Hacker News Reader

Comment by s3r3nity | Hacker News Reader

A relative told me something similar once when I was younger and skeptical about buying a house, because it's a depreciating asset class that didn't make sense to me why it increases in value.

His advice: "Population will continue to grow - but you can't make more land."

View on HN

It's going to be a very, very long time before there's an actual shortage of land in America. Take a flight from New York to San Francisco and look down the entire time. Just an endless expanse of...nothing.

The only thing that changes within the span of a decade or even a single lifetime is desirable vs undesirable land. Purchasing property isn't as much of a "sure thing" as everyone believes. Housing prices are dictated mostly by local policy and speculation rather than physical space.

I'm using farmland to diversify my portfolio, it produces income, I don't think anyone is arguing we will run out of land. Cash and Bonds are risky now, so this is a holding that will not be debased. Its also fun! I feel like I'm living a real life Stardew Valley

America has enough land. What we don’t have is good enough infrastructure to connect these areas to make them viable parts of the commerce network.

Tri-State area in the Northeast is a good example of ‘almost, but no cigar’. Sure, you can live in some parts of Connecticut/NJ/Upstate and commute to NYC, but I feel like it should be a lot better.

Bullet trains would expand what’s possible. Imagine living in Philly and commuting to NY or vice versa in a reasonable amount of time.

Building (no pun) our way out of this mess is one way, but not enough. We need better/faster travel, and unfortunately that initiative should have started 10 years ago. We’re too behind on that front, so I’m not optimistic about the housing market being properly saturated with houses to keep the frenzy at bay. The places where they will have to build are not viable if you need to get to an economic center daily.

Edit:

One thing I think the federal government can incentivize is to subsidize companies to not have a large headquarters anywhere. Find a tax break for companies to create distributed offices across at least 3-5 states. That’s a great way to let people relocate in a safe way (same company, different office), and help build new economic centers.

According to the NYTimes (although I believe the UN has been saying this for years as I've seen the charts for a long while now), we're do in for a sharp contraction on population growth with an eventual decline.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-s...

This is the coming housing correction. It is likely that we will decide to just depopulate undesirable areas completely. Because if you get under a threshold of density a lot of city infrastructure doesn’t make sense.

I wonder what we can learn from what is happening in Japan?

There was also an article posted here a while back noting that many American cities are too dependent on population growth to fund their infrastructure projects. They are essentially borrowing against expected growth and if that growth doesn't come, some cities could be left with a huge debt.

Probably sourced from strongtowns

This exact problem is why immigration is so heavily supported by liberals around the world. Europe has slowing birth rates, so they need large numbers of immigrants to find growth. The issue is a bit more acute there than in the US, but we will run into this sooner than later.

That's a curious take.

Source?

Conservatives love it too. At least the millionaires and billionaires do.

In this case, the term could mean economic liberalism.

Location, location, location?

You can't make more land but there's actually plenty of land. Some kind of policy disruption could happen to make the land we do have much more accessible. Obviously land barons will fight this tooth and nail as they do and always have – but times are changing faster and faster in many ways.

That's just rent seeking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com