Re: Housing .. uses 0.5% of land

"Dan in Philly" <djr8@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:0bMHj.283679$FE.277722@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "Enough Already" <enough_already@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message ...
> > 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-tota
l
>
> 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
>
>

   I live on an abandoned tobacco farm.  The barn was burned in our
fireplace.  There are 150 houses where there used to be one tobacco farm.
Do we need more tobacco or more houses?  There are all kinds of trees on
the
land now, but at one time there were none.  I so happen to have a buy-out
for a tobacco allotment (on another piece of land).  But do we need more
smokers?