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Posted by George Conklin on March 30, 2008, 5:26 pm
> wrote:
>
> >> Does anyone think about how much land gets covered by blessed housing
> >> starts each year?
> >
> >Total acreage of the U.S. = 1876 million acres
>
>http://www.statemaster.com/graph/geo_lan_acr_tot-geography-land-acreage-tot
al
> >
> >Assuming 100 million households, and assuming the average "house" covers
0.1
> >acres (should be much less than that due to apartment buildings, condos)
> >then houses cover 10 million acres.
> >
> >Percent of land covered by houses: 10/1876 = 0.5%
> >
> >If this doubles over next century, then 1% of land will be covered.
(Note:
> >much of this will be due to Mexican immigration, so lots of crummy
'houses'
> >in Mexico will become abandoned and will revert to nature)
> >
> >Dan in Philly
>
> Overall context:
>
> The entire population of the world, 6.6 billion, could be given
> single-family homes (figuring 5 persons per family, low for the world)
> on quarter-acre lots, with yards to play catch with the kids and all,
> and easily fit into four or five decent-sized U.S. states.
>
> Say ... Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arkansas.
>
> Though they might prefer California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and
> Arizona. Nicer weather, with more choice about it.
>
> That's about 15% of the land area of the US.
>
> Then say you create multi-family housing, so one-third of housing area
> is single-family homes, one third is two-family homes, and one-third
> averages nine families up in apartment buildings, per quarter acre.
>
> Now you've emptied 75% of even that space, and 6.6 billion people live
> in about 3.5% of the land area of the US, with the other 11.5%
> becoming room for ball parks, offices and shopping center parking
> lots.
>
> The great bulk of the world's land area is empty. The great weight of
> humanity physically bears down upon the globe like dust upon a
> basketball.
>
> As far as just the US is concerned, if it had the same population
> density as that infamous hell-hole Bermuda, all its people would fit
> into an area somewaht smaller than California and Wyoming combined.
Given quadraplexes, the Sierra Club ideal, everyone in the world would
fit into Texas, leaving the rest of the world to snakes and flies.
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