So? Why do we need new land for housing? Seems like a good thing. There are billions of acres of single-family homes with huge backyards. As demand increases political hurdles will be banished and we'll start to see those torn down and replaced by denser housing.
It's wild how one can drive down route 89 or 91 in VT (the two long north south routes in the state) & be amid beautiful simple mountains & open space, beautiful nature, and still know: this state has a horrible housing availability/affordability crisis. So much space everywhere & nowhere to live.
There's definitely tons of land still. But like our continental friends have seen for hundreds of years now, only some of it js really attractive, in demand. And we are very very slow to allow development, to allow unlocking it.
Im in Washington DC, and for a while this city was a hotbed of coops, of places developed for people then then over to them, with a slow & not bad at all development debt owed. It still seems like such a mature & respectable model, such an obvious way to upzone humanely: take current property owners & new would be owners & build a much more vuluable much higher capacirt people owned property out of the existing land. For a city that was so good about this though for so long, Im shocked stunned & saddened for it simply seems to have stopped being a thing, something like 40 years ago or more. Where did the culture of people doing for people go?
These past two decades I personally have been some witness to have been a pretty sorry sight
indeed by comparison. Large corporate run condos are the only big development. And more so, there's so much taking a family sized row house & spending a bunch of money to rebuild it, as a set of three over-expensive 1.5BR unfit for a family condo units, partitioning up & reducing the net living space (via lost stairway space) compared to the original WW2 build. We're getting worse, & profiteering without helping.
Even on my tiny island of Puerto Rico there’s plenty of undeveloped land. Call me skeptical. Perhaps it’s just there isn’t land where people want to live badly
I think bringing transit links further to the exurbs would make the affordable housing out there a lot more attractive. For instance, Harpers Ferry WV is in commuting distance of DC thanks to the commuter line.
Land use, rezoning and infrastructure development (and redevelopment) is going to be a couple trillion dollars or more and a whole lot of political fighting.
