Originally posted on Quora November 29, 2021
Sources: Deseret News NPR FiveThirtyEight
Four centuries of sprawl is enough; anyone who’s serious about environmental stewardship and reducing our carbon footprint will oppose mass immigration and not fret about declining birth rates. Our neoliberal addiction to constant growth and insatiable consumption isn’t just an exacerbating factor; it’s the whole enchilada.
Out of all the problems we face in modern society from housing shortages, a lack of affordable housing in big cities, overcrowded schools, traffic congestion, and inflation, the gradual decline in fertility rates is the least of them; in fact, a baby boom is the last thing we need right now. As Georgists, we should take a holistic approach to politics instead of compartmentalizing different issues along party lines; just because they appear as separate concerns on party platforms does not make them so in reality.
There are two solutions to Ricardo’s law of rent: land value capture or sprawl. For over two centuries (four if you count the colonial era) we have chosen the latter. Smaller high population density countries, especially island nations like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan as well as tiny landlocked countries like Thailand and Denmark have chosen the former because they did not have the luxury of endless sprawl. Perhaps we can learn something from them, but as of late the illusion of endless land for development seems just as strong as it was in the 19th century. Yet unlike the pioneer days of federal land grants and the Homestead Act our current land grab schemes center around single family houses, to the exclusion of any housing density or even ADUs for that matter, minimum dwelling unit requirements, to the exclusion of tiny houses, and the time honored American tradition of real estate speculation pushing the margin of production even further away from city limits. Until we address and resolve the root of our problem, population growth through births or immigration will only make it worse.
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