As with all things real estate, proximity and travel times are key. You're almost always paying for location. It's nothing to get a large newly built 5 bedroom

As with all things real estate, proximity and travel times are key. You're almost always paying for location. It's nothing to get a large newly built 5 bedroom house in an extremely rural area for $200k, or rent a small house for $400 a month. Developments like that pop up all the time, I even live in one, but you pay for it with longer commute times or less access/proximity to stores, and infrastructure like high-speed broadband. Everyone wants to live where those things are so that drives up demand, and they only build those things where people already are so its not as if its solved by saying, simply put a bunch of empty stores and run fiber and people will start building houses and businesses there. From and an environmental perspective doing so makes my carbon footprint insane since I have to drive a longer distance to get the most basic things done and walking anywhere, even to a small grocery store to buy food for dinner is not an option and you can write off public transportation entirely. It creates a completely car dependent culture, expanding on that is not sustainable. Also, 90% of our open lands is already agrarian or much needed natural ecosystems. More urban sprawl for cheaper rent but greater detriment to the environment probably isn't a good idea. I do know lots of tech workers that live in the middle of no where, work remote, and make 6-figures and live like kings while living on large plots of land paying very little in taxes and have mortgages equivalent of a car payment, but they live 2 hours from anything and I'm not sure what they do for Internet beyond basic DSL. If you have a purely WFH job this is doable. They only have to leave their house once or twice a week maybe for a trip into town on the weekend and end up making up for it by traveling heavily to central offices or customer locations for big projects or F2F situations. You can ask the same question of companies, I often wonder why SF companies are even based in such an expensive cities when their workers can do their job from almost any physical location. The issue still is proximity, they want their workers to be close to each other and close to a talent pool they can pull from. Even with highways and fast travel times to the city doesn't stop you from suffering the same issues with traffic and other commuters once you get to the city. I live outside the city I work 30 miles away and 50% of my commute is getting from the city's edge, to the city center, dealing with tons of lights, random traffic jams, finding parking, and walking blocks to my office. I lose 2 hours of my life a day of personal time for cheaper housing, and I've considered many times moving to a more expensive location just to gain almost 8 hours of my week back.