“The reason it costs thousands of dollars per month to rent a tiny apartment in a big city is because the energy consumption and pollution output to build and maintain vertical steel and concrete real estate is off the charts.”up, rents have gone down and rents have stagnated. Right
That is not correct. I have owned two apartment buildings in the city of Boston for over 20 years. Rents have gone up, rents have gone down and rents have stagnated. Now we are in an upswing. Tenants pay their own energy bills for their apartments. The consumption per square foot is the same as any dwelling with the same age furnace and appliances. My biggest costs are taxes and then maintenance followed by legal in that order. Rent is strictly supply and demand. The industry standard is 1% a month the worth of the property.
Those costs are all higher because indirectly more energy is being consumed such as more union government employees, which have a negative return on cost. Rents are influenced by demand however if rents go sufficiently higher then more steel and concrete is ordered, and government and other employees hired, to build more capacity, so pollution goes up. Cost is a wonderful proxy for total energy consumption/pollution because it cuts through all the political baloney. While there are exceptions, in general if something costs more, more energy is being consumed somewhere. The ultimate reason gold and diamonds cost so much is because a tremendous amount of energy consumption and pollution output is required to obtain them. The same is true for high rise buildings in a big city.