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> What don't we make more of (with rare and expensive exceptions)? Land isn’t made, but more land becomes legally available all the time. The scarcity argument

> What don't we make more of (with rare and expensive exceptions)? Land isn’t made, but more land becomes legally available all the time. The scarcity argument is overestimated given the immense surface area available and the actual limiting factor being zoning laws (and logistics).

newsclues 5y ago
Land is rarely made. It happens naturally occasionally and man made at great expense, like in the UAE
- jefftk 5y ago
  We actually used to do a lot of it even in the US. Compare San Francisco or Boston to their original boundaries. (I also think we should resume: https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-more-land https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-more-land)
  - marvin 5y ago
    Plus, look at an aerial photograph of a non-metropolitan area and see how much of it is covered by buildings. Not a whole lot. With the current global population, real estate is generally scarce only because there is local democratic consensus for maintaining scarcity. (NIMBY)
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Land is rarely made, but in the US there are vast areas of lands that are federally owned that the government would be happy to find uses for.
- benibela 5y ago
  We could get a lot of new land from a Mars colony
nico_h 5y ago
The Netherlands beg to differ, 17% of it is reclaimed/created land and more than half is on life support thanks to dikes, dunes and pumps. Singapore's Marina Bay area is reclaimed land. There's an airport in Japan that's also made on reclaimed land. On the other hand, nobody is re-zoning Central Park anytime soon, Monaco is unlikely to expand its borders, and the imperial palace in Tokyo is unlikely to move out and allow new developments on its grounds. Nobody wants to live in Wyoming even if it's cheap. And Japan is literally giving away houses in villages to try to slow the decay of the countryside. Maybe some industrial zone or office space might be re-zoned to inhabitation, pushing the industrial zones out. I guess gentrification is some way of making more value out of the same land. But generally new developments or gentrification doesn't degrades the value of earlier developments. On the balance, there are more people, with the rich having more money that they don't know what to do with except park it in real estate with deleterious effects on the affordability for less fortunate people (for example Vancouver and London where investments are kicking the middle class and the rest of the classes out of the cities, or Black Rock paying 20% / 50% above market rate for houses). The scarcity applies to places people want to live or work, not to land in general.

newsclues 5y ago

Land is rarely made. It happens naturally occasionally and man made at great expense, like in the UAE

jefftk 5y ago
We actually used to do a lot of it even in the US. Compare San Francisco or Boston to their original boundaries. (I also think we should resume: https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-more-land https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-more-land)
- marvin 5y ago
  Plus, look at an aerial photograph of a non-metropolitan area and see how much of it is covered by buildings. Not a whole lot. With the current global population, real estate is generally scarce only because there is local democratic consensus for maintaining scarcity. (NIMBY)
thehappypm 5y ago
Land is rarely made, but in the US there are vast areas of lands that are federally owned that the government would be happy to find uses for.
benibela 5y ago
We could get a lot of new land from a Mars colony

nico_h 5y ago

The Netherlands beg to differ, 17% of it is reclaimed/created land and more than half is on life support thanks to dikes, dunes and pumps. Singapore's Marina Bay area is reclaimed land. There's an airport in Japan that's also made on reclaimed land. On the other hand, nobody is re-zoning Central Park anytime soon, Monaco is unlikely to expand its borders, and the imperial palace in Tokyo is unlikely to move out and allow new developments on its grounds. Nobody wants to live in Wyoming even if it's cheap. And Japan is literally giving away houses in villages to try to slow the decay of the countryside. Maybe some industrial zone or office space might be re-zoned to inhabitation, pushing the industrial zones out. I guess gentrification is some way of making more value out of the same land. But generally new developments or gentrification doesn't degrades the value of earlier developments. On the balance, there are more people, with the rich having more money that they don't know what to do with except park it in real estate with deleterious effects on the affordability for less fortunate people (for example Vancouver and London where investments are kicking the middle class and the rest of the classes out of the cities, or Black Rock paying 20% / 50% above market rate for houses). The scarcity applies to places people want to live or work, not to land in general.