Comment by MikeNotThePope
16 hours ago
I have a dumb question. What is the eventual of efficient land use? Say we bulldoze a bunch of single family homes and get 10x as dense. Now we have 10x as many people per square kilometer. Is that an efficient use of land? Will there be someone saying at 10x population density that it's an inefficient use of space? If yes, what would they propose instead?
Why are you acting like there isn't a definition of inefficient. I think "underutilized" is a pretty good definition.
The fact that every single person has a small private park in their front and backyards that's enjoyed maybe a couple hours per day at most is pretty wasteful - if it was shared the utilization would go way up and space used would be way down. Same goes for all the parking lots needed to facilitate car traffic - if we used more efficient/shared options like buses or trams then the parking lots that sit empty most of the day could be replaced with more businesses or houses that allow people to live closer to the services that they need every day.
Meanwhile, we have big bottlenecks in our city downtowns where all the density is packed. Spread that out and things get a lot more efficient - your commute probably goes down too because you can live closer to work. Suburbs don't work without a productive city near them - otherwise they're just rural areas.
There's a really great way to think about this that doesn't get enough attention: land rents.
Some plots of land are very valuable due to their location, what you can access, etc. It's pretty straightforward to find out what the monthly cost of land is in any area, either from simple regressions on property values, or empty lot sales, etc.
When the land rent starts to excessively exceed average income of number of households allowed to live on that plot of land, that's pretty inefficient.
Owning land is society letting you say to other people: you're not allowed here. When we restrict land us so that people can not figure out their best use of it, eg 4 families building townhouses together, we start to restrict access to opportunity and basic economic freedom.
this is the same fallacy of saying there's no point getting a 10x faster server because you'll just have 10x more load and your site will still be slow.
If you're really interested: as density increases, population growth decreases. High density places become a sink for populations from elsewhere. You end up reaching a regional equilibrium, where some of the lowest density places start emptying out entirely. Japan is a great example of this, small towns there disappear regularly, as Tokyo grows. Suburban life around Tokyo remains very stable as the center increases and edges decrease.
Yes, dense cities are more efficient in every way compared to sprawl. Can you articulate what is confusing about this?