4 ms·

As the trend towards urbanisation (rural flight) continues worldwide, and as population continues to grow, the rent isn't going to get any cheaper in the decade

by spcoll 12y ago

As the trend towards urbanisation (rural flight) continues worldwide, and as population continues to grow, the rent isn't going to get any cheaper in the decades to come, anywhere. Even imagining that 3D printing techniques can significantly cut down the cost of new construction (as is starting to happen in China), land scarcity will be the overriding factor. Save building cities on the ocean, we can't escape it.

nugget 12y ago
There's plenty of land, the problem is that everybody wants to be in the same dense urban cores. Drive 3-4 hours north or south of San Francisco and you have lots of cheap, beautiful coastal land available.
- bagels 12y ago
  Where, specifically, 3-4 hours south is the coastal land cheap?
- jekdoce 12y ago
  Inspired by this comment I actually spent 30min looking on Redfin. Most of the coastal land I found is listed for around $1-2M (for ~1 acre), from SF area down to LA. Check it out! I was actually pretty surprised by this.
  - pimlottc 12y ago
    I really can't tell whether you find that to be surprisingly cheap or surprisingly expensive.
stegosaurus 12y ago
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)
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  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.
  - stegosaurus 12y ago
    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.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > 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.

by spcoll 12y ago

nugget 12y ago

There's plenty of land, the problem is that everybody wants to be in the same dense urban cores. Drive 3-4 hours north or south of San Francisco and you have lots of cheap, beautiful coastal land available.

bagels 12y ago
Where, specifically, 3-4 hours south is the coastal land cheap?
jekdoce 12y ago
Inspired by this comment I actually spent 30min looking on Redfin. Most of the coastal land I found is listed for around $1-2M (for ~1 acre), from SF area down to LA. Check it out! I was actually pretty surprised by this.
- pimlottc 12y ago
  I really can't tell whether you find that to be surprisingly cheap or surprisingly expensive.

stegosaurus 12y ago

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)

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
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.
- stegosaurus 12y ago
  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.
cbd1984 12y ago
> 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.