[29athrowaway]

Then each renter will become a homeowner, they will feel very comfortable, have 4 kids, and now you will need 4x more units.

Then their kids will have 4 kids, and you'll need 16x more units with respect to where you started.

Few generations after you have a much deeper problem that the one you started with. Now you live in a country with a population of over 1 billion, where protests cannot be controlled anymore and now you need a totalitarian regime with a massive surveillance and censorship apparatus to keep things under control.

The alternative is that everyone is stressed out and feels the pressure of a system that is over capacity.

Have you heard of Earth day? In 2022, it was April 22. It means that by April 22 we already consumed our environmental budget for the full year.

If we continue like this it's not going to be long until there's mandatory population control.

NOTE: this was edited

[TuringNYC]

>> Then each renter will become a homeowner, they will feel very comfortable

Not sure about the entire comment, but the above line is the clutch item. Once a renter turns into a homeowners, things change drastically. In the US you are typically highly leveraged once you buy a home. That means a 20% drop in home value wipes out all your equity. So once you buy into the system (esp with leverage) you have a huge incentive now to perpetuate the system that once enslaved you. Now you become the prison guard. Sadly, even the prison guard is in the prison of debt for many years, thus has to maintain the jail.

[bushbaba]

Well the birth rate is less than replacement rate. Without illegal immigration the US would not be seeing a population growth.

[sleepydog]

I don't understand. The population in wealthy countries is growing very slowly.

https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#&place=country/USA&st...

What makes you say that housing costs are the cause? I've not heard of that argument before.

[wyre]

Reminds me of this [1] post yesterday that because sedans can only fit 2 car seats parents don’t have a third child because they can’t afford a bigger car.

Maybe, parents are having less kids because they can’t afford to move to a place with an extra bedroom.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32491901

[29athrowaway]

Because cost of life is high. Make cost of life lower and see what happens.

[ziddoap]

>It's fine for people to struggle and be stressed out, the opposite would be overpopulation.

People should struggle now to the point that they can't have kids so that 3 generations down the line we don't need more housing?

Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding. Because this seems like a pretty hot take if I'm understanding you correctly.

[rowanG077]

So your point is we need to keep people in such shitty situations they won't want to bring kids into this world?

[29athrowaway]

My point is that the system is overcapacity, that's the reality you like it or not.

If you want to watch Netflix and forget about what's happening outside, that's your choice. But we are completely destroying this planet in every way.

There are lots of mouths to feed every day depending on systems that are not sustainable and may collapse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q

If you go camping and have limited amount of food rations, water, etc, you will make sensible decisions about how to consume the supplies you have. This is very similar.

[reedjosh]

I find it funny that I agree with you in some ways that others might not.

For example, I agree people should ditch the dumb super hero movies and do something better. Maybe garden or learn to weld or something.

But I completely disagree with you that humans are destroying the planet in an unsustainable way.

Sure, there are huge challenge and excesses, but the human spirit should also bring solutions.

Particularly in the face of both energy and water shortages, we should be building coastal nuclear plants.

Not only do they provide clean energy, but they basically function as desalination plants.

That and it's pretty glib to make people "uncomfortable" so they don't procreate. Especially when here in the US we barely even have population growth.

[29athrowaway]

If we are not destroying the planet as you claim, then animal species would be flourishing. In reality, insects, fish, and many species of animals, especially animals above certain weight, they're all dying off and going extinct.

As we humans advance, we destroy the habitat of other species. As industrial agriculture expands, we consume all the topsoil (soil with microorganisms, worms, etc. in it.), we extract dietary micronutrients from it, we pump all of the groundwater, kill all the pollinators and insects, then cause collateral damage to all migratory species that cross those territories.

We dump trash everywhere, we pollute the atmosphere, we pollute the oceans, we make the oceans more acidic, we are raising the temperature of the planet, our industrial plants dump toxic chemicals everywhere... and the list goes on and on and on.

You, on the other hand, are heavily influenced by an alternate reality which is a combination of television and Internet content, documentaries, and uplifting stories about how some experimental technology 50 years away from mass production that is prohibitively expensive and makes things 1% better for the environment, while things get 10% worse each year. You are completely out of touch with reality and the hunter gatherers from the future hunting contaminated vermin will hate you.

[rowanG077]

Keeping people in misery is not the solution. Population control is much less ethically challenging IMO.

[reedjosh]

Again assuming a solution is even needed when birth rates in first world nations is already low.

[29athrowaway]

Keep telling yourself that. The environmental impact of the human population at large, which is growing consistently, has nothing to do with you by any means!

The millions of marine animals drowning in single use plastic bottles will concur with you.