At the time I was researching the technology and doing the maths, 20 years ago, I was mostly smoking Power Plant. High beta-pinene. Sharp clarity.

significantly harder and more expensive to build, but you also have significantly more water intrusion issues, meaning the building won’t last nearly as long and will require horrifically expensive fixes on the regular.

This sounds like the kind of argument I hear against spaceships for everybody, that's basically like "We can't have spaceships! Screen doors don't work in space!". Yeah, well, don't build them like that.

[Edit: Also sounds like people complaining about indoor plumbing, not understanding what that meant, imagining poop all over the place inside. No. We have tubes to manage where stuff goes. Ample dry clean space.]

Go build yourself a house that is a forest archology-scape,

:3

A house that is a forest arcology-scape... lol... just one house, going from horizon to horizon, with vast layers big enough to fit giant trees in... just a house? Seems more than a little opulent-overkill.

And, by myself? :3 If I had the resources, I would not do it just for myself.

Also, I did draft a small example (and even 1000 variations) of a largely self-sustaining house, using environmentally friendly materials, that would strengthen over time, and as intended to be lived in would increase in capacity to produce food and energy over time, and I was enslaved to do this design work while at my worst health, under promise I'd be put in it, if I'd only design a house fit for my needs, then, after much blackmail, slavery, and torture, they defrauded me, and built a design that inverted every key design element for my health, turning a healing home into a torture box, and what's worse, it cost them at least twice as much. ... I still don't really know why they did that. Can only presume some kind of sadistic narcissistic Munchhausen-by-proxy. Gets me wondering how much more human potential is being squandered for utterly insane reasons. By this worse-than-Sisyphusian task, I have envied Gregor Samsa. ... And I shall recover enough health, and build it properly, and more, yet.

Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive.

You're kidding, right? That's insanely farcical. Not even funny. If we've availed the means to build forest arcologyscapes, you think this makes housing building more scarce and expensive? I would love to hear your reasoning behind that, correct or incorrect. I wonder where your're presuming screen doors. Like... concrete? LOL. Or perhaps unimaginatively in cognitive dissonance presuming aspects of the current economic paradigm would persist along side the deployed ability to construct vast linked forest arcologies...?

Also, just the same as we don't have to increase the carrying capacity of earth into the hundreds of trillions, nor fill that capacity, and that's just an example to illustrate some of the headroom we have with proper resource management, we don't have to make everything on earth a forest arcologyscape.

Anyhoo, please don't be put off by my reflexively scoffing incredulity, and do elaborate on how "Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive". You might be right. I wouldn't want to be barking up the wrong tree. (Pun not intended, noticed, and did nothing to avoid.)

"Roads? Where we're going... we don't need... ... "roads"." -- Doc Emmett Brown, Back To The Future trilogy.

Yeah, I know. But these are exclusive to America and the underdeveloped world, and we're not defending that. It also has similarities with it. Europe has good housing (Though unaffordable) that isn't suburbia, but modern day commie blocks aren't exactly affordable in Russia either.

Funny story, suburbia is systemic government slop that destroys individuality, too.

I know this, I used to live in a Stalin era house in Moscow. But Stalin's Russia had a big problem with housing, only Khrucshev fixed it. All of these things may come as a shocker to an American, but they're quite common in Europe. And it wasn't that easy to get a house, you had to wait in line for half your life and the system didn't work with a bit of corruption, like centralized systems always do. Comparing the USSR to western countries is especially bad, because western countries had no regard towards workers, and if we look at the same timeframe we could say they advanced their housing capabilities equally.

I feel like Vienna did it better. And in European cities that didn't get bombed to shit in ww2 these houses look out of place and terrible. These houses weren't build for the benefit of people, but for the benefit of production, like in good old capitalism. They often disregarded the enviroment and historic parts of the city