>>479746>a massive amount of it is just land speculation driving prices up across the board because literally everyone and every industry uses land & buildings & natural resources.You are right that land is a natural monopoly, especially for real-estate in cities and agricultural land. Large hedge-funds have been able to abuse that in many regards.
However nothing is/can stop people from building floating houses and grow cities or towns into the ocean. It might take a while until all the engineering aspects are worked out and the most effective technological pathways are found. That famous city in Italy with building on stilts that was just an early attempt.
Storm-proof stable(non-sway) floating foundations are already done and cost efficient.
Sewage is currently stored in tanks, and then periodically pumped off by a sewage-barge. That could use some improvements. Sewage could be decontaminated, purified, dehydrated, then mixed with cheap sand to create soil for floating agriculture barges. People would get payed for their sh…bodily-contributions while also foiling the ploys of agro-land speculators, one dump at a time.
Electrical supply is wave-power, solar and wind. There is grid-power based on underwater cables derived from houseboat-supplies, but it's too expensive to scale up. However, 70% energy efficient, focused microwave power links exist. It's good enough for supplemental grid-energy used in conjunction with renewables. Nicola Tesla dreamed about creating wireless energy towers, and now something vaguely similar might actually become viable. And it's very cheap, a microwave link rectenna is basically just a wire mesh. Installing that is cheaper than a satellite dish.
The micro-wave-link Power-Towers could have small modular nuclear reactors, they would dump their waste-heat into the surrounding ocean water, by passive radiators. The floating buildings could use heat-pumps to collect that heat to make hot-water supply and building heat, from the same ocean water. Basically remote-heat without any pipes.
People would move around on city-barges instead of city-buses/trams. It's slow but very energy efficient, cheap, quiet and pleasant to look at or ride in.
Drinking water could come from photo-evaporation desalination and water purification machines, which would act as a powerful political incentive to do something about ocean pollution. Because clean ocean water means less water filter-replacement costs. If you cultivate filter plants like various types of algae, you get cleaner water and potentially a precursor material for hydrocarbon chemistry products like paper, plastic, many industrial and domestic chemicals, medicine, up to grease to fix the squeaky door-hinge.
Recycling could get a big boost because dumping trash in the ocean will be frowned upon. Because unlike landfills where it's out of sight out of mind. Everybody can buy a cheap underwater drone with a camera and see the trash lying on the ocean floor beneath the floating buildings.
If this indeed plays out towards pushing clean ocean water, it will also enable fish-farming.
This scheme represents a complex pattern that takes a while to come about, but when it does it will replicate everywhere, and 10% to 20% of the earths population will live on the "floats".
Try as they might it will not be possible to replicate the enclosure of the commons on the water. It will not end land speculation, but the insane levels of metropolitan real estate speculation will be dampened.