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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

People who say that have never owned land and have a simplistic fantasy in their mind.

Listening to people that have owned land you hear things like:

- A creek was at one edge of our property right outside of it, and the state required us to build a bridge, getting the license for the bridge was costly and time consuming

- The creek changed course and cut across our property, the federal government had new requirements that had costs and approvals necessary

- We lost money on the property, despite land being a finite resource and all the dreamers being perma-bulls on land ownership, there was no way we could turn this into an income generating property that would be profitable.

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Sure, we have anecdotes about how not every property is a profit bonanza, and that there are often a bunch of surprise costs.

That's why there are big development companies. The advantages of scale apply here as much as anywhere. Lose money on one, make money on others to offset the risk. What you call a "simplistic fantasy" is a century-long phenomenon in the US at this point of increased population in major urban areas leading to rising land values and the conversion of empty fields into developed areas.

There's no guarantee that population growth will continue to increase demand, or even that demand in developed areas will stay high - there have been a lot of cycles in that time as well, with extreme examples like Detroit to balance out the SFs of the world - but that's a very different argument than "we need to increase development so that we make housing less of a good investment," which I'm claiming is a blatant contradiction when it comes to the value of the land that is being developed. A shitty house in NYC is worth more than a nice house in Austin not for the building, but for the value of the slice of land it sits on, because the area has been developed more which has resulted in more demand.

owning land in a high demand city is a wildly different experience than owning land in a rural area with creeks. The issue is not just that "land is a finite resource so any piece of land will increase in value" the issue is that "vacant urban land has very few alternatives for people who need it so the price consistently rises in areas with growing economies".

Land often has a lot of strings attached. For example you need to maintain it, make sure there is no wild foliage, people don't start camping, it is safe (someone gets in and breaks leg? Nightmare), then maybe you need to build a specific thing or cannot build anything at all and so on.

> For example you need to maintain it, make sure there is no wild foliage, people don't start camping

You really don't. Dirt lots coated in rusty chainlink, gang tags, weeds, and tents are traded hands all the time, even in Downtown Los Angeles, for top dollar. Maybe you hire a crew to weed wack once a month if that. Even land zoned for a single bedroom bungalow goes for a lot of bread, because one day in the future that zoning can change and there is always demand in a big city with a lot of jobs near a major harbor and airport for more units, and parcels in big cities are finite.

This is not true. Maintenance is necessary for dirt lots in downtowns. I own a few parcels in the middle of dense cities. You have to deal with soil erosion, animals digging up soil which blows away, problems with trees (due to storms, pests, hanging into other properties), property line encroachment, and vandalism.

I own land and never had those kind of problems. I assume 95% or more of land owners also never had those problems.

95% of land owners don't have creeks running through them

The point is that you have to be as discerning as a homeowner or even more, and this can limit the supply of decent land to own or highlight how impractical it is or how it isnt a solution to anything

Even the other sister replies shifted the goal post, this is a thread about housing supply and people talk about squatting on land in urban environments as a rebuttal to just owning land in the vast expanse of space available, which further reduces the possibility of alleviating the housing supply

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