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Originally Posted by Onn
I think your missing the gray in bettween the black and white.
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No, you just don't understand similes and metaphors.
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Originally Posted by Onn
They still are cheap, a lot cheaper than moving in a city. Not every suburb is made up of million dollar McMansions. If you just want a house, the suburbs are still A LOT cheaper than buying something in the city....from what I know. To move to any decent city in the country you’re going to be dishing out the cash.
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Why do you need a house? Millions of families live in apartments and make use of park space instead of back yards, communal gathering areas instead of decks. Choosing suburbs is more a fear of interaction and not conforming to what is portrayed as a societal standard than it is "wanting a house" or "wanting privacy", and the "I can't afford a decent neighbourhood in the city" argument only expresses their laziness and unwillingness to foster positive change in depressed neighbourhoods. When you get a group of people buying cheap houses in the city and fixing them up, they improve the neighbourhood, increase the value of the home and often make a profit, and don't tax our limited services and resources as much. Instead, they take the easy way out and spend a lot of money on living in a cheap, artificial neighbourhood on the periphery of town.
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Originally Posted by Onn
As I said earlier, we still have far more land than we know what to do with.
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That doesn't mean it has to be paved over for houses. There are other living things on this land. Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, filling in a swamp and building houses on it was referred to as "improving land". Then we realized that swamps play an important role in cleaning waterways and were the reason so much of our water was becoming so polluted, and that the loss of these habitats was causing the local extinction of animals.
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Originally Posted by Onn
Since when has there been a food shortage in the United States of America? That is complete baloney!
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Look at how far the food has to travel. Subdivision construction in Ontario has reduced the amount of farmland in the GTA by half. Food has to travel further to get to that city, less food is grown in that region than is consumed by it, and both of those factors drive the price of food up. Just because there is 10 million farms doesn't mean it is OK to build on top of 1 million of them, especially when the population is set to increase by 100 million.
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Originally Posted by Onn
We could build for the next 100 years and still have enough farmland, and I suspect that is what will happen. Besides, farming has come a long way since the early 20th century. Farmers can be a lot more efficient today than they used to be.
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They are more efficient because they use more chemicals, and those chemicals are causing health problems. The food we eat is hurting us because the options on where and how we grow food are too limited to meet an unnecessarily high demand, and once again, just because the land is there, doesn't mean we should build on it. Exactly how much food per acre are you expecting these farms to produce? And back to McDonald's for a moment: To produce one pound of beef (four burgers), you need about 400 gallons of water (the average household's use in one month), and 2 pounds of corn. (That averages to something like 800 pounds of corn per cow.) Now multiply this by all the cows, water and corn these 100,000,000 extra Americans will consume. Do you still think we should decrease the amount of farmland?
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Originally Posted by Onn
If you need proof why don't you check how other countries get by who are 50 times more landlocked than we are?
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It doesn't have anything to do with being landlocked. It has to do with how much of the soil in the country is arable. In Canada, most arable land is also on the periphery of cities and therefore is under direct threat from urban sprawl. Every new subdivision represents a farm that no longer produces food. Only 4% of this planet's land is arable. Only 18% of America is suitable for growing crops. Only 4.5% of Canada's land is suitable for growing crops, so I'm sure you can now appreciate why it is such a concern here, especially in Ontario where the most fertile soils are being replaced by houses at an alarming rate.
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Originally Posted by Onn
I think we still have plenty of room for more people, more than half are states are still more than half empty.
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You don't have to fill every corner of the country.
How the planet works is very complex. You can't just build all over it without any regard for how that development will affect things because it puts our long-term survival at risk.
You're missing the bigger picture here. Not only is there more to land use than building on it, but there is more to the world than the US.