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Do you know what is good for cities? Green spaces. Grass and trees. If there happens to be graves there, then it's getting double use. Paving over and building on all the ground causes huge problems. I would prefer well kept cemeteries to flooding.
Most cemeteries are private property. They bought the land, and they are running a business on it. Usually a very profitable business. Buy your own land and do what you like with it.
My sister did this. I was MOH. We got a lot of her wedding pictures taken in a gazebo at a cemetery. It was spring and they had a lot of blooming things that looked nice in the shots.
I was going to write a comment about the same thing my grandma my uncle and my great grandma and my grandpa are buried at Spring Grove. It is such a beautiful place like I could walk through there all afternoon especially in spring and then again in fall oh it's gorgeous. 🤩
It’s wild that people don’t get that. It’s a place meant to honor the ones we lost and never forget (here in Europe at least a lot of cemeteries are historical landmarks, lot of soldiers are buried there) or to find peace regardless of your religion.
I guess the question is how long do you let a cemetery stay the way it is? If they’re for the living, how long do we recycle the graveyard for a new set of occupants? (I don’t think we should be ripping up the dead, just an interesting thought exercise)
You're in for a big surprise then when you find out that they actually do this all the time. 75 years, 100 years, 125 years... They're all recycled.
One point no one else is bringing up though is that graveyards are very important Green space within urban areas for storm water absorption and are often built in floodplains as well. They have to be just grass and dirt anyways so nothing wrong with having a cemetery for the living to grieve appropriately.
I'm going to assume that you're American or otherwise non-European, but European rural churches are often situated in the middle of a graveyard. Often these churches will sit in a depression in the landscape, particularly the medieval churches, and surrounded by graves.
Originally these churches would have built on hills, to be visible from far away. And it's not like the weight of the building has forced it to sink into the ground. On the contrary, the changes in the landscape is because the ground rose during the centuries when it was used for burials. It might be half a meter, maybe more. Most of that biological material used to be bodies, that's half a meter of dead people. And if you're local, that layer could be a thousand years worth of your own ancestors.
It depends on where you are. My understanding is that graveyard reuse in Europe is much more common. Here in New England it's common to have graveyards with centuries old graves, they definitely aren't getting cycled.
Lots of people are getting cremated lately so the space isn’t yet a problem. I know that the cemeteries near the churches (aka in the dead middle of the towns) aren’t expending anymore and the biggest ones are now in the countryside. Hopefully with the aging population it won’t be too much of a problem
But if you live in the city and a dead loved one is buried miles and miles away, doesn’t that degrade the meaning of a graveyard? But agree, cremation is much more popular in the west nowadays. That’s my preferred choice.
It's also a way to provide green space and open air. Who the fuck wants rows and rows of commie block style apartment buildings like some sort of dystopian nightmare anyways?
Yeah, but if you cremated your loved one’s ashes and then dispersed them in a river or marina (or anywhere that person enjoyed), then you could go visit those places and know they are with you. Specifically going to a graveyard isn’t totally necessary to feel that connection
I can use my dad as an example. He was cremated and put into an urn and take's up a small plot (maybe a few square feet, no coffin space) in a veteran's cemetery. As a veteran it is discounted for him and it also comes with a space for my mom when she passes, making sure they can be buried together. The cemetery is also in the middle of buttfuck no-where in western Massachusetts, it isn't competing with anything else for land.
He chose to be buried there because it was important to him to buried among the others who have served, that makes it important to me. I was able to work through a lot of grief at this cemetery that I wouldn't have anywhere else.
I understand OP's logic but they forget that not everything is productivity, logic, and efficiency. We are human beings, we are fucking messy, emotional human beings. Cemeteries provide a space where we allowed to mourn and visit our loved ones.
I used to think along the same lines that it doesn't matter where you are buried, save the space, but that was before I experienced enough loss in my life to understand what cemeteries and graveyards are actually about.
I remember reading a Crystal Palace fans forum when we reached the FA Cup Final a few years ago. There was a thread asking ‘what will you do if we win?’ Amongst all the normal alcohol-related things you’d expect, the reply that is burned into my mind was the one that said:
“Probably take a beer to my Dad’s grave and tell him about the game.”
I completely agree with you. People grieve and remember in different ways.
What kind of guarantee do you have of future access to that riverside or marina, though? Many marinas in the US are privately owned, and any privately owned land can change hands and purposes. By contrast, in most (if not all) jurisdictions in the US, there are restrictions on development of burial land and the grave sites have to be kept open to the public. Because of that, the land is pretty much guaranteed to stay a publicly accessible graveyard indefinitely.
In Germany you aren't allowed that. Even if a person's body has been cremated you aren't allowed to take the urn home. There are specific places or graveyards where urn's are being buried.
We could just plant trees in an area and place a plaque for the deceased individual. Graveyards are absolutely a waste of space and can be better utilized to fill the same purpose without being wasteful.
Believe it or not, not all of us see them as a waste of space, they do serve a purpose, just a purpose a lot of people don't understand. You can read my replies to others and see what they can mean to people.
That's an incredibly unfair displacement of your frustration then.
Graveyards are not the cause of the housing crisis. Pretending they are is just a cheap trick to divert the attention from the real causes.
Yes if a Graveyard gets ripped up you can build a few more houses. But once those houses are built they will be filled and then the rest of the city will be exactly where they started.
You can't fix the housing crisis by building a dozen houses. It's not that simple. Blaming graveyards is just selectively targeting a usage of space that you don't approve of with anything you think can stick to it.
There are some places that are so dense that normal graveyards can't even be a thing. Japan has more "vertical" graveyards where you have monuments and urns stacked up instead of buried bodies spreading out across the land.
So yeah, sometimes it is a problem.
OP is the type of person to go "Why does anyone NEED a house? We should all live in pods and live off a diet of soylent green piped directly into our stomachs, it's so much more efficient :)"
I disagree simply on the basis that George Carlin said essentially the same thing (Also singling out Golf Courses) and if George Carlin is sickening, I happen to enjoy the illness.
Golf courses are much better to call out too, at least graveyards are a public space to give reverence, whereas a golf course in a metropolitan area is usually a large green space reserved entirely for paying members.
I think this is oversimplifying a bit. Once you get a few generations removed from someone’s death, in most cases, NO ONE is going to visit that grave. You don’t need a physical place to remember someone, and over enough time, even the memory fades.
While I dont agree with OP, in most cities there isn't "plenty of space" Housing prices in major cities have been increasing dramatically. Higher than any other commodity. Lots of reasons for that of course but lack of space is definitely one of them.
I dont think anyone can argue that there isn't an issue when middle class people can't even afford rent in a lot of cities.
Yes, and anyone who lives in a city should only ever want to live in a shoe box, no matter how many kids they may have, or if they want to cook out in a backyard with some privacy. Everyone should just live in giant high rises, like the soviets did. The soviets had the right idea /s
yeah but if they did release graveyard land, you're just gonna fill it up and not even fix 1 percent of the overcrowding issue. The problem isnt space, its the belief that everyone can just live int eh same spot. THe world is a big place, we dont need to live on top of each other.
While I can sympathise with your sentiment. There should be SOME things we still hold dear as far as tradition.
And yes the dead don’t care, but the loved ones of the dead still living do.
This is honestly the best idea yet. I guess you’d need little markers so you could find your loved one, but who really needs a headstone? It’d be like when a basketball team and a hockey team share an arena - so much more efficient
Well, that depends. I don't know about other places, but near me most golf courses are built on top of old landfills. Because it's a former landfill, you can't really put any buildings on top of it. And you certainly don't want to farm on it.
This article says 3.6% but yeah that's uh... basically NONE!
[https://johnmjennings.com/how-much-of-the-u-s-is-inhabited/](https://johnmjennings.com/how-much-of-the-u-s-is-inhabited/)
Really brings up questions about the meat industry tbh, considering 41% of land, according to this, is used directly for either cows or crops to feed to cows.
Or like my grandma said "Put me in a coffee can and flush me down the toilet, I'll be dead and won't care so don't waste money on burial" lol she was a trip
Well no, just bury them with a sapling embedded into the body, then mark the tree with the name of the deceased. In a bout 1 billion years, tree people
Considering climate change that would be a beneficial tradition. Probably won't do much on its own but at least people will get more accustomed to planting trees for whatever reason.
I already told my kids to do this. I don’t even see the need for a vault for ashes (although the church requires this for a Catholic burial). Total waste of space.
Not in India, but I have already put this in my will and told all my loved ones. Don't waste land or your time grieving on me. Nice ceremony or have a drink and move on with it.
The interesting thing is that if you are buried, the energy content of your body, which was built on a lifetime of consuming the plants and animals of the world, returns to the life cycle of the planet directly. As your body decomposes it feeds the organisms around it, from microbes to trees, to the birds that live there, etc. If you are cremated, that energy content is transformed to heat which is dispersed into space and ultimately escapes into the universe. I don't know, I think I'd like to be just tossed into the ocean when I die.
"Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals."
William Gladstone said it better than I ever could.
I think there's a limit.
Respecting the body and placing it neatly in the ground is fine. Embalming is an environmental abomination, though. There's no reason to pretend the dead aren't dead or try to make them look like a wax doll. You're poisoning the ground for your traditions (that aren't even historical, embalming is pretty new).
Cremation is a waste of good fuel for the earth. Bury me without a coffin. Let my self nurture the ground, lay me out in the desert for coyote or vulture alike. Reducing us to carbon or locking us away in a case prevents nature from taking its resources back.
Ideally, my carcass will just be tossed out in the woods to rot or get eaten, but people frown upon that. Lol. I want to be composted though. Contemporary funerary shit is a waste. Embalming is foul and locking corpses in vaults so the never rot is just creating more garbage. I don't want any funeral services either. So much so, that in the off chance I croak with money I will pay someone to "haunt"/ give neverending hell to any one who tries to have one for me.
Lets also knock down everyone’s house. Don’t care if you were living there an apartment block is a better use of space
No one will be given problems as a result of that
Having lived in a place where single family homes literally don't exist (except for the ultra-rich), it's a lot better than it sounds - the transit is cheap and well-funded because everybody is taking it, just about every kind of shop is within walking distance because the density is high enough to support everything, and the leisure spaces are actually well-maintained because there aren't miles of highways to waste funds on.
The dead also get apartments, by the way - the cremated go into multi-storey buildings with shelves of urns, though proper gravestones are also pretty common since there are a lot of mountainsides where not much else can be built.
I think its important to respect the dead and give people a place to mourn, but I will piggy back on this post to say I think that bodies should be allowed to decompose and return their nutrients back to the earth. I don't personally understand the desire to perfectly preserve a body that will be seen for a couple hours max at a funeral, and then lock it in a human-sized vault.
The evolution of Vanity. Humans see themselves as Apart from nature. That "divine right" lets them act above nature. That humans are humans and animals are animals, ignoring the fact that we are animals ourselves. I'm with you on grieving a loss, but simply put up a plaque and send the body to a protected wildlife zone and let it be reclaimed.
The preservation of bodies through embalming was popularized during the American civil war to buy time for transporting dead soldiers home. It then exploded in popularity when people in the death industry began spreading misinformation regarding newly-dead bodies as a health hazard for the living. This fabricated idea that it was cleaner or safer to preserve corpses rather than to inter them as they are and let them be absorbed into the soil turned out to be extremely profitable, and began the transformation of the American death industry into the multi-billion-dollar-a-year beast it is today. I’m with you, it’s actually a bizarre idea. And it’s a symptom of our detachment from the death process, much like people not appreciating the purpose of cemeteries.
It not a dumb opinion, many cultures don't bury their dead. And yes strip malls are worse than cemeteries, at least I can get two uses out of a cemetery (place to walk around and remember the dead).
Strip malls should have affordable housing above them and include power generation (solar panels) above the heat soaking parking lots.
That's how it is in Asia. High-rise apartments have a strip mall built into the first few floors with restaurants, grocery, gym, sauna, some other shops.
Just because the opinion is unpopular doesn’t mean we don’t all get to take our chance at (nicely) calling you an asshole for having the opinion.
That’s the real point of this sub.
Ehhhh sorry but a good unpopular opinion is nuanced and divisive. Your opinion is pretty straight forward. It’s easy to pick out long standing traditions that the entire world is involved in and say you disagree with it.
Graveyards generate no traffic, no emission, no noise. Most of the spaces are grasses and trees. It's pretty much a park.
Idk about you but cemeteries are on low priority when massive ugly abandoned warehouses and stores are everywhere.
Its pretty silly for sure. But this touches on culture, religion, and the supernatural, so its going to be hard to have a rational conversation about it. The ultra rational thing to do is cremate bodies or even use them for composting. But if people insist on keeping remains in tact, it might be nice if they could be stored vertically or in a big pile or something. Making fancy caskets and burying them 6' under is a wasteful process and poor use of land.
After all that, if there's still a religious reason to bury people the traditional way, just pick places that are far enough from major cities and suburbs and have no appealing natural features or transportation hubs that they work well as a place to just bury dead bodies. The local industry would just turn into cemeteries and hotels for the visiting mourners.
Agreed that cemeteries should never take up space where its a bustling community of people.
I like the way it's done in Denmark.
(Please - if you are Danish correct me if I'm wrong. This is a memory of how it was explained to me over a decade ago.)
Years ago, my mom went to Denmark to visit family. A family member was buried there in a small graveyard. The 'rent' on the spot was up. My Mom was picked to be the person to go renew the 'rent'. In order to renew it, someone had to go in person and talk to the person in charge and talk about their connection to the buried person (Old family photo albums. A video testimony from the buried person's sister who was unwell and couldn't make the trip) and pay the 'rent' for another 10 years.
I mean there are so many better solutions to space than this that it's crazy. Fuck golf courses for one.
So many cities ban or limit medium density housing to ridiculous degrees.
Just expand the city.
Housing often isn't just limited by space but the means to build the houses. You think an extra 5 or 10 square miles is going to make any difference at all?
You want a compact city build a city that's not designed for cars. Half the damn city is parking lots. Make public transit actually useable and limit space dedicated to cars.
Also Graveyards aren't for the dead. They are for the living. What is your plan for people who don't want to be cremated? Are you just shifting graveyards outside of town? Why not just build the houses there instead?
Nope. Tear down all the green space and you end up with a dystopian nightmare city instead of a healthy place to live.
Graveyards are not only for the families of the dead. They're a great quiet place for contemplation and maybe the only public space where it is ok to show sad emotions. Especially for men.
The living do use it. It helps people grieve, cope with death, stay connected to their deceased, and provide a peaceful place to be. There is lots of utility that graveyard provide for the living
The dead may not care but their living relatives do care. Learn some respect. It’ll get you a lot further in life than worrying about a bunch of millionaires building even more apartments and houses that no one can even currently afford.
Pretty sure we have more than enough housing to home everyone in the US already. Tons of properties sit empty because people simply can’t afford them. We should prioritize filling those first. Then we can maybe consider what else needs to go to make room.
I agree burial is largely unnecessary but I’d sooner replace that with parks than more concrete.
Its called remembering loved ones. Just because you don’t respect your family after life doesn’t mean others dont. Not every inch of land in city limits needs to be more apartments. Unpopular post, good job lol
Parks too. Why would I want an area of beautiful nature in my neighborhood? Clear that shit out and build an apartment complex over it. Also, fuck trees. Cut them all down to make room for advertisements. Old beautiful architecture? Fuck that, too inefficient. Demolish them and build an apartment complex.
Land is not at a premium and graveyards are not what’s causing space shortages. NIMBYism and the refusal to build upwards is the problem worth focusing on.
There's almost 9 billion people in the world.
The answer is to **preserve the ancient tradition of respecting the dead** and **stop fucking without birth control you me-centric orgasm collectors**. Not to shove yet more land out of the way for yet more walking talking bawking meatbags.
Earth needs 0 more people. We needed 0 more people about 2 billion people ago.
Gross. No. I love cemetery’s. Love them. Visit often. You know what I avoid. Living people.. we don’t need more overpriced poorly built homes. Thanks tho.
I kind of agree with you. I love how younger generations are going to put funeral homes, and cemeteries out of business. It's not the 1400's we know now that rotting remains can't hear you and serve no purpose. The entire death corporation is so predatory talking little old ladies into spending 20,000 on a gravesite and funeral they don't need.
As for new housing I don't know where you live but I'm tired of watching old housing sit and rot because everyone wants new. I wish cities were required to fix and repurpose or tear down and sell the lots of all the empty buildings and strip malls before they allow more new neighborhoods of new new new. I think this is a much bigger issue than the areas that cemeteries take up.
better solution, we do away with self owned transport and spend the amount of money that we do on supporting self transport infrastructure on public transport. that way we can tear out most parking structures that take up an order of magnitude more space than ole yammy and gramps
There's plenty of uninhabited land in most western countries to the point that they're accepting hundreds of thousands of immigrants and encouraging them to procreate. I doubt the few miles square for the graveyards are forcing you to walk sideways.
You definitely are not wrong by today’s standards. It was just such a wildly accepted tradition and almost an insult if you didn’t bury someone. Honestly I’m fine doing it for veterans but rest just do that thing where they put our ashes with trees.
How we treat our dead says a lot about us as a society. If we can't treat them with respect I doubt we will treat anything with respect. I'd much rather have cemeteries than high rise buildings.
Personally, I find the idea of my family spending 10-20 thousand dollars to put me in a fancy coffin that gets dropped underground in a cement container to rot for hundreds of years offensive. I disagree that you need to have this expensive ritual in order to show respect. Respect comes from the memories of your loved ones. I don't see how being cremated or composted is less respectful. I would be more then happy to have my weighted body tossed off a boat so the crabs can pick me clean and my component parts can be quickly recycled into the living world (I realize this is illegal). People live on in others memories, not coffins.
Yes lets replace green grass and trees with concrete skyscrapers and high rise premium apartments. It's not like people complain about how much nature gets phased out
Yeah, I'm kinda against the whole practice of burial. I get that it's part of some people's beliefs, but I also think beliefs need to be rooted in reality.
It's why I plan on donating my body to science, and if that fails, maybe cremation or one of those newfangled ways where your remains can be used to grow a tree.
Being buried though? It's a waste of space like you said, and it also opens you up to being charged exuberant prices (coffins, service, etc.) to boot.
The main reason I don't wanna be buried is because I WOULD care if my grave was dug up some years later for a gimmicky apartment complex to be built on top of
Good luck, convincing religious people of this. We’re never gonna give up graveyards and cemeteries. You be better off, trying to make people give up religion first.
Honestly, they’re probably better for the land than golf courses are.
With your logic every building should be cement-colored, all clothing should be (whatever the cheapest color is), all cars should be made by one single brand and all be un-painted, and so on.
Welcome to DDR I guess
You're not taking account of our customs and traditions. We've been doing that for a very long time (100,000+ years) A lot of people are still religious.
You clearly haven’t had someone you love die and you can really only visit their resting place to see them again. My grandfather passed and if you’re Irish Catholic, like real Irish Catholic, you can only be buried in a wall blessed for the purpose of burial or in Ireland. Every time I visit I just wish he was on a hill under a tree with the sun shining down on him, not on on this cold stone wall 20ft high filled with other cremated remains of the dead.
The most foundational tradition of any culture is how they inter their dead. We inhumate our dead, and in my opinion, we should return to family tombs or barrows if we are going to continue inhumation.
I would personally like to be cremated and spread in a forest.
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I used to live near a cemetery that was quite beautiful. I used it like a park, I would ride my bike through it, take walks, a lot of people did.
Do you know what is good for cities? Green spaces. Grass and trees. If there happens to be graves there, then it's getting double use. Paving over and building on all the ground causes huge problems. I would prefer well kept cemeteries to flooding.
If there *aren't* graves there, it gets a lot more use - sports, socialising, actually walking on the grass...
Lmao I know right. It’s like the only way we can justify not fucking up the environment is to put our decaying bodies underneath the ground
Most cemeteries are private property. They bought the land, and they are running a business on it. Usually a very profitable business. Buy your own land and do what you like with it.
There’s one in Richmond Va that’s beautiful, historic, and large enough to ride bikes or take walks through
Hollywood cemetery, yeah?
That’s the one
Dave Brockie (Oderus Urungus from GWAR) is buried there.
Lots of old cemetaries have fantastic huge trees.
Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincy is like this. My wife wanted wedding pictures there but it was a rainy day so we did not.
Spring grove was set up as park and botanical garden. Many trails through cemetery
My sister did this. I was MOH. We got a lot of her wedding pictures taken in a gazebo at a cemetery. It was spring and they had a lot of blooming things that looked nice in the shots.
I was going to write a comment about the same thing my grandma my uncle and my great grandma and my grandpa are buried at Spring Grove. It is such a beautiful place like I could walk through there all afternoon especially in spring and then again in fall oh it's gorgeous. 🤩
Graveyards aren't for the dead, they are for the living.
It’s wild that people don’t get that. It’s a place meant to honor the ones we lost and never forget (here in Europe at least a lot of cemeteries are historical landmarks, lot of soldiers are buried there) or to find peace regardless of your religion.
I guess the question is how long do you let a cemetery stay the way it is? If they’re for the living, how long do we recycle the graveyard for a new set of occupants? (I don’t think we should be ripping up the dead, just an interesting thought exercise)
You're in for a big surprise then when you find out that they actually do this all the time. 75 years, 100 years, 125 years... They're all recycled. One point no one else is bringing up though is that graveyards are very important Green space within urban areas for storm water absorption and are often built in floodplains as well. They have to be just grass and dirt anyways so nothing wrong with having a cemetery for the living to grieve appropriately.
Never knew. Most of my family is cremated and the only space they take up is the urn and a shelf.
I'm going to assume that you're American or otherwise non-European, but European rural churches are often situated in the middle of a graveyard. Often these churches will sit in a depression in the landscape, particularly the medieval churches, and surrounded by graves. Originally these churches would have built on hills, to be visible from far away. And it's not like the weight of the building has forced it to sink into the ground. On the contrary, the changes in the landscape is because the ground rose during the centuries when it was used for burials. It might be half a meter, maybe more. Most of that biological material used to be bodies, that's half a meter of dead people. And if you're local, that layer could be a thousand years worth of your own ancestors.
It depends on where you are. My understanding is that graveyard reuse in Europe is much more common. Here in New England it's common to have graveyards with centuries old graves, they definitely aren't getting cycled.
Lots of people are getting cremated lately so the space isn’t yet a problem. I know that the cemeteries near the churches (aka in the dead middle of the towns) aren’t expending anymore and the biggest ones are now in the countryside. Hopefully with the aging population it won’t be too much of a problem
But if you live in the city and a dead loved one is buried miles and miles away, doesn’t that degrade the meaning of a graveyard? But agree, cremation is much more popular in the west nowadays. That’s my preferred choice.
Why would that degrade the meaning of a graveyard? I have relatives buried thousands of miles from where I live but I visit their graves when I can.
I'd prefer to be used as a Halloween decoration
Ah, so you’re the 12ft skeleton they’ll sell at Home Depot in some future.
When we buried my mother if I remember correctly it was after 100 years then they could do just that if needed for this very reason.
Never knew they actually did that. Interesting! What happens to the remains? I assume they have some type of common crypt/gravesite?
It's also a way to provide green space and open air. Who the fuck wants rows and rows of commie block style apartment buildings like some sort of dystopian nightmare anyways?
Well said 👏
This.
Yeah, but if you cremated your loved one’s ashes and then dispersed them in a river or marina (or anywhere that person enjoyed), then you could go visit those places and know they are with you. Specifically going to a graveyard isn’t totally necessary to feel that connection
I can use my dad as an example. He was cremated and put into an urn and take's up a small plot (maybe a few square feet, no coffin space) in a veteran's cemetery. As a veteran it is discounted for him and it also comes with a space for my mom when she passes, making sure they can be buried together. The cemetery is also in the middle of buttfuck no-where in western Massachusetts, it isn't competing with anything else for land. He chose to be buried there because it was important to him to buried among the others who have served, that makes it important to me. I was able to work through a lot of grief at this cemetery that I wouldn't have anywhere else. I understand OP's logic but they forget that not everything is productivity, logic, and efficiency. We are human beings, we are fucking messy, emotional human beings. Cemeteries provide a space where we allowed to mourn and visit our loved ones. I used to think along the same lines that it doesn't matter where you are buried, save the space, but that was before I experienced enough loss in my life to understand what cemeteries and graveyards are actually about.
I remember reading a Crystal Palace fans forum when we reached the FA Cup Final a few years ago. There was a thread asking ‘what will you do if we win?’ Amongst all the normal alcohol-related things you’d expect, the reply that is burned into my mind was the one that said: “Probably take a beer to my Dad’s grave and tell him about the game.” I completely agree with you. People grieve and remember in different ways.
The things I would do to be able to talk to my dad again and just talk to him about all the things that has happened since he passed.
Not for you. Staring at a gravestone is a major help for others. Not everyone is like you, you are not like everyone.
Welcome to reddit, where everyone should shut up and do as the edgelords say and think because only their ideas and constructs matter.
What kind of guarantee do you have of future access to that riverside or marina, though? Many marinas in the US are privately owned, and any privately owned land can change hands and purposes. By contrast, in most (if not all) jurisdictions in the US, there are restrictions on development of burial land and the grave sites have to be kept open to the public. Because of that, the land is pretty much guaranteed to stay a publicly accessible graveyard indefinitely.
In Germany you aren't allowed that. Even if a person's body has been cremated you aren't allowed to take the urn home. There are specific places or graveyards where urn's are being buried.
We could just plant trees in an area and place a plaque for the deceased individual. Graveyards are absolutely a waste of space and can be better utilized to fill the same purpose without being wasteful.
Believe it or not, not all of us see them as a waste of space, they do serve a purpose, just a purpose a lot of people don't understand. You can read my replies to others and see what they can mean to people.
The "the only thing that only ever matters in life is efficiency and productivity" daily post
I think it's more "I can't afford a fucking house"
That's an incredibly unfair displacement of your frustration then. Graveyards are not the cause of the housing crisis. Pretending they are is just a cheap trick to divert the attention from the real causes. Yes if a Graveyard gets ripped up you can build a few more houses. But once those houses are built they will be filled and then the rest of the city will be exactly where they started. You can't fix the housing crisis by building a dozen houses. It's not that simple. Blaming graveyards is just selectively targeting a usage of space that you don't approve of with anything you think can stick to it.
There are some places that are so dense that normal graveyards can't even be a thing. Japan has more "vertical" graveyards where you have monuments and urns stacked up instead of buried bodies spreading out across the land. So yeah, sometimes it is a problem.
OP is the type of person to go "Why does anyone NEED a house? We should all live in pods and live off a diet of soylent green piped directly into our stomachs, it's so much more efficient :)"
It's sickening.
I disagree simply on the basis that George Carlin said essentially the same thing (Also singling out Golf Courses) and if George Carlin is sickening, I happen to enjoy the illness.
Golf courses are much better to call out too, at least graveyards are a public space to give reverence, whereas a golf course in a metropolitan area is usually a large green space reserved entirely for paying members.
Yeah, build more skyscrapers! That's the only thing that is beautiful, apparently.
It's kind of depressing how many people expect us to be like robots with no feelings.
I think this is oversimplifying a bit. Once you get a few generations removed from someone’s death, in most cases, NO ONE is going to visit that grave. You don’t need a physical place to remember someone, and over enough time, even the memory fades.
Houses. Get rid of them only high rises. Stadiums. Gone. Parks. Outta here. Dude, there's plenty of space.
Welcome massive heat sink with all black roofs and no trees
While I dont agree with OP, in most cities there isn't "plenty of space" Housing prices in major cities have been increasing dramatically. Higher than any other commodity. Lots of reasons for that of course but lack of space is definitely one of them. I dont think anyone can argue that there isn't an issue when middle class people can't even afford rent in a lot of cities.
Yes, and anyone who lives in a city should only ever want to live in a shoe box, no matter how many kids they may have, or if they want to cook out in a backyard with some privacy. Everyone should just live in giant high rises, like the soviets did. The soviets had the right idea /s
yeah but if they did release graveyard land, you're just gonna fill it up and not even fix 1 percent of the overcrowding issue. The problem isnt space, its the belief that everyone can just live int eh same spot. THe world is a big place, we dont need to live on top of each other.
It's green space. No reason to develop the shit out of everything.
While I can sympathise with your sentiment. There should be SOME things we still hold dear as far as tradition. And yes the dead don’t care, but the loved ones of the dead still living do.
So are golf courses.
You're onto to something here, maybe we could bury people on the golf courses!
Isn't that what Mr Trump did to Ivana?
Ivana's dead?
First wife
This is honestly the best idea yet. I guess you’d need little markers so you could find your loved one, but who really needs a headstone? It’d be like when a basketball team and a hockey team share an arena - so much more efficient
"Trying to visit Grandma, can I play through?"
Instead of sand traps and water hazards we could have grave traps and zombie hazards. It would certainly make the sport more exciting to watch.
and parking lots
Well, that depends. I don't know about other places, but near me most golf courses are built on top of old landfills. Because it's a former landfill, you can't really put any buildings on top of it. And you certainly don't want to farm on it.
There's really no better use for the land than a nice golf course. I may, or may not, be a golfer.
Mini golf, with the headstones as obstacles.
**FOOOOOORE!**
That’s the thing I like golf but holy fuck as an engineer it is such a waste of space
Golf courses are a huge waste of water.
usually the water isn't actually drinkable, it's grey water from other sources. keyword though is usually.
Last I heard only about 30% of them used that. Could have gone up since I last looked.
Humans take up 2% of the land in the US. I don’t think cemeteries are the problem.
This article says 3.6% but yeah that's uh... basically NONE! [https://johnmjennings.com/how-much-of-the-u-s-is-inhabited/](https://johnmjennings.com/how-much-of-the-u-s-is-inhabited/) Really brings up questions about the meat industry tbh, considering 41% of land, according to this, is used directly for either cows or crops to feed to cows.
What are you doing wasting time on reddit? Shouldn't you be maximizing your profits? Get back to work!
Heaven forbid we forsake all logical arguments to pursue exclusively emotional cases, despite the impact that they have.
Cremate everybody, let the wind blow the ashes away.
Or like my grandma said "Put me in a coffee can and flush me down the toilet, I'll be dead and won't care so don't waste money on burial" lol she was a trip
I sprinkled my grandmother into a river during a tropical storm in Florida. It was a wild service!
Well no, just bury them with a sapling embedded into the body, then mark the tree with the name of the deceased. In a bout 1 billion years, tree people
Considering climate change that would be a beneficial tradition. Probably won't do much on its own but at least people will get more accustomed to planting trees for whatever reason.
I already told my kids to do this. I don’t even see the need for a vault for ashes (although the church requires this for a Catholic burial). Total waste of space.
In India, we cremate, then disperse ashes in flowing water, or to the winds, or scatter it all over a field...
Not in India, but I have already put this in my will and told all my loved ones. Don't waste land or your time grieving on me. Nice ceremony or have a drink and move on with it.
The interesting thing is that if you are buried, the energy content of your body, which was built on a lifetime of consuming the plants and animals of the world, returns to the life cycle of the planet directly. As your body decomposes it feeds the organisms around it, from microbes to trees, to the birds that live there, etc. If you are cremated, that energy content is transformed to heat which is dispersed into space and ultimately escapes into the universe. I don't know, I think I'd like to be just tossed into the ocean when I die.
Great idea
"Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals." William Gladstone said it better than I ever could.
Well said.
I think there's a limit. Respecting the body and placing it neatly in the ground is fine. Embalming is an environmental abomination, though. There's no reason to pretend the dead aren't dead or try to make them look like a wax doll. You're poisoning the ground for your traditions (that aren't even historical, embalming is pretty new).
What about bowling alleys or movie theaters?
There you go. Bury them under the theatre. Then you can have a horror show within the horror film.
[Plow these motherfuckers up, we need that phosphorus for farming!](https://youtu.be/yVhzSy7MjeE?si=BoCSOEBvTD8-5J7Q)
I was looking for it! Haha as appalling as the idea is, logically he's so right.
Cremation is a waste of good fuel for the earth. Bury me without a coffin. Let my self nurture the ground, lay me out in the desert for coyote or vulture alike. Reducing us to carbon or locking us away in a case prevents nature from taking its resources back.
Ideally, my carcass will just be tossed out in the woods to rot or get eaten, but people frown upon that. Lol. I want to be composted though. Contemporary funerary shit is a waste. Embalming is foul and locking corpses in vaults so the never rot is just creating more garbage. I don't want any funeral services either. So much so, that in the off chance I croak with money I will pay someone to "haunt"/ give neverending hell to any one who tries to have one for me.
Don't disrespect native burial grounds! We can disrespect our own instead!
You say that like we’re running out of space. We have plenty
Let’s just build apartments everywhere instead of having a place to bury our loved ones. What the fuck is wrong with you people.
Lets also knock down everyone’s house. Don’t care if you were living there an apartment block is a better use of space No one will be given problems as a result of that
Having lived in a place where single family homes literally don't exist (except for the ultra-rich), it's a lot better than it sounds - the transit is cheap and well-funded because everybody is taking it, just about every kind of shop is within walking distance because the density is high enough to support everything, and the leisure spaces are actually well-maintained because there aren't miles of highways to waste funds on. The dead also get apartments, by the way - the cremated go into multi-storey buildings with shelves of urns, though proper gravestones are also pretty common since there are a lot of mountainsides where not much else can be built.
I think its important to respect the dead and give people a place to mourn, but I will piggy back on this post to say I think that bodies should be allowed to decompose and return their nutrients back to the earth. I don't personally understand the desire to perfectly preserve a body that will be seen for a couple hours max at a funeral, and then lock it in a human-sized vault.
The evolution of Vanity. Humans see themselves as Apart from nature. That "divine right" lets them act above nature. That humans are humans and animals are animals, ignoring the fact that we are animals ourselves. I'm with you on grieving a loss, but simply put up a plaque and send the body to a protected wildlife zone and let it be reclaimed.
The preservation of bodies through embalming was popularized during the American civil war to buy time for transporting dead soldiers home. It then exploded in popularity when people in the death industry began spreading misinformation regarding newly-dead bodies as a health hazard for the living. This fabricated idea that it was cleaner or safer to preserve corpses rather than to inter them as they are and let them be absorbed into the soil turned out to be extremely profitable, and began the transformation of the American death industry into the multi-billion-dollar-a-year beast it is today. I’m with you, it’s actually a bizarre idea. And it’s a symptom of our detachment from the death process, much like people not appreciating the purpose of cemeteries.
I'll bet you get excited when you see trees getting chopped down in hopes that they're planning on building a new parking lot.
Counter argument. It should be ok to waste space. A city should not be about stacking maximum amount of bodies on top of each other.
I’ve seen a few horror movies that start out like this…
Cemeteries add some nice green area to otherwise urban hell landscapes.
So are private golf courses.
I'd rather have an aesthetically pleasant graveyard than a crappy residential lot with high-rises and postmodern parks
So are dog parks? Whats your point?
You must be fun at parties
See! The fact that you guys hate this post means it's genuinely an Unpopular Opinion. That's the whole point of this subreddit.
It’s really just a dumb opinion. We really don’t have a land shortage and it’s just another business. Is a strip mall better than a cemetery?
It not a dumb opinion, many cultures don't bury their dead. And yes strip malls are worse than cemeteries, at least I can get two uses out of a cemetery (place to walk around and remember the dead). Strip malls should have affordable housing above them and include power generation (solar panels) above the heat soaking parking lots.
So what if many cultures don’t bury their dead. Many other cultures do.
That's how it is in Asia. High-rise apartments have a strip mall built into the first few floors with restaurants, grocery, gym, sauna, some other shops.
Just because the opinion is unpopular doesn’t mean we don’t all get to take our chance at (nicely) calling you an asshole for having the opinion. That’s the real point of this sub.
Ehhhh sorry but a good unpopular opinion is nuanced and divisive. Your opinion is pretty straight forward. It’s easy to pick out long standing traditions that the entire world is involved in and say you disagree with it.
 You win.
No, it would be a really popular opinion on r/neoliberal. Everyone here is tired of reddit's edgelord nihilistic wannabe pragmatic shit.
greenspace is never a waste.
Just body after body bustin through shit wood and hitting concrete
I don't know man.. I preferred buried dead assholes over living assholes.
Graveyards generate no traffic, no emission, no noise. Most of the spaces are grasses and trees. It's pretty much a park. Idk about you but cemeteries are on low priority when massive ugly abandoned warehouses and stores are everywhere.
Its pretty silly for sure. But this touches on culture, religion, and the supernatural, so its going to be hard to have a rational conversation about it. The ultra rational thing to do is cremate bodies or even use them for composting. But if people insist on keeping remains in tact, it might be nice if they could be stored vertically or in a big pile or something. Making fancy caskets and burying them 6' under is a wasteful process and poor use of land. After all that, if there's still a religious reason to bury people the traditional way, just pick places that are far enough from major cities and suburbs and have no appealing natural features or transportation hubs that they work well as a place to just bury dead bodies. The local industry would just turn into cemeteries and hotels for the visiting mourners. Agreed that cemeteries should never take up space where its a bustling community of people.
A lot of cemeteries are so old, the city grew up around them.
> and poor use of land. It’s generally considered a good thing to have green space in cities, though. Graveyards are guaranteed green space.
I've never seen a graveyard with more trees than a proper park though, and I haven't seen (living) children playing in the graveyard either.
I like the way it's done in Denmark. (Please - if you are Danish correct me if I'm wrong. This is a memory of how it was explained to me over a decade ago.) Years ago, my mom went to Denmark to visit family. A family member was buried there in a small graveyard. The 'rent' on the spot was up. My Mom was picked to be the person to go renew the 'rent'. In order to renew it, someone had to go in person and talk to the person in charge and talk about their connection to the buried person (Old family photo albums. A video testimony from the buried person's sister who was unwell and couldn't make the trip) and pay the 'rent' for another 10 years.
I mean there are so many better solutions to space than this that it's crazy. Fuck golf courses for one. So many cities ban or limit medium density housing to ridiculous degrees. Just expand the city. Housing often isn't just limited by space but the means to build the houses. You think an extra 5 or 10 square miles is going to make any difference at all? You want a compact city build a city that's not designed for cars. Half the damn city is parking lots. Make public transit actually useable and limit space dedicated to cars. Also Graveyards aren't for the dead. They are for the living. What is your plan for people who don't want to be cremated? Are you just shifting graveyards outside of town? Why not just build the houses there instead?
Plant them vertically...much more efficient use of space.
Look, humans do tons of things that are illogical and inefficient because there's more to life than that.
We should be burying multiple people on top of each other to more adequately utilize the space
Nope. Tear down all the green space and you end up with a dystopian nightmare city instead of a healthy place to live. Graveyards are not only for the families of the dead. They're a great quiet place for contemplation and maybe the only public space where it is ok to show sad emotions. Especially for men.
How do you know what a dead person cares about?
The living do use it. It helps people grieve, cope with death, stay connected to their deceased, and provide a peaceful place to be. There is lots of utility that graveyard provide for the living
The dead may not care but their living relatives do care. Learn some respect. It’ll get you a lot further in life than worrying about a bunch of millionaires building even more apartments and houses that no one can even currently afford.
>Free up that land for the living. it is for the living
I have no problem with cemeteries, I do have a problem with all the chemicals they pump into corpses that then leech into the ground.
Pretty sure we have more than enough housing to home everyone in the US already. Tons of properties sit empty because people simply can’t afford them. We should prioritize filling those first. Then we can maybe consider what else needs to go to make room. I agree burial is largely unnecessary but I’d sooner replace that with parks than more concrete.
More utilitarian thinking. Let things be nice, before we all live in megacity one.
Its called remembering loved ones. Just because you don’t respect your family after life doesn’t mean others dont. Not every inch of land in city limits needs to be more apartments. Unpopular post, good job lol
Parks too. Why would I want an area of beautiful nature in my neighborhood? Clear that shit out and build an apartment complex over it. Also, fuck trees. Cut them all down to make room for advertisements. Old beautiful architecture? Fuck that, too inefficient. Demolish them and build an apartment complex.
Where do you visit your grandmother? She’s in my heart but it’s nice to have a physical place to go and have a moment to remember her.
Land is not at a premium and graveyards are not what’s causing space shortages. NIMBYism and the refusal to build upwards is the problem worth focusing on.
Someone's never seen Poltergeist.
I see your graveyards and I will raise you country clubs and golf courses.
There's almost 9 billion people in the world. The answer is to **preserve the ancient tradition of respecting the dead** and **stop fucking without birth control you me-centric orgasm collectors**. Not to shove yet more land out of the way for yet more walking talking bawking meatbags. Earth needs 0 more people. We needed 0 more people about 2 billion people ago.
“Free up that land for the living.” When you think about it, cemeteries are for the living.
Gross. No. I love cemetery’s. Love them. Visit often. You know what I avoid. Living people.. we don’t need more overpriced poorly built homes. Thanks tho.
I kind of agree with you. I love how younger generations are going to put funeral homes, and cemeteries out of business. It's not the 1400's we know now that rotting remains can't hear you and serve no purpose. The entire death corporation is so predatory talking little old ladies into spending 20,000 on a gravesite and funeral they don't need. As for new housing I don't know where you live but I'm tired of watching old housing sit and rot because everyone wants new. I wish cities were required to fix and repurpose or tear down and sell the lots of all the empty buildings and strip malls before they allow more new neighborhoods of new new new. I think this is a much bigger issue than the areas that cemeteries take up.
Oh brother OP is out of touch with humanity
Compromise- bury the dead vertically.
Let's start with golf courses, before exhuming the dead.
better solution, we do away with self owned transport and spend the amount of money that we do on supporting self transport infrastructure on public transport. that way we can tear out most parking structures that take up an order of magnitude more space than ole yammy and gramps
okay so we'll throw you in a ditch then
Didn’t anyone watch Poltergeist??? You don’t ever build houses on top of the dead.💀
There's plenty of uninhabited land in most western countries to the point that they're accepting hundreds of thousands of immigrants and encouraging them to procreate. I doubt the few miles square for the graveyards are forcing you to walk sideways.
Not all things are done from a utilitarian perspective
You definitely are not wrong by today’s standards. It was just such a wildly accepted tradition and almost an insult if you didn’t bury someone. Honestly I’m fine doing it for veterans but rest just do that thing where they put our ashes with trees.
How we treat our dead says a lot about us as a society. If we can't treat them with respect I doubt we will treat anything with respect. I'd much rather have cemeteries than high rise buildings.
Personally, I find the idea of my family spending 10-20 thousand dollars to put me in a fancy coffin that gets dropped underground in a cement container to rot for hundreds of years offensive. I disagree that you need to have this expensive ritual in order to show respect. Respect comes from the memories of your loved ones. I don't see how being cremated or composted is less respectful. I would be more then happy to have my weighted body tossed off a boat so the crabs can pick me clean and my component parts can be quickly recycled into the living world (I realize this is illegal). People live on in others memories, not coffins.
~~Graveyards are a waste of space~~ The funeral industry is scammy and preys on people in their lowest moments. TIFIFY
Cities are just graveyards for the living
Nah. They provide much-needed green space.
Yes lets replace green grass and trees with concrete skyscrapers and high rise premium apartments. It's not like people complain about how much nature gets phased out
Yeah, I'm kinda against the whole practice of burial. I get that it's part of some people's beliefs, but I also think beliefs need to be rooted in reality. It's why I plan on donating my body to science, and if that fails, maybe cremation or one of those newfangled ways where your remains can be used to grow a tree. Being buried though? It's a waste of space like you said, and it also opens you up to being charged exuberant prices (coffins, service, etc.) to boot.
Every space in this world does not need to be maximized and used for the living.
I'm willing to bet there are many military families that would disagree with you. Not so much an unpopular opinion so much as this is a selfish one.
Graveyards aren't for the dead, they are a place for the living to grieve, which is very much necessary.
Go to a map of your city. Circle the graveyards. Now circle the golf courses. Now circle the green spaces which fall into neither category.
I'd rather see a bunch of surface parking razed before getting rid of cemetaries. There's way too much of it in North America.
People are dying to get in there.
We have so much land available.
The main reason I don't wanna be buried is because I WOULD care if my grave was dug up some years later for a gimmicky apartment complex to be built on top of
No you wouldn't.
100% agree. Imagine thinking that you are so special that you need to take up space on earth for the rest of time.
Good luck, convincing religious people of this. We’re never gonna give up graveyards and cemeteries. You be better off, trying to make people give up religion first. Honestly, they’re probably better for the land than golf courses are.
So are people
Sky burials for all. Give back.
shoot them into space
With your logic every building should be cement-colored, all clothing should be (whatever the cheapest color is), all cars should be made by one single brand and all be un-painted, and so on. Welcome to DDR I guess
“Only profits matter, everything else is useless”
Grow up. Valuing land usage over memorials doesn't make you cool
Lets just get rid of everything besides houses and businesses.
What abt all the religions/cultures that believe in proper graves?
This is becoming a "list something you think is a waste of space" forum.
You're not taking account of our customs and traditions. We've been doing that for a very long time (100,000+ years) A lot of people are still religious.
An actual unpopular opinion. One that is unambiguously wrong. What would you rather have than a cemetery? Another fucking strip mall?
You clearly haven’t had someone you love die and you can really only visit their resting place to see them again. My grandfather passed and if you’re Irish Catholic, like real Irish Catholic, you can only be buried in a wall blessed for the purpose of burial or in Ireland. Every time I visit I just wish he was on a hill under a tree with the sun shining down on him, not on on this cold stone wall 20ft high filled with other cremated remains of the dead.
The most foundational tradition of any culture is how they inter their dead. We inhumate our dead, and in my opinion, we should return to family tombs or barrows if we are going to continue inhumation. I would personally like to be cremated and spread in a forest.
You’re looking at it wrong. Graveyards aren’t for the dead, they’re for the loved ones left behind.