Simple, for externalities, you directly charge for the externality.
All these stop-gap "it costs carbon, so we must make it last 50 years" is like placing massive `if-then-else` statements throughout your codebase and then being surprised when the emergent behaviour of your program somehow results in uglier, more carbon polluting, sicker buildings that are now 100 years old and imposing massive costs on society around them.
What hubris for a landowner to assume there will be a need for a building 1000 years hence.
Buildings aren’t usually demolished and replaced because they are dilapidated; rather, it’s because the new owner has a different need (and a different aesthetic.)
A building that takes 1000 to crumble is just as a much a blight — maybe more — as a plastic bottle that takes 10,000 years to crumble.
I see two arguments against:
1. Future buildings will be so much better for the environment that increasing costs today for long lasting buildings or having to wait longer for environmentally better buildings is a net negative
2. Old buildings are typically not useful and so we shouldn’t encourage a future full of them (examples: smaller houses in city centres function ok but aren’t well insulated and could reduce total environmental costs of the city if they were replaced with more dense accommodation; many old churches see little use; many old buildings or rooms of them are no longer fit for any efficient purpose and so are wasting resources, eg banks with lots of space for tellers/vaults/deposit boxes or stock exchanges with big trading pits or warehouses which cannot be converted or even the rooms above shops which often seem to be disused. I have also seen other places where good use is still made of old buildings (typically long lived institutions like schools or societies or universities) though perhaps not as efficient use as might be possible. Obviously there are other cultural arguments for keeping old buildings around (but sometimes I worry regulations enforcing this can be too prohibitive, eg freezing an old building that has been changing slowly over many years at the point it becomes protected).
Japanese loathe “second hand” stuff if they can avoid it. This includes property. The service life for buildings is 47 to 50 years or so, for depreciation purposes.
Totally unrelated, but I love that 1000 year old wooden temples get rebuilt every 20 years or so[2] because of the religious idea of renewal.
[1] https://japanpropertycentral.com/2012/06/what-is-the-lifespa...
That doesn't tell you much: in the US the lifetime of a residential rental building is 27.5 years for depreciation purposes, and 39 for non-residential: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p946
My 95 year old brick house would beg to differ on utility of old buildings. My prior house was over 230 years old and provided 14 years of excellent utility to me.
"A recent innovation in the Japanese real estate industry to promote home ownership is the creation of a 100-year mortgage term. The home, encumbered by the mortgage, becomes an ancestral property and is passed on from grandparent to grandchild in a multigenerational fashion. We analyze the implications of this innovative practice, contrast it with the conventional 30-year mortgage popular in Western nations and explore its unique benefits and limitations within the Japanese economic and cultural framework." The 100-year Japanese residential mortgage: An examination (1995) (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/106195....)
[1]https://www.thelocal.se/20160324/sweden-limits-mortgage-loan...
I contend that buildings, with a few exceptions, are consumables. Whether wise or not, humans like to build new things, customizable to their own tastes.
An office building that lasts ‘only’ 50 years instead of 500 shouldn’t be surprising. In 50 years time, for most buildings, even if it could last another few decades, it will be torn down and replaced. That’s just what humans do. States differently, even if everyone at the time knew concrete/rebar would only last 50 years and not the 1000+ years, it wouldn’t have made a difference, for nobody — short of a Pharaoh — has any interest in such a permanent structure. Cities come and go, buildings come and go, rivers and shorelines change, etc. it’s not reasonable to assume the desirable center of activity (either residential or commercial) in which one builds will even be there 50 years hence. So why worry about how long the building will last?