[lurk2]

America isn't overpopulated. The pyramid scheme you're describing is not a Malthusian constraint but the product of bad monetary policy privileging non-productive investments in real estate. There's still no better place on earth for normal people to build wealth, unless you're playing the digital nomad game.

[yulker]

America has enough room to build many new cities in useful locations, yet it doesn't. Why is that?

[lurk2]

I would contest the idea that this construction isn't happening - it's largely just resulting in sprawl at the periphery of existing cities. America has a lot of space available and a lot of space actively being developed.

As to why new cities aren't being built in completely empty areas, I would have to know where you're talking about to make a guess as to why they aren't being developed. Off the top of my head:

1) Environmental concerns 2) Expropriation concerns making projects politically untenable 3) The concerns of aboriginals 4) Cost of infrastructure development 5) Lack of market demand

To elaborate on the fifth point, I would posit that people don't tend to populate such greenfield cities unless there is a compelling reason to do so; either by being pulled (e.g. by resource extraction opportunities, a growing economy, educational opportunities, etc.) or by being pushed (e.g. fleeing a war, the effects of climate change, or political persecution). China is the example to look at here. They spent most of the 2010s buying up an enormous amount of resources to build cities that ended up just sitting empty before eventually being demolished. A lot of this was just fraud (the buildings weren't constructed to be habitable to begin with), but at least some proportion of it had to do with the factors I mentioned above. The cost of physically moving to a new city, as well as the loss of social capital resulting from such a move make relocating to a new city both undesirable and prohibitively expensive for most people.

Do you have another theory?

[alephnerd]

> Do you have another theory

I do (becuase I've heard it from a buddy of mine who's an MD at a Bulge Bank) - there is no capital to invest in consumer real estate anymore.

Large portions of that industry died out in 2008-12, and capital for large real estate projects like a housing community tend to be allocated 2-3 years before ground breaking, and then an additional 1-2 years to build.

So to build a brand new community by 2020, you should have done all the leg work in 2014-16. And to build a new one today, it should have been done in 2019-20.

Any pipeline that even existed is now dead, because manufacturing construction was the asset class of choice in the 2022-24 period along with high interest rates (making projects much more expensive) and tariffs on Canadian lumber, so the housing shortage is about to get even worse.

[thelamest]

It does not come about magically from monetary or even fiscal policy. The demand for housing (and other construction) was and is real. People find use for, and like having much space, while being close together. What was and is lacking is supply.

[lurk2]

It was never implied that this mechanism was magical.

If you reread the original post, the claim being made is:

> The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, [...] was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing.

This is manifestly not the case. My response was that, insofar as a pyramid scheme exists, it has nothing to do with some fundamental Malthusian limit on how many people can fit in a given space; this limit exists, but is not the reason that the rich are getting richer, which instead has to do with monetary policy.

You make cheap money available to those with good credit. These people take out loans and use the money to buy real property with the expectation that they will be able to rent it out for more than the carrying cost of the loan. This causes the price of real estate to rise artificially beyond what it would if the cheap credit had not been made available. The key issue here is that this credit isn't being made available to everyone at once - you have to qualify for the loan first.

[fc417fc802]

> bad monetary policy

Bad zoning policy, more like.