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Comment by stegosaurus | Hacker News Reader

Are we really short on land, though?

It strikes me that by combining building high-rise blocks with expanding out into the countryside we could manage it.

The planning situation in the UK (which is a particularly dense country) seems utterly despicable to me at present. The game being played is essentially 'haves' bemoaning the loss of small amounts of countryside while 'have nots' are stuck paying dramatic portions of their income to the former group.

Add to that the long arm of the law (buy a field and stick a trailer on it? expect a visit) and it's almost dystopian.

(please read my comments if you're interested more on the UK situation - others have shown me that in the US rural land is actually affordable, if you have savings)

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Huge areas of the UK are privately owned by a small coterie of landowners, which happens to include the royal family.

Excepting the odd toy village project, those areas will never be built on.

And London's so-called property boom is almost entirely a foreign phenomenon, with the world's 1% pushing up prices as part of a speculative bubble.

None of this is accidental. The UK could easily lower prices by building affordable social housing. Even in London, housing densities are lower than they are in many cities in Europe.

But it's far more profitable to ration property ownership, and to create a new landlord class.

As is often the case the underlying problem is political, and caused by concentrations of power that - history suggests - can't be sustained indefinitely.

Thank you for this post TheOtherHobbes; glad to see someone who can articulate the issue better than me.

The idea that people can just 'move a bit further out' is flawed here; we're not the US, running a car is far more expensive, for one.

> Are we really short on land, though?

We might be short on land the majority views as attractive enough to actually live on. Rural Wyoming is by no means short of land, but it's dry, desolate, windblown, and hundreds of miles from any regions with, say, hospitals, or airports, or actual grocery stores, or land that can grow something other than grass, or other frivolities of modern living. The fact that land is divided up into huge ranches is, therefore, not a huge loss for people looking for a little spread of their own; the only way the land could possibly be economically productive is in those huge ranches. A lot of it's owned by the Federal government, as well.

So it's trivially supply-and-demand, and the fact is the US, at least, has a huge supply of land for which there is essentially no demand. It's been allocated about as efficiently as it's going to be. Canada has a similar situation. Does that mean we're not short on land? Technically, perhaps not, but realistically, if the land is effectively unlivable, it might as well not exist for our purposes.

On the gripping hand everyone has a different definition of 'livable', even to the point of some people being willing to live in rehabbed ICBM silos in the wilds of North Dakota.

I think stegosaurus's idea is that a sufficiently motivated government or billionaire could make that land attractive to urbanites. Cheap rent in high-rises + an art and cultural scene attracted by the low cost of living + planning the city around public transportation and bike/walkability rather than personal cars + fiber to the home/office = I'd happily live somewhere that would otherwise be considered the middle of nowhere due to "boring" or unpleasant geography.

Pretty far fetched, but if Elon Musk wants to build The City of Tomorrow, sign me up.

EDIT: stegosaurus, for some silly reason HN hides the reply link for the first few minutes after a post is made, but if you click the direct link to my post, you can reply anyway.

That's easy to say if you've never experienced some of the weather Wyoming has to offer.

California isn't popular because of burgeoning art scenes, cheap rent, low cost of living, and good public transportation. In fact it has none of those things (Well, maybe some art scene). California is popular because girls can wear miniskirts and tanktops in the middle of February.

> I think stegosaurus's idea is that a sufficiently motivated government or billionaire could make that land attractive to urbanites.

I don't think they can. China tried: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/marketplace-25/china...

Can't reply to the below post (max nesting perhaps?)

I agree with the solution of constructing additional cities to an extent, though I can't speak too much about the US (British here).

What bugs me is seeing endless expanses of land within reasonable commuting distance of places like London that just aren't being used. There really is no need for people to have to move hundreds and hundreds of miles from their families.

I'm not even concerned that much about employment here, because a cheap home on cheap land would free people to work far less and/or simply retire after a few years in the Big City.

"but it's dry, desolate, windblown, and hundreds of miles from any regions with, say, hospitals, or airports, or actual grocery stores, or land that can grow something other than grass, or other frivolities of modern living."

So, sort of like Southern California before the boom, then. :-) Except that there are areas in SoCal that couldn't even grow grass. If I recall correctly, several of the early Spanish colonies starved to death.

If you could convince people to move there, the grocery stores and hospitals would soon follow.

Look up how cold Wyoming gets in the winter and tell me it's a viable place for a lot of people to live.

I don't like saying things like this, but unless you've experienced a zero-visibility blizzard which went on for hours on end, you don't know what rural Wyoming is like.

Look at how hot LA gets in the summer.

I'm from Alaska, by the way.

Summer temperature averages in LA aren't that much different from summer temperature averages across Wyoming. The big difference comes in the winter, where LA's record lows are in line with (or a little below) Wyoming's average highs.

> I'm from Alaska, by the way.

Coastal or inland? North shore?

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