Economics: Why America`s Housing Obsession Is Like Cancer

 

 (Drivebycuriosity) - It seems that the public is obsessed with housing. Politicians, pundits and the media claim that America has not enough one family houses, calling this a housing crises, with the plead to construct more houses.

I beg to differ. When I drive through America I get annoyed by the vast sprawl; the sheer endless row of flat houses, parking places, malls & gas stations. Above you can see the sprawl around Chicago. This was once green land; trees, bushes, shrubs, grass, flowers, weeds - now everything is buried below concrete.

 

Unfortunately the sprawls are spreading like cancer. They are not just unaesthetic. The construction of more and more flat houses, parking places, malls & gas stations, connected by a labyrinth of streets, destroys nature. The trees, bushes and other plants, that once turned carbon dioxide (CO₂) into oxygen and stored water, get wiped out. The concrete also seals the ground, therefore not enough rain water can be stored, causing either floods or droughts. 

To make things worse the settlers in the sprawls need to drive long ways to commute to working places, to shop, to visit restaurants etc. etc.. This way the growing sprawls are producing even more green house gases and reducing the air quality in general. The growing sprawls are making global warming worse. 

There are other - and more intelligent - ways to supply lower income people with affordable accommodations. When I visited Vancouver I was impressed by the plenty of high rises, all surrounded by green. They are the result of Vancouver´s three-decade-old Higher Buildings Policy ( dailyhive). These buildings keep a large part of the population in the city and protect the surrounding rain forests from being replaced by vast suburbs. 

Apartments in high rises are much more affordable than the majority of free standing houses. Their tenants don`t  need to take expensive mortgages with the risk to overburden themselves. America`s obsession with houses lead to the 2008 mortgage crisis, because people often took loans to purchase houses they could not afford. In 2008 many of these home owners weren´t able to service their debts, which brought the banks into trouble and lead to a chain reaction on the financial markets.

America´s housing obsession is the real housing crisis. 

Books: Fine Structure By QNTM

 (Drivebycuriosity) -  - QNTM - the pen name for Sam Hughes, a British programer - belongs to the rising stars on the firmament of science fiction. I was amazed by his novella "There Is No Antimemetics Division" ( my review ) and his short story collection "Valuable Humans In Transit And Other Stories"  ( drivebycuriosity). Both books are cutting edge hard science fiction with weird but well developed and plausible ideas.

"Fine Structure" by QNTM is a very ambitious work ( amazon). I am not sure if the book is a novel or a selection of very short stories. Some of the stories are connected, some are not. 

What happens when humans play with the laws of physics & mathematics? The author has a lot of fancy and clever ideas, the best what contemporary scifi has to offer, but as usual he also overshoots and becomes bizarre & apocalyptic. Apparently during writing he got intoxicated by his own ideas:

"The Federated Shiftship Kardashev V passes the first advance warning beacon at a record-breaking velocity of almost one hundred and fifty thousand universes per second-- so fast that the second and third warning beacons are warning beacons are dopplering into its wake long before the ship's communications array has had time to decode, process and handle the first warning, let alone present it to the ship's captain for consideration and action". 

But I enjoyed QNTM`s slick style anyway: "as the newly-discovered equation is installed into established ones, the delta grows and morphs and squares and never completely vanishes and generally makes a nuisance of itself without ever saying anything useful".

I plan to read more by him.