Originally Posted by Styker:
“12% is what the UK on average is built on and you think thats too much?! Scotland is underpopulated too with just 5.5 Million people. Considering there is around 27 Million homes built on the 12% land housing up to 65 Million people then it doesn't take much working out that we'd only have to use a tiny amount of the 88% of land that isn't used to solve the housing/infrastructure crisis.
Look up Ariel shots of the country, your area, you'll be amazed on what tiny amounts we are built on and how much is green.”
The bits not built on aren't exactly unused. From an aircraft you can see the country is very green but also divided up into lots of fields where farmers grow things or animals graze. Or woods providing lumber and habitats. The rest are motorways, interchanges, industrial estates, retail parks, airports, car parks...
But the existing population also like open spaces as a relief from their towns, or for recreation. This is rightly why you're usually not allowed to just build anywhere, as the whole country would rapidly become an urban sprawl (parts aren't far off; look at a satellite image taken at night showing street lights).
Compared with the UK, parts of the USA look like more like the surface of Mars (eg. Nevada), yet the USA has ten times the population of Canada or Australia.
Both Canada and Australia each have
60 times the area of England, but just over half the population. And yet they have immigration quotas. Clearly the issue isn't just land area.