[gamepsys]

> So the wealth of everyone is going up faster than the supply of desirable land

We are also slowing down the rate we are making land desirable. During the 50s-70s we had massive success by creating suburbs that were connected to city centers. Due to how geography works, new suburbs are further from city centers and inherently less desirable. We have developed most of the geographically appealing regions of the US. The regions that can support more sprawl are seeing growth at a high enough rate that local infrastructure such as schools, roads, water, and construction labor is being stressed.

In the not too distant future we will have climate change that will displace people and a declining population that will reduce housing demand. Combine that with new building techniques/materials and in 100 years the housing situation will be totally different than today.

[mapt]

> Due to how geography works, new suburbs are further from city centers and inherently less desirable. We have developed most of the geographically appealing regions of the US.

"We have turned all of the areas within 15 miles of the existing urban development into suburbs, while banning nearly all new urban development, and banning nearly all urbanization of existing suburbs. We've run out of cities to build suburbs around and this seems like a natural limit where a Mad Max style fight for a limited suburban housing stock is our inevitable outcome. This is Basic Geography 101."

That Mad Max style fight has already been won by geriatric white men (PostWar Boys) who paid off their houses 20 years ago, who are now nominal multimillionaires, and whose preferences appear to largely control national, state, and local political outcomes.

[Seanambers]

Compared to Europe the US has an unimaginable amount of land. Europeans don't know this really - no one has told them, because they never went to the US, the ones who did went for some coastal city. On the other side Americans don't realize the reasons why Europeans live in cities. Europe is much much smaller and with less desirable land to begin with and then there is the entire "walkable cities" which is utopia reasoning...

God damn you US ppl dont know how good you got it.

[derf_]

The continental US is 8.08 million km^2 [0], while Europe is 10.18 million km^2 [1], almost 26% larger. Even adding the non-contiguous regions does not make the US bigger (still just 9.83 million km^2) [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiguous_United_States

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States

[abduhl]

Subtract out Russia from this calculation and “Europe” is 75% the size of the US. When people talk about “Europe” and Europeans not understanding how big the US is they are not talking about Eastern Europe/Russia, they’re talking about Portugal to Poland, maybe to Ukraine. Sometimes they’re not even thinking of the Nordic countries which also have a lot of land.

This of course invites the counter argument that the US coastal areas are just as dense and small feeling as Central Europe.

[defrost]

For another comparison, the state of Australia I live in has 3x the land area of Texas, a current population of 2.9 million that largely live in the one concentrated urban area, farms and cattle stations large than those in the US, and had people walk out of the desert than had never met or heard of non indigenous people until that point in time in the mid 1980s.

I grew up in one of the more remote corners when the state population was less than 800 thousand and the local population within a few hours drive was barely a thousand or more..

[airbreather]

Western Australia, a unique place that is part Texas, part Alaska, part Silicon Valley and part something of Europe.

It should be a country of its own, and might as well could be with the most isolated capital city in the world, but the Austealian Federal govt keep fucking it up, despite it being the real cash cow of the country.

[doubled112]

I've always found it interesting that Canada and California have a similar population, although I haven't looked those up in a couple of years.

Canada has a couple more km^2.