LAND is a finite resource. America sits on 3.5m square miles (9.1m square km), but some bits of it are used quite a bit more heavily than others. Our map above shows the intensity of land use measured by residential property value, in total and per dwelling and person, for all 3,143 counties in America. There are some striking findings: five counties in the New York area (New York, Kings, Queens, Nassau and Westchester) which cover just 917 square miles (or 0.026% of the total land area) account for 5.1% of the total residential property value in America. And if America's entire population lived at Manhattan density, its citizens would fit nicely into an area half the size of Vermont. Explore our map and discover the statistics for your county.

Dig deeper:

Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost (April 2015)

Land, the centre of the pre-industrial economy, has returned as a constraint on growth (April 2015)