Substeading: A Profitable Way to Build More Affordable, Convenient, and Prosperous Cities by Turning Underground Wasteland into New Transportation Corridors
About this ebook
In this paper, we show how Substeading (underground homesteading) can achieve this within a generation. In addition to proposing a new legal technology, we present specific projects that would be profitable today, despite high tunneling costs.
Radically improved urban transportation would greatly improve our quality of life and standard of living, and substeading would achieve this. Substeading is homesteading underground; it is a legal process that would allow new privately owned corridors to be brought into productive use from the unused subsurface.
Substeading is economically powerful, based on proven technology, and could transform big cities in a generation. It would create brand-new and conveniently-located rights-of-way, ideal for new urban transportation networks and other infrastructure. This would pave the way for bigger and better cities by nurturing new construction and infrastructure technologies and by eroding regulatory obstacles to new development.
Substeading is also politically practical because it has minimal environmental impacts, requires no government funding, and doesn’t use eminent domain.
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About the author
Kyle M. Kirschling is an urbanist who specializes in improving cities’ infrastructure. He is a licensed CPA and holds a Master’s degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University.
As an advisor to the New York City Transit Authority, he sped up subway trains (reversing a 23-year trend) by conceiving a new operations strategy, saving two to four minutes per train trip and increasing on-time performance from 67% to 81% in 12 months, at zero cost (includes the “Save Safe Seconds” campaign and “SPEED Unit,” as reported in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere).
He is the author of “Engineering the New York City Subway,” the first publication to explain why New York City has a subway, and he is the author of "An Economic Analysis of Rapid Transit in New York, 1870-2010," an evaluation of the impact of private, public, and hybrid institutions for transit ownership and operation.
He presently runs an internal management consulting group at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority focused on asset management and on improving infrastructure reliability for the subway division.
Raymond C. Niles is a Senior Fellow and columnist at the American Institute for Economic Research and a former university professor. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University and an MBA in Finance & Economics from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University.
Prior to embarking on his academic career, Niles worked for more than 15 years on Wall Street as senior equity research analyst at Goldman Sachs, Schroders, and Citigroup, and as managing partner of a hedge fund investing in energy securities. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly and popular publications, Niles has contributed book chapters to In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance, and the recently published book, Coronavirus and Economic Crisis, edited by Peter G. Earle, and published by the American Institute for Economic Research.
