Anytime you have people living in dense, highly populated areas it will make nearby land a premium. High demand for land (and the resulting high prices) will result in high rent and high cost of living.
I'm not really sure how to fix this. You could have some government managed system for what businesses get the high demand land, but that will result in less popular stores being in the best locations and greatly incentivize corruption as businesses want highly profitable locations that can only be granted by politicians.
To fix this that kind of development has to be far more normalized. A big part that drives up those land values is because that style of development is both rare and desirable. If it becomes desirable, common,and meets housing/commercial needs, the market will become more competitively priced.
Land in Tokyo is remarkably inexpensive. The average family can afford a detached single family home in the heart of the city. High demand for land is mostly a product of having too little housing
20 years ago, Japan's population was basically flat. It has the same population today as it did in 1995, having gone up and then down by only a couple million people in between.
Land prices in the US were also low 20 years ago, before we added another 45 million people to the demand side of the equation.
You can't just take the average value for a variable and assume it's representative of all values at all times. If you take two cities, one with 100 people and another with 900, the average population is 500, but that doesn't mean half of the people live in each city.
Actually, at some point the graph flips around. If everywhere is fairly dense, less dense areas go for a premium (rich people hate living near poor people).
Haha what? Please explain exactly what is "bullshit" about any of that.
"considering the price of home ownership near city centers" - yes those homes are very expensive and overpriced
What does that have to do with the massive square mileage of the USA and how most of it is uninhabited? Do you think that there is any possible way to turn all of that massive land area into a dense urban environment?
Are you seriously this slow? What makes you think that every cm² needs to be paved and covered in concrete? Here's a little non-secret for you: most land of most countries is inhabited.
No I think it is you who are slow to understand what the conversation is even about. I responded to your comment, "If everywhere is fairly dense, less dense areas go for a premium" by saying that you can't make Everywhere dense.
You can't make Everywhere dense in the USA because there are 3.7 million square miles of land that make up the USA. Much of that land does not have humans occupying it. The cities where most of the population stays take up only a small fraction of those millions of square miles.
Congratulations on confirming you are extremely slow. Again, why the fuck do you think anyone should build densely in the middle of the Mojave, instead of simply doing so in cities - where people actually want to live?