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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

This story is the same nearly all over the world. The earth is getting pretty full.

If you take a step back and look at the earth via satellite layer via Google maps, it’s not as full as it feels on the ground. Quite the opposite.

A sibling comment about people cramming into the same area seems way more accurate.

Also, look up the population density of different countries:

* China has ~4x the people of the U.S. with similar land area

* India also ~4x US population and has 1/3 of landmass

* Russia has ~2x landmass of US, but only ~1/2 population.

There’s plenty of space for more people. Just gotta be less lazy and destructive and build, build, build. Finding how incentives align & not as game-able would also help.

Arable land is a problem. Most of China lives in one third of the country, and even in that one third there are a lot of mountains that keep population even further concentrated. Russia has never figured out how to really population Siberia and it’s FarEast, it’s sort of a hostile area, although the areas next to China could easily be as populated as the adjacent areas in China. India has a lot of arable land for its size, which is why it is populated the way it is, and see Bangladesh for an extreme take on how dense a country can get with enough arable land.

US has plenty of world-class arable land though, that’s why it’s world’s largest food exporter.

Arable land is only to grow food.

> Most of China lives in one third of the country

Right, so U.S. has PLENTY of space ;)

I’ve been to rural China (village where my family and ancestors are), there’s tons of space to modernize and build still, China def not out of livable space.

Arable land probably has to do more with carrying capacity in terms of agriculture and water resources. Yes, you could build a huge city on the Tibetan plateau but you would have to truck in a lot of stuff to keep people alive.

Even the rural areas, you have to decide whether to keep them growing food (low density for China) or turn them into dense cites. Do too much of the latter and your cities starve. But you can’t really build cities on land unsuited for farming, since again you have to truck a lot of stuff in from far away.

I think it's mostly empty, but everyone is cramming into the same few places. Eg I don't think rural Japan has this problem. But then you have to give up on high paying jobs, live standup comedy, lots of matches on tinder, or whatever else people do in cities (tbh I've never lived in one for a long time so idk)

Exactly, you can pick up a rural house in France 4 hours from Paris for €100k. 2 hours away it's a different story, and obviously within Paris itself the same affordability issues are evident as in the article.

The value of living in cities is constantly going up. Loads of rural areas are just collapsing because they have hollowed out to the point there are no jobs or stores left. Italy has been giving out houses for $1 in rural areas but they are basically worthless.

The winning move is to work remotely/hybrid from the countryside (close enough to a city though), and invest all the savings in housing to stock market.

I can't see the value in pure city-living when quality of housing keeps going down, and prices go up. Better salary alone doesn't mean anything.

I agree that for remote workers being near enough to a major airport (not exactly sure how near near enough is) should open up cheaper housing that's not regular commute convenient, but if you have another household member who needs to work somewhere in person you're kind of stuck.

> (close enough to a city though)

Well that is a problem. I dunno why small town or village grocery stores worked perfectly fine until syddenly they started to close down one by one.

There has to be some oligopolly or something at play.

The Earth might be getting full, but the (western) US is not... lots of cheap land just waiting for settlers. Not so different from the days of the Old West. What is different is that these days, the gold rushes always seem to happen in the already-crowded places.

Serious challenges getting water.

Actually population world wide is dropping considerably and there are more empty houses per person then ever. Just almost no one can afford to live in them (only building expensive) or like rural they are just too expensive to repair. Some places are selling for $1 or giving away free houses because they know no one can afford them. Japan, Italy, Midwest America sometimes even pays you to move there out of desperation.

1€ houses were not because no one can afford them. It was because no one wanted them. And they were crap. For slightly more(tens of thousands) you could get something at least habitable. These schemes are not to combat prices, but desirability of area due to things like no opportunities.

There are quite many places that are still reasonable. I live in globally small city. It is not entirely unaffordable. Current "condo" slightly outside downtown is reasonable enough in price. And even near it is not bad. Going even further would make it entirely payable.

Worst thing is that in some places you do not even get loans to buy or repair property anymore as it is expected to be worthless...

The earth is far from full. It just needs more houses.

Over here 20% of apartments in capital city stay unoccupied. The owners don't even need to rent, prices increase alone is ridiculous. The earth is neither full nor we need more houses.

Over here != everywhere

In most EU capitals it's true.

In every place people want to live it’s true. I’m not sure why this has changed so much on the past 30 years.

You hear this kind of thing constantly, but it's such an absurd claim. Imagine being a property owner and having two choices: (a) having a property you own accrue value over time, and (b) the exact same thing as before, but also getting paid hard cash by renters. And the claim is somehow that you will, because of your landlord greed (?!) take the door with less money.

We need to have fewer conspiracy theories about landlords and immigrants, and we need to build more bloody houses.

That's part of what makes it greed. People regularly lose money in the pursuit of more money. I have seen houses go unrented for ages because owners refuse to accept that their worthless shack in the middle of nowhere is not worth what it used to be.

>You hear this kind of thing constantly, but it's such an absurd claim. Imagine being a property owner and having two choices: (a) having a property you own accrue value over time, and (b) the exact same thing as before, but also getting paid hard cash by renters. And the claim is somehow that you will, because of your landlord greed (?!) take the door with less money.

Maybe? I vaguely reading somewhere that some NYC commercial landlords would rather keep a building empty after the pandemic rather then lower the rents.

IIRC part of the reason was because the building's possible rental income was used as part of building's valuation. The higher the potential income, the higher the valuation is, and looking more attractive as collateral on a loan. Hence the problem being that if they did lower the actual rent, it would lower the building's valuation and negatively impact whatever loans they had using the property as leverage. More so then any loss of any rental income.

No idea how true it is, seems a little ponzi like for me, and eventually you do need to come up with some sort of income if nothing else to make interest payments. On the other hand I don't know enough about financial world to say otherwise, so it could be very well true.

Probably can’t sell a house with people in quite as easily as one without.

Where did you hear that house prices are expensive because the "earth is full"? Did you notice that housing prices doubled and almost tripled in the last 4 years alone?

A lot of units are straight empty, but large landlords just refuse to lower rent prices.

If I recall correctly, what's happening here is that a property is valued at a particular level based on the rent, and the owner can borrow against that to make other investments. Demand drops, and lower rents would affect the valuation of the property, the owner wouldn't be eligible to borrow as much against it any more and may not have the liquidity to readjust things. So it's more profitable and secure to keep the rents at a higher, but vacant, level. It kind of suggests the solution here is more regular and rigorous revaluations of property, or limits on how much it can be leveraged.

Vacancy in areas where people want to live are historically low.

Bad valuation in contracts doesn't change the big picture. (As it mostly affects office buildings.)

Urbanization is ongoing for hundreds of years (and got absolutely turbocharged since agriculture productivity skyrocketed), but a sufficiently high number of incumbents/voters in cities don't want their city to densify, so they have the resources to block most effective redevelopments.

States, governments, politics mostly managed this by providing more cheap loans/mortgages, and mostly by ignoring the problem, or even by not even believing that the demand is real. (Remember when housing was called a bubble because prices were rising too fast? Yeah, prices are much higher.)

A very significant portion of young people's economic output is basically converted into spending a lot of money on shitty inefficient and extremely uneconomic housing and its consequences. (More and more and more .. and more suburbs, roads, cars, etc.)

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