[twobyfour]

The homestead act worked at the time because family farming was a route to economic stability and even success in the economy of the time. Today it's a route to deep poverty.

The route to success today (for all but the few fortunate and motivated entrepreneurs) is to participate in a thriving economic engine - and those engines and the jobs that provide opportunity to do anything other than scrape by while accumulating credit card debt - are concentrated in certain cities. Which in turn is why people are flocking to those cities and housing prices are skyrocketing.

Businesses in turn gravitate to those cities because that's where the smart ambitious employees are concentrating themselves, and it's easier to hire capable employees in areas where they're densely concentrated than to try to attract them to a lightly populated area where you're the only opportunity, or to tease out the few people stuck in that area for family reasons from the rest who simply lack the skills or ambition to do the jobs that people are moving to the cities to seek.