The affordable housing shortage is reshaping parts of rural America
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
* It's bad for the environment. A lot of these people are moving to where they can afford housing and continuing to drive in to jobs.
* Big commutes are stressful, and probably lead to people having fewer opportunities, lowering productivity. As well as simply being more miserable.
* Paving over a bunch of farmland isn't great, if people could live closer in.
To know just how wasteful that'd be, I measure where I live, Seattle. In the area I measured, there's approximately 783000 people in an area of ~77000 acres. By my math, we'd have to bulldoze the entire city and replace it with 77000 homes, 1 per acre, and then cram 11 people into each of those houses. If we don't cram folks into those houses and instead just convert more and more land to this regime and displace everyone further and further away, we'd soon have the vast majority of just the folks who used to live within 6 miles of the downtown instead living 25+ miles from downtown and commuting 40 minutes each way.
That makes life for everyone slower, more expensive, more ecologically intensive, more isolating, and less social. I would not want to do that even if it did mean I had a bigger yard. I think many folks feel the same.
I would personally never want to live on less than an acre, but it's none of my business what other people choose of course. I do however get annoyed by the high-density fans who always present everything other than urban living as a scourge on the world that has to go.
Thats less than a work commute to Americans. A midwesterner will drive 3+ hours just to see family on a Saturday.
My wife and I bought 20 acres in the mountains of SE Oklahoma (really just hills) at the height of the pandemic. It's a nice place to escape to for my boys and we're working on building out a cabin. We have power/water and with starlink have pretty much everything we need. My 2024 taxes on the land were literally $9.00 :)
I did enjoy building an elaborate treehouse while we were out there. We still fantasize about building (or maybe just buying) a cabin in the woods, or out on one of the islands. But it's one thing to have a place you can escape to when you feel like it, and quite another to be stuck there all the time.
i'm jealous. This is such a great idea, I wish i could do it.
One interesting thing about SE Oklahoma is the way people make deals with each other that don’t involve money. Idk if it comes from the majority of the state being Native American but there are handshake/barter deals all over the place. People seem reluctant to bring money to the deal, it’s always “I’ll do this for you if you can do that for me” type setups.
The Real Dirt On Farmer John
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Dirt_on_Farmer_John
I'm sure the video is on youboob or some other user exploitation site...
This is exactly it, people want what she wanted and she has to share the community and her builder husband shares in the success. Making productive use of under-utilized land is exactly how civilization works.
Is this supposed to be a downside? I'd pay extra for that.
The only place you'll find tofu even in most suburban areas are at asian restaurants in their soups.
On the other hand, that rural grocery store is probably chock full of specialty items that are hard to get where those heavy tofu-eaters live, like cheese.
Different places have different cuisines, which means their grocery stores stock different stuff.
Also, they most likely have Amazon delivery.
of course having a lot of kids is also not that popular in the West, so.
the only OECD country with fertility rate above 2.1 is Israel and that's mostly because they have a highly fertile minority that eschews much of modern life.
A twenty-fold increase in parenting time (from my parents' generation) + our modern 4 income economy = no clear path for typical_income couples to start families.
"The U.S. Census Bureau today released July 1, 2024, population estimates for the nation and states. The U.S. population reached 340.1 million, up 0.98% from 336.8 million on July 1, 2023 — the highest year-over-year increase since a jump of 0.99% between 2000 and 2001."
-- https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/12/population-es...
But if the payments in by workers were put into a fund that invested conservatively with the goal of just keeping up with inflation, that could be sufficient to grow enough to pay for their benefits when they retire.
I recently calculated if such a system would have worked with my US Social Security (SS) taxes. At ssa.gov you can download a record of all your reported earnings by year.
They also have tables for converting amounts from past years to current dollars. I believe the conversion is based on income percentiles rather than inflation, but from what I've been able to tell those are reasonable close to each other.
For example I see that in 1986 I earned exactly $42 000. In today's wages that would be $161 537. From another table at ssa.gov I see that in 1986 they would have withheld 5.7% of my pay for SS, and my employer would have also paid 5.7%, so that is $4 788 contributed to SS, which in today's dollars $18 415.
If all of that was just put in an account somewhere that earned just enough to just keep up with inflation it would have enough that if I retired next year it could pay my monthly SS benefit for 16 years. The life expectancy of a US male at the age I will be next year is 18 years, so that's pretty close.
I did another calculation where I assumed that my monthly SS contributions went into a fund that each month earned interest at a rate that matched the current T-bill rate. That turned out to not earn as much, but still earned enough to pay my monthly SS benefit for around 14 years.
If we assume that some of the fund especially when the worker is far from retirement is invested in something that aims for better growth than merely keeping up with inflation, but still is reasonably safe, there should be no trouble growing it to enough that when the worker retires the fund has enough to cover their benefits until death.
I did a similar calculation with my Medicare contributions. My total contributions for that, in today's dollars, are such that if I start Medicare next year would be enough that if paid monthly over my life expectancy and put toward the premiums from a health insurance plan from my state's ACA marketplace the amount the amount extra I'd have to pay monthly is pretty close to the current Medicare premium.
As with SS, if the contributions were managed for more growth than just keeping up with inflation, but still conservatively, it would be enough for an ACA marketplace plan.
I wonder if there are any pension/social security systems that actually work like that?
Shrinking birthrates aside, we have undeveloped land near population centers - but it tends to be dominated by counterdevelopment mindsets (NIMBY, onerous zoning).