[Nitramp said]Apparently many people are upset with their housing cost and commute situation, which I understand triggered the original post on making more land. Having lived in the Bay Area for a while, the housing/commute/living cost situation there definitely seems dysfunctional.[..]

Right. But how is America different from other countries? Mumbai and Tokyo have similar problems and they can’t expand housing outside their dense zip codes unlike America because they are much smaller.

America doesn’t have to ‘make more land’. We have enough of it.

This whole issue must be reframed as a resource allocation problem and not a ‘land problem’.

Bay Area housing woes occur because those who can’t afford to live there want to live in expensive zip codes. When the city of San Francisco wants to build housing for the homeless at $800k per, they are essentially taking away the land resource from the working class and upper middle class people who can afford to live there with their salaries.

The case for mixed income neighborhoods has clearly jumped the shark. It’s political shenanigans and pandering to unions and a vote bank.

The Bay Area housing crisis as well as the commute problem is a failure of imagination and execution of sound policies by Sacramento and the elected officials whose progressive stubbornness is creating a Bread and Circus empire right out of the manual circa Roman Empire.

[Nitramp said]
Most of the west is arid, as you can see on the map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_United_States#/.... Here's a list of the deserts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_deserts
In the context of this conversation, "desert" was meant as a placeholder for "sparsely populated" though. Here's a map of population density in the US: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=49471c6646....
As you can tell, the arid/desertified areas from the first map match to low population density in the last one, as you'd expect.[...]

Right. I am confused. You said ‘the middle is desert’ and then went on to claim that ‘most of the west is arid’(not true,btw).

And then you claim that desert in this context is ‘sparsely populated’. Which one is it?

[Nitramp said]
I don't think that's a useful argument. Migration is a complex, many factor issue, with affordable housing presumably being a minor point amongst many. [..]

It might not be useful to you, but rates of immigration is directly related as a factor to an increase in population density outside of native population’s natural birth rate.

Bay Area does not have affordable housing and yet, the urban-rural migration has only been increasing. Intra state migration from states outside CA to Bay Area has also increased. Immigration to the country is also highly desirable.

[Nitramp said]Your personal impression might also be colored by the people you happen to know.[..]

Irrelevant and unsupportable.

[Nitramp said]Data suggest the EU has a net immigration rate of ~5 per mil, with the US at ~15 per mil. Given higher population in the EU, in absolute numbers that's 2.5 million vs 5 million immigrants over the last 5 years. So apparently a lot of people do try and immigrate to Europe. But again, it doesn't seem like a useful argument.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.NETM[..]

Right. So you are changing tracks again. EU population density is 117 people/km2. It is closer to the population density of America.

While considering migrants data, refugee/asylum migration as well as immigration should be considered. As well as geographical location.

Can you state your position on this subject clearly and concisely because I can’t tease this beginning or end from this ball of yarn.