Subject: Re: Zakaria, for the usual suspects who
Just in looking at aerial photos of those areas, that's not what I'd call vacant land. It's all subdivided and criss-crossed with roads. It's lightly populated with folks who may or may not be happy about that development spreading into their area. Some of those will become the folks who will complain about the congestion as the development spreads toward them.

Yeah, that won't matter much. That type of development pattern is pretty common outside the urbanized development areas. You get "farm residential" in a lot of these areas, where people have 20-30 acre properties that they have a "farm house" on so that most of their land can qualify for the tax exemption. But that stuff is super easy to assemble once it's time for development to move into the area - the spread in value on 120-140 homes vs. 30 acres with a single home is so huge that it's easy to find a deal - and a lot of those places are basically people that are land banking as an investment, but just choosing to live on it until its time to sell. They don't object when their neighbor closer in sells to developers, because that's their plan as well.

And that's not even the easiest stuff. Tons of land where you don't even have that. You can see it where the Villages is currently expanding, to the South. The tan area that you see in this link:

https://www.google.com/maps/pl...

It's all tan because it's been cleared and graded. You can see that they've put in nearly all the roads as well - all that's ready to go and be converted into houses. About 4 square miles, just eyeballing it - probably north of 10K people, just in that area. And then all that land to the south and east of that tan area - that's all former ag land/ranch land that's gone idle, easily another 20-30 square miles more. It will all eventually be part of the Villages metro area, about 3K people per square mile, the next 100K Floridians. In just that one spot. It won't look at all what New Urbanist planners look for - it will be very suburban sprawl - but it will be plentiful and have yards and parking and easy roadway access and lots of the stuff that Villages residents like to have.