"Gee, I wonder why."

"Do you know how much money and effort would be saved if we stopped worrying about cleanliness -"

"No, and I don't want to, because those numbers always get used to argue the merits of robots or rotation."

"Doesn't rotation also involve a lot of worrying about cleanliness, just distributed differently?"

"Yeah but you don't have to maintain a separate supply chain, separate streets, separate cars. Just on-site cleansing. And the red parts of the city are low-density because of the difficulty of building for reds - if you cleared them out and built skyscrapers you could house ten times their current population -"

"If it's that much money why not build dense housing for reds in a not-yet-red area so there aren't complications of construction, move them, pay them half of the returns on repurposing the old neighborhood - they all get rich, you get better land use -"

He ticks off problems on his fingers - "compensating reds ever for anything is a political non-starter because we don't have to and it'll annoy some constituents, more concentrated populations are easier to kill later - not that it'd be hard now, but still, they'll be attentive to that and probably riot, they'd expect it to be a raw deal in other ways I'm not anticipating and probably riot about that too, and relocating the current infrastructure for controlling comings and going of reds would be a hassle."

"They'd probably complain about not getting to decide what their new homes were like."

"Everyone hates getting relocated for infrastructure projects and that's usually with having had some buy-in into the process, some benefit from the results, and some recourse if your new arrangement isn't adequate."

"Does that happen here a lot? It never happened to me in Tapa."

"We make sure most people never experience it, precisely because it's wildly unpopular and we've gotten better at city planning. But it happens often in the sense it's usually happening somewhere - a neighborhood has a big boom and suddenly the trains are way over capacity and we need to do infrastructure work - Salt Island had a badly-planned subway system and we're replacing it piecewise -"

"Huh."

"It's actually some of my favorite work, trying to arrange for urban development to go smoothly and the institutions to be in place to handle population growth. Nicer when you needn't force anyone out of their house, of course, but if the airport needs another runway and three hundred homeowners are happy to sell for a fair price and one won't budge, you tell the one he's regrettably evicted. And of course in future you design your airports with more foresight."

"Most people'll sell at some price, you could just offer them that."

"If they know you'll offer whatever price they ask then they will all demand to become millionaires. And with reds I don't even expect that to work because they wouldn't expect us to actually pay them."

"You sure do have a lot of problems that amount to 'we've broken our word so often that now people don't trust us'."

"I've never broken my word. Even to a red."

"Personally, sure."

"Oh, I do think he correctly diagnosed the problem. The ones who were stuck at the capitol were terrified when we said they could charge their devices - because we might later decide we hadn't really meant it, see, so they daren't accept, but they also daren't disobey us - 

- it'd be overwhelmingly better for everyone to be rid of them if there were only somewhere we could put them."

"Could countries be persuaded to collaborate on that? All give up some land and commit to years of aid, all relocate their reds there -"

"If we discussed it very very quietly, maybe. Could do something with half of northern Lilipsi and a comparably sized contribution from Voa and a comparably sized contribution from Tapa, except diplomatic relations are still a little strained and when Governor Avalor dies Voa's going to get worse. - and again the reds won't believe you about the commitment to years of aid."

"Would you actually be able to promise it."

"If I were willing to spend my political capital there, sure. It has other drawbacks -  you'd have a hundred million recently-relocated people with very limited skillsets in a relatively small area and they are on average less intelligent and intelligent leadership is in fact strongly correlated with all kinds of measures of population welfare -"

"How do they check that?"

"Blue lead exposure levels anticorrelate with national GDP growth! It's a pretty robust finding - mostly gets used to argue we should only intermarry green which is a shame because it has lots of more interesting implications -"