> In the meantime, the well-watered, prime farm I worked on as a teen had most of the topsoil stripped and sold, and there is a subdivision with 40-50 houses on it.
Americans are addicted to (boring) houses in the suburbs and cars, it's such a shame.
Gotta admit, I'm not sure which you'd call the ecological wasteland -- the urban area, or the suburban area. Because I'll tell you what, we have a heck of a lot of biodiversity in this suburban area, far more than downtown.
Far less though than if three quarters of that land was left undisturbed or used as pasture and the same number of people lived in a denser urban area.
But the math against urban development is brutal. Rule of thumb I've read seems to be if cost of shelter in exurb is 1, then suburb is 2, mid-rise urban is 4, and high-rise urban is 8.
To make that pencil out, people must be willing to trade off outsourcing much of their lives for much smaller living spaces. That outsourcing cost must not exceed their available income. Beyond that, the outsourcing has to rely upon a dependable logistical tail. While industries everywhere in modern commerce are becoming more brittle and fragile due to various incentive structures, this entire premise tower unravels and becomes increasingly tenuous. High-density living is effectively a mass-trust exercise; low-trust societies cannot sustainably maintain high-density cities over centuries, the only timescale where the long-term public and private financials modulate into a reasonable payoff.
Yes. A lot of people enjoy having a safe yard for their kids to play in and where they can have friends and family over for a cookout. They also enjoy not sharing walls with noisy neighbors who fight and/or play loud music at all hours, not having heavy traffic in the area, and so on.
In the case of the property I’m thinking of, it was land continuously farmed since the Dutch colonized New York. It had a barn built in the 1670s. The farm was prosperous until about 1997, when it ceased to be economically viable.
It seems strange to me that a “one shot” subdivision with a 50 year lifespan is the only viable economy use for that land.
Americans are addicted to (boring) houses in the suburbs and cars, it's such a shame.