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Comment by ganitarashid | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge step back for the environment. People who are not familiar with construction and development don’t know just how much waste and garbage and pollution is generated by real estate development.

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So true! If you don't build denser housing in urban areas, the people just disappear and cause zero environmental impact living further out in suburban sprawl where they drive everywhere.

There will always be more people. There is only one environment.

I think you completely missed the point of that comment.

Not really. Housing should be more expensive than is is now, both in cities as well as in suburbs. We don’t want growth, we want less growth. High prices will slow growth which is a good thing for the environment.

> There will always be more people

What are you picturing, government enforced house sharing?

I don’t think anything would have to be enforced. Look at San Francisco or NYC. Most people wouldn’t want to have a family of 3 kids there because it’s too expensive.

No - they live in the suburbs of new developments and drive in to work there. Massively, unarguably a worse impact on the environment than building some condos downtown. It's like you think people will say oh well, can't afford San Francisco, I'll move to Detroit!

That’s true, good point. Then the prices of suburbs and new developments should be raised so high that they’re not worth building or moving to.

Byyyyy.......government enforcement or something?

So you are anti people, not anti housing.

Anti growth is actually pro people

You have to think about complexity rather than just construction impact. Taking this argument leads one down a problematic 'Tragedy of the commons' path. As someone else said, not building may just create more sprawl somewhere else and increase vehicle miles travelled. You're also ignoring some historical covenants that might have excluded race from certain neighborhoods.

References: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1102604887223750657 on 'tragedy of the commons'

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1141456562512207872 work done on historical racial restrictive covenants.

The racial covenants (and blockbusting and redlining) need to get mentioned more to refute the bogus pseudo-nativist argument that whoever moved to town first has the right to control housing policy.

What do you propose as an alternative to real estate development to build housing?

Move to Detroit, they're literally giving away houses /s

I think you may not have read the article.

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