Cart before the horse. The problem is status. It's significantly easier and cheaper to build in the "empty areas", and developers would love to build there, we

Cart before the horse. The problem is status. It's significantly easier and cheaper to build in the "empty areas", and developers would love to build there, were the demand present. It's not the developers or politicians you need to convince. It's the status-oriented urbanite bugman. It's the urbanite bugmen who think people in flyover country are all filthy rednecks, who are literally afraid of living in an area without human feces and used heroin needles on the sidewalk, that you need to convince. These people prefer living in high-cost, high-crime environments because shopping at a bodega makes you the right class of people, not like those trashy Wal-Mart customers. So instead of even considering moving to the empty areas, they bitch about "developers" and "politicians" standing the way of building more $3000/mo 300 ft^2 bugman pods, just so they can tell all their friends that they live in the "right" place. It's all about status, and nothing is sweeter than the tears of these people. Their unhappiness at their self-inflicted "problem" is a beautiful thing. Status-oriented people are the lowest form of life. Let them wallow in it.