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 Ba

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.