As President Trump undoes the federal land grab by the Obama Administration, the environmentalists and left are screaming “Urban Sprawl”.Land use in the United States falls under so many myths it will make your head spin. A paper in 2002 titled, The Truth About Land Use In The United States debunks many of these. It is a very good read and I’ll share the stat in the title of this post:

Rural Residential Land-This category comprises nearly all sprawl and subdivisions along with farmhouses scattered across the country The total acreage for rural residential is 73 million acres. Of this total, 44 million acres are lots of 10 or more acres.

Developed and rural residential make up 139 million acres, or 6.1 percent of total land area in the U.S. This amount of land is not insignificant until you consider that we planted more than 80 million acres of feeder corn and another 75 million acres of soybeans (95 percent of which are consumed by livestock, not tofu eaters) last year alone. These two crops affect more of the land area of the U.S. than all the urbanization, rural residential, highways, railroads, commercial centers, malls, industrial parks and golf courses combined.