environmental damage will render the city uncompetitive, and the costs pushed off onto the citizens will lower their effect standard of living. However…
Our regulations should be predictable and easy to comply with. Companies can plan for costs that they can foresee, but unplanned costs are significantly more expensive. Additionally, while allowing companies to pollute without consequence pushes costs off on everyone else and may decrease net efficiency, any regulations beyond those which are necessary is a loss - it is a form of waste.
Infrastructure & City Services - We want our infrastructure and city services to be cost-effective, as again, any money we save can either be spent on something else, or spent on more city services. Nailing the efficiency on every other aspect of the city will help with this - if half of our city doesn’t own a car, we’re talking a potential average %8 decrease in the cost of our cops, clerks, and judges. If our rent is only %25 of income, compared to other cities we could be looking at at 45% of income, our cops might cost $14,000 less, or we could get cops that are $14,000 better, because they have an effective wage which is 28% higher.
Triage - As the city’s population is falling, however, we may want to look at in-city relocation programs for residents which would allow us to de-urbanize subsections of the city.
In particular, this would allow us to maintain service levels by keeping density high enough for infrastructure and city services to remain cost effective. Infrastructure in the de-urbanized areas would be shut off and no longer maintained, and buildings would be demolished to prevent the pro-crime effect of vacant buildings.
Attracting Talent - You probably won’t attract all the talent of the cool, hip places, like New York - but you don’t have to. If your city offers high quality of life with low cost of living (a profit for employees!), it can attract sensible, competent people that are attractive to employers that aren’t looking to skim the cream of the crop from the entire country in a desperate arms race of absurd rent prices along the coasts.
It probably still pays to develop a university that has excellence synergistic with a key industry in the area to build up a unique talent pool allowing for city specialization competitive globally (although this is still somewhat risky).
However, I’d like to reiterate the idea of conditional loans here, depending on how much funding the city has available. These would go to promising people pursuing degrees in key local industrial/commercial sectors, which would gradually be paid off by the city so long as they remained in the city, or until paid off completely. This allows us to build a talent pool which is unique to our city, providing an indirect subsidy for employers, employees, and potentially improved economic productivity.
(Low cost of living per quality of living also helps us attract professors for our university!)
How do we get there?
That, I think, is a very good question. It is economically infeasible to rebuild the city into a more efficient form all at once. You’d go bankrupt if you tried.
I think, aside from some of these matters that exist primarily at the municipal level, the answer is that we redevelop subsections of the city around principles of efficiency over time. This allows us to maintain a productive base to keep our city alive long enough to build the next one, and as we connect these areas together with public transport, the overall value of each one will improve.
For some locations, even a genius invested with absolute municipal power could not pull it off, as the fundamentals of the location are not viable within the current economic context, but IMO, it is likely that combining everyone into a few ultra-dense, ultra-high-rent coastal cities is not actually the most economically efficient possible use of resources.
