(Physiological density is close to what I’m after, and if you tweak the definition of ‘arable’ it might actually be it, but I don’t think it really is as it stands.)
I live in the West, the region where the cattle are cattle, the people are bored, and the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service own 76.1% of Nevada. Admittedly, this is land nobody cares about, but it seems a bit dishonest to use it in figuring Nevada’s population density since, to a first approximation, nobody can live on the land the BLM et al. owns. Ditto military bases, proving grounds, and whatever other land the government claims as its own. It all might as well be underwater as far as the real estate market is concerned.
This kinda bugs me. So my question: Does anyone bother to compute population density using only the land it is physically and legally possible to live on?
I don’t know that’s a good idea because people do live on government land.
Members of the military often live on military bases, there are inholdings within National Park or National Forest lands that people live on, etc.
I would think zoning would muddle the issue of “legal to live on” somewhat. These days, even most rural counties have some sort of zoning laws. In general, if you’re out in the boonies, you can put up a single farmhouse or something similar without much trouble, but you can’t convert your farmland into tract housing without the government getting involved. For your purposes, you’d have to come up with some way of estimating if a particular chunk of land is likely to be granted residential zoning or not should someone try to develop it.
For that matter, public ownership isn’t a 100% block to living on land either. Especially with BLM land, the federal government sells or swaps chunks of land all the time. If a chunk of land has no special protection status, the feds and states usually have no problem selling pieces of their land if a town is expanding out into it. The BLM has actually made quite a lot of money selling land on the fringes of the Las Vegas metro area. As far as BLM land is concerned, for the most part the situation is that it’s owned by the government because no one wants to live on it, not that nobody can live on it because it’s owned by the government.
Interesting responses. I suppose I should have taken zoning more into consideration than whether the land was owned by the government.
My original question stands, though.