[lapcat]

> No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places

It's not enough to have land, though. The land needs access to water and electricity, not to mention roads, or it's a nonstarter, especially if you want to build a bunch of homes on the land. And the new homeowners will need access to food and supplies, i.e., stores. You need an entire community.

[xnx]

Very true. There are many areas in the US (Detroit for example) that have lost population over the past 50 years that wouldn't have to start from scratch with new development.

[kjkjadksj]

The homes from detroits population high did not sit vacant and maintained over the decades. They rotted apart and many were razed. Much of inner city detroit really would be like starting from scratch considering the amount of vacant greenfield land available.

[xnx]

The neighborhoods definitely aren't turnkey, but roads, pipes, and power lines give you a good head start.

[kjkjadksj]

Assuming infrastructure serving vacant lots were maintained by a famously insolvent city budget is a big one to make. Sometimes replacement or retrofit are vastly more expensive than greenfield development.

[ghaff]

That's a bit of a strawman though. There are plenty of cities and towns that have infrastructure and have stores at some level that have much lower costs. (They may or may not have good local jobs.) It's not a choice between NYC/SF/etc. and the wilds of Wyoming.

[lapcat]

I'm not sure what exactly you think is a straw man?

When the OP said "everyone wants to live in the same few places", I didn't interpret that to mean specifically NYC/SF, because that's plainly false. I interpreted it to mean urban vs. rural/undeveloped areas in general.

But the problem is that home builder cartels exist all across the country, and they own a lot of the desirable land around the urban areas. For example, in my own area of Madison, Wisconsin, we have a company Veridian Homes that owns giant tracts of land all around the outskirks of the Madison area. They're the dominant home builder here.

[ghaff]

It was in reference to: The land needs access to water and electricity, not to mention roads, or it's a nonstarter, especially if you want to build a bunch of homes on the land.

(The comment may indeed be true--sort of by definition to at least some degree--for new construction, although getting that access can be pretty straightforward, to the degree anything involving construction is straightforward. It's more that housing prices are an issue in popular places where a lot of people want to live. And, yes, vibrant college towns fall into that category although not to the same degree as elite cities.)

[lapcat]

Fair enough, it would be possible to scale up smaller towns, much smaller than Madison. However, I'm not sure that's practical, at least to the extent required to meet the housing shortage, for several reasons. First, the reason you already mentioned: "They may or may not have good local jobs." Second, there may not be enough home builders available in smaller towns. The builders themselves have to come from somewhere, and they're likely to be somewhat scarce the smaller and more remote the town.

I just don't think the conspiracy that the OP postulated, "We all want our properties to increase in value so we collectively conspire to suppress supply" is a very plausible explanation when applied in general to the entire country. For example, again in the Madison area, most of the home building is occurring not in the city proper but rather out in the suburbs and exurbs, which are independently governed. Indeed, in a fast-growing suburb, the property values can actually increase as homes are built and the town becomes a more desirable place to live.

[kaibee]

The neat thing about capitalism is that stores will be built to serve the community if there's a market for it. We don't need to centrally plan the whole community up front. We do need zoning laws that ALLOW those stores to be built though.

[toomuchtodo]

This is not borne out by the evidence.

https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/food-and-hunger

https://www.propublica.org/article/food-desert-grocery-store...

[kaibee]

Those are about rural communities. It makes perfect sense that a very low-density community doesn't generate enough demand for a robust grocery store. The 2nd article mentions that the community used the newly built grocery store for a while, before going back mostly shopping at a Walmart 30 miles away. My guess is that those people were going to that Walmart anyway for this or that in many cases. So at that point, why drive to two locations, esp for most people in the rural area, that grocery store isn't actually that much more convenient, and can't compete on price with Walmart?

[Qworg]

Food deserts also exist in urban areas, particularly poor and historically disadvantaged communities. No magic to capitalism - the local communities don't get a grocery because they can't pay (and, of course, other reasons), even if the population density is high.

[jbellis]

"Food deserts" are a demand problem, not a supply problem. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/decemb...

[Qworg]

Not in the traditional sense - they simply demand the same things they normally eat, sans the hour+ of commuting to get it.

[toomuchtodo]

You said:

> The neat thing about capitalism is that stores will be built to serve the community if there's a market for it.

I am pointing out that this is not a given, magic that will just happen. Capitalism is not always efficient nor reliable, based on the evidence.

> before going back mostly shopping at a Walmart 30 miles away. My guess is that those people were going to that Walmart anyway for this or that in many cases. So at that point, why drive to two locations, esp for most people in the rural area, that grocery store isn't actually that much more convenient, and can't compete on price with Walmart?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/walmart-clo...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/05/what-...

[kaibee]

> I am pointing out that this is not a given, magic that will just happen. Capitalism is not always efficient nor reliable, based on the evidence.

I said 'if there's a market for it'.

The simple fact is that these rural communities are just not as economically viable as they used to be. Most rural communities exist around 'base input' types of industries that made money by exporting stuff extracted from the land. Farming, mining, logging, etc. The community existed because extracting those resources required a lot of labor, and that labor wanted to buy services after work. When you had 100 people who worked in the fields all day, they'd come back to town and patronize local bars, stores etc. However, farming, like mining, has continued to become less and less labor intensive because of better automation. There isn't 100 people coming back from the fields in most cases now. There's 1 dude who was driving a combine harvester all day. Or a planter, etc. And more recently, its one guy who was monitoring a dozen combine harvesters that were self-driving based on GPS.

Editing in a reply to below comments bc depth limit.

> This is why I'm very pro remote work for the broader economy. > It's much easier for remote workers who want to live in rural areas to patronize these local bars, stores, etc, when they're not already commuting to places with a much larger collection of services.

I'm also pro-remote work, but even if every job that is do-able remote becomes remote, that won't revitalize every rural community. No one is moving to North Dakota just because they got a remote job. The US is just too big and the number of remote-able jobs is too small. Sure, some rural communities, with particularly nice outdoors, etc will be winners. But you need actual 'large' numbers of people to sustain those local bars/stores. A few software developers moving to a dying mining town is just not going to be enough patrons to sustain a bar, stores, schools, etc. Even if they all keep their 500k Google paychecks, they can still only drink so much beer at once.

> In which case, that reminds me:

> The neat thing about central planning is that it can invest in things-- like rural electrification-- which are cost prohibitive for a market-based solution, if/when that need arises.

> So would you agree they are both neat in their own way?

Yes, they are both neat in their own way. I like that the post office has to deliver mail to everyone.

Central planning can react faster than the market, if the central planners have good foresight. But they can't see into the future either. If you have some rural mining community that could sustain a population of 5,000 in 1970, it made a lot of sense to electrify it. But then 40 years later, the mine is more productive than ever before, but only needs 20% of the labor because of advances in automation. It kinda sucks that you built an electric system sized for a population of 10,000, right? Cuz now you have a town of 5,000 where unemployment is extremely high.

Though I'd argue that rural electrification at this point (or in the next few years) is probably best by a home-solar-battery combo.

[jancsika]

> I said 'if there's a market for it'.

In which case, that reminds me:

The neat thing about central planning is that it can invest in things-- like rural electrification-- which are cost prohibitive for a market-based solution, if/when that need arises.

So would you agree they are both neat in their own way?

[Loudergood]

This is why I'm very pro remote work for the broader economy.

It's much easier for remote workers who want to live in rural areas to patronize these local bars, stores, etc, when they're not already commuting to places with a much larger collection of services.

[achierius]

"if there's a market for it" is a big weasel phrase. It lets you ascribe fault not to the system, but to the people who 'chose' to live in such a non-marketable way.

Even if we accept that: what would you have those farmers do, then? Capitalism has hollowed out the towns that supported them, and now you say that the free market will handle the rest: to me that sounds like a recipe for headlines ten years out saying stuff like "The farmer shortage is quickly becoming an issue of national security."

And it's not just a rural issue either. AFAIK the term originated, or at least first became popular with reference to urban areas: e.g. map of these in New York https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=a20cc15bc7cf49939c8... These people did the "right" thing and moved to a city, even if they had to take up residence in cheaper homes to do so. Yet the market still doesn't want to serve them.

[lapcat]

> The neat thing about capitalism is that stores will be built to serve the community if there's a market for it. We don't need to centrally plan the whole community up front.

There's a chicken-and-egg problem here, though. Would you buy a new home and move in with no groceries or other stores in the area yet? If there's an existing community, then yes, stores will be built eventually, but that can't just happen overnight, so how do homeowners survive in the meantime?

That's why most new housing is built in the suburbs around existing cities. All of the amenities needed by homeowners are already nearby, or at least within reasonable driving distance. Starting a new community in the middle of nowhere would be extremely difficult, and would certainly cost a lot more money to the home builders, reducing profit.