America has NIMBYs too!

Another snippet from that article:

The American Farmland Trust, which campaigns to protect agricultural land, estimates that 1.1m acres are lost to development* every year. But now that process has ground to a halt.

UK NIMBYs never tire of pointing out that the UK is more densely populated than France or Germany (politely overlooking the fact that we are much less densely populated than plenty of other countries).

The US NIMBYs have to resort to scary statistics like "1.1m acres". The surface area of the USA is ... 9,826,630 sq km = about 2,500 million acres. So assuming that they started building at this rate a century ago, and continued doing so for another century, there'd still be about ... er ... 2,300 million acres of undeveloped land left.

* I hate that expression. "Put to more efficient use" is correct.