> represents a long tail of real preferences among the population The other problem with this long tail is that (like other long tails of, say, bandwidth or st

> represents a long tail of real preferences among the population The other problem with this long tail is that (like other long tails of, say, bandwidth or storage utilization) it has a disproportionate effect on the whole. If 60% of, say, 100k people in a metropolitan area prefer to live in urban, high-density housing at 20,000 people per square mile, and 20% prefer to live in low-density suburbs at 4,000 people per square mile, you have 3 square miles of urban housing and 10 square miles of suburbs. And the small number of rural folks on the outskirts who are living the American dream of having their own 40 acres (160 houses per square mile) have an even larger effect on average land usage.