There's externalities in having a home that aren't just the land itself, but also the infrastructure per person. The infrastructure costs are why very few people are buying up land in e.g. California City[0] and popping a cheap concrete[1] or steel[2] box (depending on your preference of 3D printing or prefab/shipping container houses) in the desert for less than many people here earn per month.
Did you want a road with that house? Running water? Electricity? Internet? A police force?
Yes, these things are all doable. But they also add to the value proposition of a property ("it's in a good area"), driving up demand, meaning people can charge more for the land, and if you're going to spend a lot more on the land anyway then you might as well make the structure of the home itself a bit nicer, and it all blows up rapidly.
I'm not sure how costs of sewage etc. change with increased population density. Pipes have to get wider per person, but low-density also means they're longer.
> I'm not sure how costs of sewage etc. change with increased population density. Pipes have to get wider per person, but low-density also means they're longer.
Probably accurate to say that in general, the great majority of the cost of infrastructure is in labor, not materials. It doesn't matter if pipes are a little wider or longer; the labor of digging up dirt and installing pipes, and doing that over time as things need maintenance, would far exceed.
IIRC where suburbs get the short end of the stick is lifecycle replacement. The primary costs for replacing pipes is in labor hours, not really pipe size, and it takes longer to replace more miles of pipe.
Lots of land is, literally, dirt cheap.
There's externalities in having a home that aren't just the land itself, but also the infrastructure per person. The infrastructure costs are why very few people are buying up land in e.g. California City[0] and popping a cheap concrete[1] or steel[2] box (depending on your preference of 3D printing or prefab/shipping container houses) in the desert for less than many people here earn per month.
Did you want a road with that house? Running water? Electricity? Internet? A police force?
Yes, these things are all doable. But they also add to the value proposition of a property ("it's in a good area"), driving up demand, meaning people can charge more for the land, and if you're going to spend a lot more on the land anyway then you might as well make the structure of the home itself a bit nicer, and it all blows up rapidly.
Police in particular are currently getting more expensive thanks to Baumol's cost disease, because policing isn't automated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
I'm not sure how costs of sewage etc. change with increased population density. Pipes have to get wider per person, but low-density also means they're longer.
[0] https://www.landwatch.com/kern-county-california-recreationa...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180926121023/https://www.busin...
[2] https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/prefab-container-house.html