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Comment by wcfrobert | Hacker News Reader

Land is not scarce in the US. My road trip through Nevada to Salt Lake City convinced me of that much. What is scarce is land people actually want to live in - with safe neighborhoods, good schools, restaurants, shops, etc. Restrictive zoning and NIMBYism is definitely making this worse.

I don't think the amount of "unexplored" or "undeveloped" land is a good metric for social mobility. Economic growth is. New "frontiers" are created all the time. They do not have to be in the physical world (e.g. computers, the web, biotech, the App store, social media influencer, crypto, and now AI). Even in the physical world, frontiers can sometimes expand. Desirable land can be created in the middle of a desert (e.g. Las Vegas), we just don't want to anymore.

Despite its many flaws, I think the US is still better than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

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In much of the American West, water is the limiting factor. To build another Las Vegas, the water rights would need to be bought somehow.

Cities can outbid agriculture, but the water rights market is complicated.

A better example might be the California Forever project which seemingly had this figured out, but was blocked because they couldn't get permission.

Agriculture, the Saudis get five harvests of alfalfa a year by leasing unlimited water rights in Arizona for practically nothing. The Az Governor could call the leases and stop that, but they haven't for some reason. Most water in AZ is for Manufacturing and Farming, very little is used for people.

There's tons of land on the east coast too, just far away from people and amenities. See: rural WV, PA, VA, etc.

Yes, and rust belt cities have lots of infrastructure that could be reused. Jobs are probably a limiting factor. Less so with working remotely.

This is one of the reasons I wish companies embraced remote work more, and which I wish the government encouraged more. Plenty of locations could be rebuilt and revitalized simply by moving working families there, and plenty of people would be happy to buy up the cheaper housing and contribute to the local economy if their places of work allowed for such flexibility.

Its a real shame that both state and federal governments do not see the advantages of this...

Most of that rust belt infrastructure from mid century population highs is actually at end of life. Some cities are having a crisis with things like their sewer systems right now. Its underreported because no one cares about the intricacies of stormwater and sewage movements, much less in a smaller midwestern city.

They are currently attempting to essentially be annexed by the small community of Suisun City in exchange for being allowed to develop the land according to their vision.

Doesn’t BLM control chunks of land that are desirable but not allowed for settlement?

The point is San Francisco has tons of land (with houses already built on it) that is desirable but not allow for redevelopment.

Not really, no. The land the BLM owns is mostly scrubland suitable for cattle grazing and basically nothing else. I suspect whoever told you that has an ideological bone to pick with the BLM and is bullshitting you to try and make you equally mad at them.

By the way, this is such a textbook example of how planted counter narratives brainwash people into deflecting actual criticism on a topic.

People interpret the speaker as if he is “one of those people”, who believes the counter narrative the listener has heard about.

Rarely does the listener move past this point, and check in on whether the speaker is actually one of those people, or if he is someone who has never heard of those people, or if he has ignored those people because he thinks their views are just as stupid as you think they are, and he is actually independently criticizing the topic.

No one told me that I’ve just seen a map and it looks quite extensive in a lot of the western US.

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