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Comment by tlss | Hacker News Reader

It's possible to build more houses... up to a limit.

Cities need to be supported by enough resources -- that includes enough water, proximity to arable land, hospitable climate, and ease of access. The 2% figure you quoted can be a bit misleading because we can never develop 100% of the land into houses.

But as Japan/China/Korea has shown, it is probably still very possible for England to become much denser than it currently is. It would require all the residents to change their lifestyles to match though.

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>proximity to arable land

Any land is arable if we want to. See Phoenix.

That potentially just shifts to another zero sum game for water rights. The West is dealing with that currently.

Ocean is full of water. It just costs money (maybe a lot) to desalinate it.

(And to move it).

That just pushes it to another zero sum game of money.

Why does it matter if it's zero sum? Sometimes things we need aren't free.

The GGP post was claiming housing was zero-sum. Posts responding to it seem to be trying to contradict it.

My point is that in a world of finite resources, it's going to be zero-sum at some point whether that's land, water, money, labor, or something else. It's not good or bad, but you do have to pick your poison to a certain extent.

This is purely a result of the fact that water is so cheap and water rights don’t incentivize water saving technologies.

There are residential and agricultural technologies that dramatically reduce water usage. For instance drip irrigation. Also the city of Las Vegas recycles almost all the recyclable water and consequently is extremely efficient at using water

Can you elaborate? I agree water cost does not tend to incentivize conservation and leads to what seems to be inappropriate choices of crops for example. It’s also interesting how the idea of water rights in the East/West evolved differently because of scarcity. Is your point that the problems in the West would be solved by more expensive water?

I’d worry that it would upend agrarian economies (in the short and medium term, at least $

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