Housing/footprint
How many resources does it take for people to have housing?
This is a page for some estimates.
Single-detached home
Note: This estimate doesn't consider other footprints of living in the suburbs (i.e. car driving and its infrastructure).
Labor
We could estimate labor by looking at some costs:
- labor costs, obviously
- material costs, because these generally reflect the labor that goes into producing the materials
We don't want to count other costs:
- zoning permits and other bureaucracy - maybe these exist in our current society but they don't have to exist fundamentally - there are probably much more efficient & fair ways to make decisions about housing (or at least, the process could do without bullshit jobs) - so we leave this out.
- land value - this depends on the location and it isn't a reflection of labor requirements. Also we will calculate land in another section anyway. So here we leave this out too.
Housing costs have gone up recently, but this is more a function of demand rather than any inherent increase in the amount of labor needed to build a house.
Quick estimate: How many labor hours go into a house:
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How about labor over time:
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Shockingly low. Did I get something wrong?
Land
For one, there's the land that the house sits on: Quick estimate:
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But also the land that it takes to grow the wood for the house:
tree plantations of pine and eucalyptus can sequester an average of 10 tons of carbon per hectare per year.
If we assume that half of this carbon is in the tree wood (the other half being in leaves and roots), and if we assume that 50% of the mass of wood is carbon atoms, then: This means 10 tons of wood per hectare per year.
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If you have some idea how to estimate the land footprint of other materials, please start the discussion. For now, let's hopefully assume it's small enough to ignore.