Flying Cars Will Solve the Housing Crisis
By: Tarron Lane
Tags: Housing, Self Driving, Passenger Drone, Drones, Technology

Flying Cars Will Solve the Housing Crisis

Alex Butterfield, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Listen to my related podcast episode at https://redcircle.com/shows/ae991a1b-c410-4177-a548-507498ca540c/episodes/89594a60-d5ac-41b6-8c72-375c9b37cb14

A Problem With An Out-of-the-Box Answer

I have a theory that flying cars are going to solve the housing crisis, at least for the next couple of generations after we start using them.

I’m right at that stage of life where all of my peers are buying houses. As I try to chart out when the right time for me to make that step is, it has had me thinking a lot about why housing is so expensive. By “thinking about”, I of course mean “getting frustrated by”.

Most people that I know are pulling their hair out over this same thing. Why is it so expensive to buy a house? The hopelessness is especially strong for those looking to stake their claim in really constrained housing markets, like Silicon Valley. I grew up in California, so the depressing housing outlook there is near and dear to my heart.

Is there any hope for trends to reverse, or at the very least to stop getting worse? I think there is, but I don’t think we’re using the right transportation infrastructure to make that happen yet. We have to start thinking outside the box. We have to change the fundamentals about how we get from A to B on a daily basis. We need some flying cars. We need some vertiports.

Vertiports — Little Baby Airports all over the place

Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles don’t need an entire runway to get into the air. That means you can put their landing areas in more places than you could fit a traditional airport — like on top of buildings and parking garages. That, plus the advances in flight and electric technology, are going to allow eVTOL flight to merge into our everyday life in a way that traditional airplanes and helicopters could never achieve. Really, it’s probably more effective to think of flying cars less like cars that we’ve given flight capabilities to, and more like airplanes we’ve just figured out how to downsize.

With the current advancements being made in battery and flight technology, I’m sure we are going to make it to a place within my lifetime where instead of driving my car through an hour of traffic across several different freeways to get to work, I’ll grab an electric scooter and head down a couple blocks to the nearby vertiport that the local Walmart paid to build on its roof.

I’ll leave the scooter in the “MicroMobility” hub next door to Walmart that rents out all kinds of electric last-mile urban transportation, and then I’ll open my “FlightPlan” app that lets me reserve the next flight over the nearby hills and into the big city. The self-flying “car” will take me for a couple minutes over all the traffic, following an A.I.-determined flight path, and then I’ll land in the vertiport built on top of the parking garage of the business complex where my company rents office space, where I’m now only a short walk from work.

Then at the end of the day I come home the same way, back to my house, that I was able to buy relatively cheap considering the commute time. Turns out there was a ton of nearby land that just wasn’t being developed before because it was too expensive to build a big enough freeway out there.

The Housing Economic Perspective

I may not have done super well on my college economics tests, but I still remember that first fundamental notion — supply and demand. I’ve always heard that people aren’t making any more land, so of course supply is going to be low no matter how high demand climbs. The problem there is that I don’t think the market cares about just any land; it cares about useful land. Even though we don’t make more physical land, we CAN take available land and make useful land from it. I’ve driven through Nevada enough times to know that we aren’t anywhere close to tapping out our supply of available land. The only real thing keeping the supply/demand curve tipping in favor of limited real estate supply is our own technological ability to extend a plot of land’s usefulness further out away from societies activity hubs. The physical square footage on planet earth isn’t the limiting factor. It’s whether or not we can get there and back in short enough times to make it worth it.

Boats, railroads, freeways, and airplanes all took their turns in history at expanding outward the sphere of relevant land we wanted to live in. Now we live in a society where the freeway is the king of the every-day American’s land valuation process. We chart our paths in google maps and make our decision based on freeway traffic loads, commute times, and proximity to stores and schools. There’s only so far we can drift away from the bustling hives of human activity before we reach the limits of how much time we are willing to spend on transportation. It’s like our leash, keeping us bumping into each other all together in crowded clumps of humanity. That leash isn’t just made of personal preference or or traffic intolerance — there’s a hard limit on how many cars you can squeeze through the strained road network before the whole process gets as sluggish as a cholesterol-riddled artery. Every costly investment in additional lanes or expansive intersections only alleviates the stress for a short time. Traffic which was suppressed before just released and fills capacity right back up again.

Any housing developer looking for land is going to be hard-pressed to find an abundance of opportunities where people are going to be willing to live there, and where all the existing nearby neighborhoods won’t let the “Not in my backyard” mentality unite their residents in opposition to new development. They’re justifiably worried about putting added strain on their transportation infrastructure.

We need a new approach that will last longer than one more freeway lane or one more redesigned intersection. We need housing developers to have a way to turn more land into useful land. The only way to do this faster is to give ourselves the right tools to break out of the tyranny of the restrictive and sluggish freeway system. We need a way that can scale out faster than we can slap down more asphalt and concrete.

Some Missing Puzzle Pieces Still

Flying cars have what it takes to dethrone that despot and set up a new king. It won’t solve our housing problems forever, but it’s the long overdue step in the right direction. It’s an upgrade that might just buy a growing earth population some relief from the hot housing water we find ourselves in.

There are still many challenges that get in the way of flying cars and vertiports being a near-future reality, but we seem to be definitely headed in that direction. A few more iterations of better battery and energy technology, a few more cycles of improved versions of self-driving software, and an exponential increase in artificial intelligence, and I think we’ll be in a place where flying cars just make sense. The cost of doing it is falling, while the cost of NOT doing it is rising. Soon those lines will cross, and flying transit will explode.

Why do I think it’ll become so popular? It’s because it will be easier than figuring out how cars work. I’ve owned a car for several years now, and I STILL don’t feel confident I know how to take care of the thing properly. Can you imagine the upcoming generations wanting to go through the same nightmare of licenses, driving tests, and oil changes when they can just Uber their way through the air on their parent’s money and get to where they need to be?