How much developable land is left in the US?

[Pleonast]

@Ludovic

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.

The question to ask is: why was a particular piece of land never developed? Typically, it’s because some other piece of land was better suited for the intended purpose. An undeveloped piece of land has never been chosen to be developed (ignoring the some small amount of developed and then abandoned land). Maybe it will be developed in the future, but maybe not.

Being near developed land isn’t enough to say land is developable, especially because it’s near developed land and never has been, despite the presumably has lower barriers to develop than more distant land.

@iamthewalrus_3

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.

Dallas_Jones is right about water in the West. It doesn’t matter which way settlement came from, water is the limiting factor on development in the West. It can never be as densely populated as the East. There could be some trade off between rural (high water use per person, low water use per acre) vs urban development (low water per person, high water per acre) and exactly where the development is, but development has reached the overall limit.

[Pleonast]

@slash2k

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.

If you’re ever in the Boston area and follow the historical markers for Paul Revere’s ride, you’ll notice how the farmland he passed through is mostly forested now.

@Dewey_Finn

In fact, if you go back a couple of hundred years, there was farmland where there are now skyscrapers in Manhattan.

One of my Dutch ancestors was a farmer near Harlem, Manhattan.

[eschereal]

Some of the vacant land you see from an airplane may have in fact been developed at some time in the past and has become abandoned. So the question of how much land is available for development should encompass land that has been developed and later abandoned, though abandonment may indicate that “available” can mean something very different from “usable”.

[Mr_Downtown]

We can now get pretty good detailed land-use analysis from satellite imagery. Here is a good starting point for one of the most recent studies. Urban areas (including suburbs) account for 3.7% of continental US land area (drops to 3% if you include Alaska in the calculations).

That “nighttime map” of the Continental US is actually just a dot-density map of population prepared by the Census Bureau (map GE-50) to look like a nighttime image. As you can imagine, it’s hard to get all the clouds to just wait out over the ocean while you take a picture of the continent one night.

[eschereal]

@Mr_Downtown

That “nighttime map” of the Continental US is actually just a dot-density map of population prepared by the Census Bureau

You are mistaken. It is a composite map stitched together from numerous satellite flyovers. How can we tell? It clearly shows the Bakken Formation fields in western ND/eastern MT.

[thelurkinghorror]

Legally, you can’t really “develop” land controlled* by BLM or NF or FWS. They have websites publicizing occasional sales, but it’s not something that they can just arbitrarily choose to sell off. They more often use an exchange system, where say a landowner has some land that they want and will trade it for a land they own but don’t want of roughly equal value. Sometimes this has the benefit of connecting “landlocked” properties, as for historical reasons there is some weird land out west.

*I hesitate to say “owned” because it’s your land. Get out there and enjoy it.

[Mr_Downtown]

@eschereal

It is a composite map stitched together from numerous satellite flyovers

Sorry that I didn’t look more closely.

As you point out, though, it’s a map of where there are lights at night—not of where land is “developed” as most people would understand that term.