4 ms·

> If you’re anti-car you also need to be pro-city-shack for yourself. Many people would like to live in a city but can't afford it because even a multi-bedroom

• WorldMaker 5y ago
  The comparison is to a "rural half-acre". If you can afford a half-acre of land in a rural area but not a "shack" in the city, that implies a lot more about the continued under-valuation of "rural" land than costs of urban living. (Which the Georgists were arguing about more than a century ago.)
  • s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Why do you say rural land is under valued? What is society missing that should be included in the price?
    • WorldMaker 5y ago
      Land is a very finite resource on this planet. The easiest "carbon capture" (though it is slow) is and has always been: Trees. We need more forests than ever and we keep bulldozing them instead. Rural development is often at the expense of trees and forests for at best mostly unvariegated farm land and at worst useless (but "pretty") green yards. (Here again the externalities of the greenhouse gases aren't felt by corporations building the houses nor the average home owner. We'd never pass Carbon Taxes in the first place, but especially no one wants to talk about Property Tax Carbon Taxes on their homes. But we need to reforest a lot of land to better deal with climate change and that's not going to happen with just market forces at work. Trees, deer, and birds don't have the money to buy land/houses.)
      • qwertygerty 5y ago
        Well said. It seems to me those who came first, benefited the most. At the cost of everyone who follows. (if you think longer term). Eg; open land, develop it, live a grand life from the large profits. Subsequent years will have the property market determine the financial benefits from those who come and go. But then eventually, the natural loss starts to become a problem. And then everyone suffers. Everyone who is still around. This is just another kind of debt, just like "kicking the can down the road" wrt finance/national debt/money printing is. Not only can those much further into the future not "benefit" (financially) from the ability to "cheaply" obtain undeveloped land, but they also sit with the problems due to the natural resources having been depleted (development of land does not only negatively affect tree...) The whole concept of land ownership as it is, imho , is a problem.
• paulcole 5y ago
  Yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting. If people aren’t willing to suffer today, then everyone is going to suffer immensely from climate change over the coming generations. The fact that everybody wants change but nobody is willing to change shows me that climate change is an absolute lost cause.
  • whakim 5y ago
    That's a totally false choice. No one has to suffer for more (and more affordable) housing and more (and more convenient) mass transit - except perhaps the "winners" of the current system. It's also quite an entitled position you're espousing: just because you have the economic wherewithal to live in cities and forgo driving, doesn't mean that many people (and their families) who work in those same cities do.
    • paulcole 5y ago
      Yes, I am quite privileged. Anybody who’s privileged (most people reading HN fit into this category) and isn’t thinking about the sacrifices they can make today for the good of the future needs to take a good hard look in the mirror. But like I said, humanity is fucked. The next 200-250 years are going to be unimaginably awful for the descendants of people alive today who can’t imagine their lives being unimaginably awful. Drive if you want. Live in a big house. Do whatever. It clearly doesn’t matter at this point.