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There is quite a lot of open spaces, alteast down here in GA, AL, and TN

I have seen how quickly a place can go from farms and fields to asphalt and steel.

If you go here: http://www.forgotten-ny.com/forgottentour12/12tour.html

You will see on that page a photo of adjoining buildings with the following caption under it:

"When these buildings on 9th Avenue were erected in the 1890s, the architect felt that it was as far out of town as development was likely to go and he playfully named them 'Maine' and 'Oregon.' In a similar spirit, Henry Hardenburgh's grand apartment building on Central Park and West 72nd Street was named the Dakota."

Those buildings are in Manhattan.

What are now Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, were then mostly farms.

Let alone areas like Long island, etc.

You will be amazed at how fast areas can be changed forever--and there is no stopping it once the change begins, it is too late.

The stopping must be done decades in advance.

You cannot think any place too remote to be bulldozed.

I really meant my post about there being plenty of room in regards to room for Americans to reproduce and add to our population. I am without a doubt all for shutting down illegal immigration though and making legal immigration more difficult. I didn't realize until I went back though that it sounded as if I wanted more immigrants moving in and taking over.

What are now Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, were then mostly farms.

Let alone areas like Long island, etc.

I grew up on Long Island, my family has been there nearly since the Dutch showed up. The entire south half of the town I grew up in was farms when my parents moved there. It's wall to wall houses now.

And my great-grandparents owned a large farm in Nassau county. When my great-grandfather died, his wife didn't do a good job managing it and it was sold off piece by piece to pay for taxes. It's now the site of the Green Acres shopping mall.

"You cannot think any place to remote to be bulldozed."

The fact is that most of the habitable rural United States is already thickly populated. I live in Vermont. With the exception of the higher elevations of the Green Mountains, which get too damned cold for most people to endure, the rest of the so called rural areas have very few stretches where there aren't houses around every turn in the road. The same is true for most of the northeast. From what I've seen that also holds for most of the South, Midwest and west coast.

It's only in desert areas of the west or parts of the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana that are just too far from amenitie for most people's comfort, that the country is under-populated

I have seen how quickly a place can go from farms and fields to asphalt and steel.

So true again, Age. Even TX can't keep up with the overcrowding. The city sprawl has taken over vast areas of nothing but farm and ranch land. Yesterday we went for a drive and were appalled at the amount of land out here in the boonies that has sprouted McMansions within the last couple years. The drive to school has gone from hardly seeing a handful of other cars on our little nothing roads to bumper to bumper traffic.

What are now Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, were then mostly farms.

Pete Hamill once remarked how he used to see small farms taking the Elevated to Coney Island in the early 1940s. The last commercial farm in Queens (if you could call it that, it was down to two acres at most) closed about six years ago. I wonder if Grossman's "Farm" (which was nothing more than a glorified fruit stand when I was a kid) is still there in Malverne.