So fighting residential development locally to try to push companies to other areas may be a rational strategy for some.
I'm not convinced that perpetual population growth will always be required for economic growth.
No there isn't. All the places with viable logistics and water supply are pretty much full up. Urban areas need barge transport, good rail grades, aqueducts, and rivers to carry away waste. You can't plop a city down in the middle of nowhere. The energy economics mean it will never work. All the sites worth building on have been built on. A lot of the places supplied mostly by truck are of questionable viability in coming years.
Probably the only area of the country that could long term sustain a much higher population density is the great lakes region.
If Oklahoma had the population density of the Netherlands it would have an additional 72 million people living in it...and oh by the way it’s got huge oil and gas reserves and some pretty enormous inland ports...
The Netherlands is, too, in the long run. But for now it's economically sustainable.
There are a few interesting studies in this area, California's agricultural section's tug-of-war with its residents for water is the biggest one that comes to mind, and the lesson you get is that industry uses up the lion's share of the water out of greed and sloth, but enough pressure will force them to curtail usage.
I wouldn’t want to live there, but seems like a lot of bulk commodities, and products come in and out of Oklahoma and there is still plenty of room...
None of the other developed countries have vast interior deserts. The east and west coasts and some parts of the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds are plenty overpopulated.