even in the US, i'm sure there are places where land is still cheap. Thinking globally, there's even more of them. That's the beauty of it being opensource: you can build in any part of the earth
Here in Florida, large parcels were bought up by developers and then subdivided into .25/.33/.50 acre lots. These were then sold off to people who eventually wanted to retire here. The problem is the building codes here are probably the most stringent in the US. So there are a lot of these parcels for sale on the cheap ($10k-$25k) but it’s still not worth doing anything with them.
This is the exact issue I've run into. Land in good location is cheap near me. But only a handful of counties in the entire nation have building codes loose enough that let you make use of it affordably.
The issue with much of Floridas land is it’s wetlands. It doesn’t so much matter what you build on it as it is about minimizing impact to the environment.
I thought living in huge estates (or even suburbs) with none of those things was fairly common in much of the US? There are examples of it here (Australia) too and there still seems to be plenty of demand to live in such places, despite the fact that everybody who does so after a few months or years starts complaining about it (in fairness, often such facilities are sold as "coming soon").
Suburbs in US almost universally have these things, even suburbs of decaying cities like Detroit or Cleveland (which often offer more facilities than than the city cores themselves).
I certainly got the impression that there were newer suburban housing developments with many 1000s of houses and basically nothing else.
I gathered Texas was particularly prone to this so randomly browsing Google Maps found "Ridglea hills" and suburbs to the south of it in Fort Worth which appear to house 10s of 1000s of people without a single supermarket and barely even a cafe etc.
well, schools become irrelevant once kids grow up (that is, if you have any). A lack of shopping is good for the wallet, when you grow accustomed to buying in bulk and stacking food. the rest is all about your lifestyle preferences