[nomel]

You missed a costly part of grabbing a chunk of land: utilities. Getting them onto your land, so you can live with modern creature comforts, some of them dictated by law, is often prohibitively expensive. You can DIY with the alternative being a well (hit or miss), a septic system, and setting up a solar/battery farm, which isn't cheap either.

[whartung]

> You missed a costly part of grabbing a chunk of land: utilities.

There is a 15 acre lot down the street. A good spot for another small housing development.

But one issue with it is that it has legacy utility and power poles on the periphery. Anyone wanting to develop that space is obliged to route all of that underground, which easily add several M$ to the project.

Eventually, someone will bite, buy the lot, and develop it.

But it's going to be low on the list because all of that cost will notably bounce up the new home costs. Cheaper places to build elsewhere.

[bluGill]

What is wrong with powar poles? They are reliable and work well.

[nomel]

Above ground is ugly, and less reliable, in terms of frequency (about half) and total duration (about 20% more, since underground takes around 1.6x longer per outage) [1]. But, underground is so expensive that they end up being a net social loss, at least in NY [2].

[1] https://pdi2.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/51-EdisonElectIn...

[2] https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/09/final-repo...