How about a single building?

The human urge to own land sometimes borders on the absurd. Earlier this week, Richard Florida and I took a look at the question of whether the size of American cities was economically optimized: Do we have too many cities with too few people in them? (Answer: Yes!) But there’s an implicit question embedded in that notion of anti-NIMBY place-making, once posed by Leo Tolstoy: “How much land does a man need?”

Tolstoy’s answer was pretty grim. But leave it to a YouTuber to take that existential literary question literally by asking, “How much land does humanity need?”

What If Everybody Lived In the Same Building? (Part 1)
What If Everybody Lived In the Same Building? (Part 2)

That’s the issue enterprising online video-maker Joseph Pisenti explores on his channel, Real Life Lore.