The nearly 5M US Census Blocks with zero population (2014)

We'll somehow go all the way over there and find a way to live in those hostile conditions.

Guess what, fast forward, people don't just want to stay on Earth, but will also prefer SF proper, Manhattan and/or Paris within 20 arrondissements.

Even smaller cities are losing population. I guess that Spengler's narrative lives on.

http://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/42/105242-004-D8DEDBD1...

That's a lot of area with less than one person per km2. Of course, even the US and China can't beat Canada and Russia, or even Australia probably.

This is a major aspect, I think. A lot of land in the west is federally owned. This NY Times article[0] states that 47% of the land in the western US is owned by the Federal Government. It doesn't look like there's 1-1 overlap between the empty census blocks and the federal land ownership, though.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/upshot/why-the-government...

Well twenty eight percent is just in Federal lands. So throw in state, city, and local, properties and we can cover a lot. I wonder how much is considered water way? Not sure if that is defined as federal land, but lakes and rivers eat up a bit too. Top it all off with places no one wants to be

Its an odd article that seems to be more sensational than necessary.

It's a fairly meaningless number resulting in an arbitrary choice of binning. If I defined "home" as "home is where the heart is" and used bins about the size of a human heart then I could say that no one calls 99.999968 percent of the USA "home".

Wasn't for lacking of trying, you drive through and occasionally you'll see the remains of old buildings. Mostly schools I think. For some odd reason the schools were always built with rock while everything else was made out of wood.

Basically what happened is that people came in after the Homestead Act to try and settle, found out that despite all the grasses it's still basically a desert, and gave up after the Depression.

There's also the town of Tolar, New Mexico. That one's special. It got leveled during WWII when a train carrying bombs derailed.

Nowadays I think most of the land between Clovis and Roswell is privately owned by ranchers.

Just because there's no room for a house on the side of the Rockies in Colorado doesn't mean people don't hike it or animals don't inhabit it.

Maybe the fears of immigration are laughable, maybe not, but your argument doesn't hold water.

England is lucky in that what little land it has is good for humans to live in.

Even leaving aside the fact that much of the U.S. is not easily habitable, that's a straw man. Even if there is land for more people doesn't mean we have the resources to offer a robust safety net for all those people. (Ironically, many so-called progressives in the U.S. defend immigration by asserting that immigrants do below-minimum wage jobs nobody wants to do and don't use social services for fear of being deported. How that's a good thing escapes me.)

Why is it just westerners/whites who are expected to cope with a changing population?

Can you imagine a scenario in which say Beijing, or Tokyo, or Jakarta, or Riyadh, or Nairobi, or Lagos, or Mumbai were filled with a foreign population that was greater than 50% of the total population for the city?

Can you imagine a scenario where any country outside the western world had demographic numbers showing that foreigners outnumbering the founding population group of the country in the sub 25 age group?

These scenarios are unimaginable and quite absurd even to ponder for anywhere outside of white countries. And yet, have you been to London? Have you looked at demographic charts?

People can raise objections to the population displacement you seem to favor without it having anything to do with "racism, scapegoating, and a general inability to cope," or "muh jerbs."

There are plenty of westerners who think, "We've got a pretty good thing going here, we've brought a lot of good to ourselves and the world as a whole. And we'd rather not see our civilization drastically altered, because a drastic altering of our civilization will impede our efforts and abilities to go on doing good for ourselves and the world."