NEST Logic

Consider for a moment, the Empire State Building. It is in an expensive and crowded part of town so the average person who works there must either live in an extremely expensive condo, or wake up two hours before they go to work to allow for transit, and finding parking. Just getting lunch will require more transit thrugh a busy city, and finding a spot again, and then of course there is the trip home.

Now change the layout a bit. Instead of 85 stories of commercial space, about half of that is offices,and  the remainder is split between shops, restaurants, an internal utilities center, hydroponic gardens, a hospital complex, and the rest is apartments. (For more exact numbers, something like  40 stories commercial, 25 stories residential, 13 for a mall, movie theaters etc, five dedicated to wind turbines, water reclamation, etc.  and a two story medical center.)

A person who lives and works in the building doesn't need a car. That saves perhaps two hours or so of driving each work day - which adds up to an extra 40 hours of time over a month! Furthermore, that is a savings of perhaps 600 dollars on a vehicle lease, 400 on the auto insurance, plus gas, maintenance, and parking garage fees. This also militates some traffic congestion and pollution for the city as a whole. While rent would in theory be very high, this is offset by the fact at least part of the utilities are self supported, and the building might have its own sales tax on the stores within.

This second concept is very close to what the NEST is built to do, but on a far greater scale. The base of one of these towers is equal to siting together four baseball stadiums, and the central spire rises 150 stories. While the real Empire State Building has 21,000 tenants, a NEST can have over half a million. Dedicated fields of wind farms and wave turbines to assist the panels and regenerative systems (a piezoelectric unit under a floor panel might only put out the voltage of a watch battery, but when 100,000 people step on that spot daily, it adds up) are often built concurrently. Each NEST has its own hospital and outpost emergency rooms, police, fire department, and even a national guard post with surface to air missile batteries internal amusement parks, radio stations...

To put it plainly, if you took all of Seattle Washington, Sheffield  UK, or Oslo Norway, and poured it into a giant tube - you would end up with something like like one of these structures.

Amazingly expensive to create of course. But eliminate that many cars, shift all those people out of older less efficient structures, save all that horizontal space that would otherwise be eaten by by a sprawling urban mass... It might take a while, but the rewards would pay for it eventually.