[ryanmercer]

>Land is not currently and in the foreseeable future a constrained resource

Sure, the Sahara has 3.552 million square miles of available real estate. San Francisco, NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, London, Canberra, Geneva, Soul, Oslo, Zurich, Hong Kong... not so much.

You also have a very finite amount of land that is arable and unfortunately we keep losing more and more of it to development, desertification, etc.

Again, sure there's a bunch of the U.S. that has extremely low population density but in most cases the land isn't very arable (if at all), there are no water sources for any sizable population, there are no exploitable resources to build industry around (mining, oil and gas, timber) to initially start towns around.

Realistically usable land, desirable land, land that can support populations is very much a constrained resource.

[YorkshireSeason]

   desirable land, land that can 
   support populations is very much 
   a constrained resource.

I'm afraid I don't agree.

We only loose land to development were we don't push density. Desertification is not a major problem, since -- due to global warming -- we win more new land in previously uninhabitable areas (e.g. Siberia). From a sustainability POV, it is desirable to increase density of human dwelling: the more density, the less transport is needed, the more public transport makes sense, the more heating / cooling, electricity production etc can be centralised, which means more efficient usage of resources.

[ryanmercer]

Research water rights, research where water comes from for large cities (sometimes hundreds of miles away, look at Tokyo/Miami/London/Cairo/Beijing/Bangalore/Las Vegas/Mexico City/New York City), look at water scarcity for Africa as a continent, look at the insane groundwater depletion going on for several decades now. As it stands now 14%, and growing, of the world's population suffers from water scarcity. Anything less than 1,700 cubic meters (for referenced an Olympic pool is 2,500) per person of freshwater is considered water scarcity.

Just because there is land, does not mean it's usable or should be used.

Functional real estate remains an extremely finite resource. Land prices will continue to rise, debt amassed for purchasing said land will continue to rise and will sooner or later hit a wall where land is largely only exchanging hands when the owner dies for large parts of the world.