alt Hacker News> I wish humans would come together to re-wild more of the earth. Restoring wild nature and cutting emissions is the only way to really restore natural ecosystems. We're nowhere close to doing that.
A big issue is cost and economic opportunity. For example, a lot of land in the SF Bay Area cannot be developed. This is great for the environment, but not so great for housing costs.
Long term, it’s likely worth it to save the environment, but let’s not ignore its immediate cost to everyone besides the upper class.
They’re not necessarily at odds. Manhattan has something like 75x the population density per mile. You could rewild 4/5 of the the SF Bay Area while also building 10x the housing stock under that development pattern. Single family homes are just an extremely expensive and ecologically destructive way to live. They require a ton of infrastructure per person.
Unfortunately, I think that housing unaffordability is just a desired feature - people who live there don’t want to live near people who couldn’t afford to live there. It’s much more segregated than many other parts of the country I’ve lived in.