You’re still in the NE corridor, the Boston burbs and a place where people from NYC and Boston have vacation homes.
Go to Upstate NY and it’s a wasteland; go to the Northern Midwest, and you’ll only see the big cities and their immediate suburbs. But even a lot of these, including Detroit, are at about 50% of their former populations, and once you get beyond the MW cities, you’re not going to see much of anything for over a thousand miles.
There were never huge population centers in most places outside of the NE corridor and the West Coast, but now the wide open spaces probably haven’t been this wide open in at least 60 years.
Sounds perfect to me. People bug me.