Re: Housing .. uses 0.5% of land

On Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:01:48 GMT, "Dan in Philly" <djr8@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

>"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-total
>
>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, Wa****ngton, 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.