I have observed flying over the US, that there are seemingly endless swaths of… nothing. No signs of any human development whatsoever.
I’m going to keep “developable” opened ended. Basically land that could be used for something and isn’t currently. Whether it be human habitation, farming, windfarms, solar, whatever.
I always think it’s interesting when people say ‘nothing’ to mean ‘no human buildings’.
Millions of species are using that land. If you looked harder, you’d find humans using it too.
I don’t just mean human buildings, but I am speaking of human development, not animal development, if that’s even a thing.
And I hesitate to count potential hunting land to some guy living off in a cabin in the middle of nowhere.
You’re entirely missing what I’m saying.
It’s reasonable to ask how much, if any, of the land that currently has no roads or buildings on it could or should be built upon.
Starting the discussion by describing what’s there now as “nothing” is absurd. Even if you think that only humans have any right to exist (which I will dispute), undeveloped lands are producing oxygen and providing water absorption and cleansing; both essential to humans. Species we haven’t even named yet may have medicinal uses for humans or provide important genetic diversity to plants useful for human diets.
No time now for more.
I don’t want to get into an semantic argument about my obviously colloquial definition of “nothing.” I’m not talking about some gaping airless void. I’m talking about basically untouched land with some untapped resource (by humans, if that needs to be spelled out).
The federal government owns about 28% of the US, mostly in the west. Some of that land is in use for various purposes, but the vast majority of it is completely undeveloped.
I’m not sure how to find out what percentage of privately owned land is developed, but a good first approximation would be 100%. If someone owns it, then someone wanted it for a purpose at some point in the past. I’m sure there’s some land that was previously purchased and left fallow, but I bet it’s a pretty minor part.
So, I’m going to say: 28%
All the land that could be developed up until now has been. The remaining land has not yet been economically developable. (This is a tautology.) But of course, what you mean to ask is how much of the remaining land will become economically developable in the future?
I think we’re nearing the peak area of development of the US. We’ll reach peak population by the end of this century. As the population stabilizes the cost of supporting infrastructure will become relatively higher. Building infrastructure into new areas will be a lot less palatable when the system is straining to maintain existing infrastructure.
There will always be people building in new areas. But we’ll start to see area that become less developed. Maybe not abandoned completely, but the level of services will be reduced as the population goes down. Somewhere in there is peak development.
That’s definitely not true. There’s plenty of Federal land that’s economically developable, but is not developed for political reasons.
Moderator Note
The OP clearly means to ask why certain land has not been used for agriculture or buildings by humans. The question of whether such land “should” be built on is not a GQ question. In this thread, such a discussion is a hijack. If you want to talk about this, start a new thread in Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I guess I’m cynical, but it seems to me that the government is not very good at protecting land from development. If there’s money to be made, things are changed so it can be. My point is the remaining undeveloped land is marginal enough that the incentive to develop it is currently low.
Not to (continue to) get into semantics, but the OP says “developable” but leaves it open-ended enough that “exploitable” seems to be a better term.
There’s lots of government land that private corporations would love to exploit for natural resources. ANWR comes immediately to mind, but logging is the other big one.
I have often heard that the biggest reason we don’t have wind and solar farms in the huge empty spaces is because transporting the generated power to a place where it’s useful is too inefficient at present. And the power is of course not needed in the middle of nowhere.
Define “undeveloped.” If it is several miles to the nearest road and has no buildings on it, but is being used to pasture cattle, does it qualify? How far can it be to the road? What about timber plantations, where nobody is actively doing anything right now but waiting, and as soon as the trees reach a certain height they’re going to be clear-cut?
Probably more than you think. In the West, the railroads in particular were granted vast swathes of land, but a fair chunk turned out to be undesirable (too remote, too mountainous, too hot, too dry, etc., for 19th-century farming); the Union Pacific I think remains the largest private landowner west of the Mississippi. Meanwhile, Weyerhaueser owns about 12 million acres of timberland.
Meanwhile, large swathes of New England’s forests are second-growth; the land was cleared in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but farming in that region went into long-term decline by the time of the Civil War, and abandoned pastures and fields rapidly grew into forests.
I grew up in a suburban house in Connecticut where the house took up perhaps ten percent of the acre lot. Partly this is because there’s both a water well and a septic tank and there needs to be distance between them. But if you run a water main and city sewage to the street, you could certainly have much higher density housing there. In fact, if you go back a couple of hundred years, there was farmland where there are now skyscrapers in Manhattan. (And there are various schemes where intensive farming goes on indoors under artificial lighting, with multiple layers of produce grown in ten or twenty vertical feet.)
So what I’m saying is that it’s very possible to get much higher density development within the existing towns and cities.
If the OP is going to keep “developable” open ended, the answer will be equally vague. It could be anywhere from “none of it” to “all of it”. We need some boundaries here.
That said, there are few areas left that are absent of roads, fences, or some other human features - someone has been there and thought there was some economic opportunity at some point in the past.
I assume state and local governments - down to the level of local parks and forest preserves, is substantial as well.
My wife and I have often considered the possibility that - at least SOME public land became government owned - at least in part - because no ready economic exploitation existed. Or the land had already been exploited. For example, in southern IL is the Shawnee National Forest. Somewhere down there is a plaque describing the history - the land was strip logged, and then farming depleted the poor soil, before the government took over.
But in answer to the OP, I’d suggest that everything that is NOT owned by a government (or that a government could not be persuaded to sell) is developable. The ONLY question is the extent to which development for any particular purpose is economical.
So if some land looks “empty”, it is solely because that represents the only use that is not precluded (i.e., not allowed to be used used as a nuclear waste dump) and that is economically feasible.
In these days of hurricanes in the SE, and fires in the W, I’m thinking there is likely a bunch of “developable” land in the “rust belt”! 
Am I missing something?
I neither disagree (nor heartily agree) with your analysis and timetable, but I’d note that there is still undeveloped land that is near existing infrastructure. I took a look at Google satellite view of the cities/villages I’ve lived for more than a month in and it wasn’t hard to find city block sized areas in all of them that were very close to a well-developed street but were empty. None of them were parks.
So there’s still some developable land in the suburbs of most cities and towns that could be connected to the existing infrastructure without displacing the adjacent inhabitants, if the localized growth demanded more housing or businesses. It would still be more expensive than not developing the property in the first place, but not as expensive over the long haul as continuing to sprawl.
Given this night map of the US from space, I’ll conservatively say the answer is 40%.
The answer to the OP’s question is going to boil down to one word, Water.
In the western US the underground aquifers are mostly tapped out for farming use. Several rivers, like the Colorado and the American river in California barely make it to the ocean an longer. Human settlements require a lot of water. And farming even more. Large areas of the western United States were referred to in pioneering days as the Great American Desert.
Great American Desert - Wikipedia.
So a lot of this apparently unused area is more suitable for livestock grazing or recreational human use than living on. Large swaths of Oregon in the eastern and south eastern areas are useful for little more than antelope hunting and limited livestock grazing. Also see the Alvord Desert in Oregon. So much of this unavailable land is under the Federal control of the Bureau of Land Management, formerly referred to as the BML.
Water. That is the one word answer that the OP is looking for.
While I agree with your point about water being “the” primary feature of land use out west, just a correction that the American River does flow year round into the Sacramento river, whose joined forces allow ocean-going ships to come all the way to Stockton and Sacramento. You may be thinking of the San Joaquin, which does dry up occacionally due to water diversions.
I think that’s probably true in the long term, but America has a lot of veto points, and the long term can take quite a while. For example, various administrations have been trying to expand the use of Federal land for oil and gas exploitation for a while but have been stalled to some extent by protest and various conservation laws, etc.
Yeah, probably. I couldn’t find any info on it in a few minutes of searching and punted.
I think the takeaway from this map should be that the undeveloped land in the US is probably more an accident of history than it is innate to the land. The reason the western US is largely undeveloped is that it wasn’t settled until very recently and that the vast majority of the history of population growth in the US was by ship and at walking speed from the East.
Sure, the Southwest is hot and dry, but there are major population centers in Salt Lake City and Phoenix, so those obviously aren’t a barrier to settlement.
If the US had been largely settled by Asia over the last few hundred years, you’d see something that looks more like an inversion of that map: lots of light in the parts of the US that you could get to at walking speed from the West coast, development along the East coast, and much sparser development in the Midwest.