Is America full up?

Broad-framing the question of population density

Exactly how it look from an airplane at 30,000 feet … to Donald Trump

NYT: Trump Says the U.S. Is ‘Full.’ Much of the Nation Has the Opposite Problem.

Plenty of ways to slice this question.

What triggered it for me was the list of the five most densely populated US states.

I have lived in three of them, if you can believe it:

• Rhode Island at #2 (1,061/sq mile)

• Massachusetts at #3 (901)

• Maryland at #5 (636).

Can’t say I felt terribly crowded living i any of them, but they are all way above the US average of 91/sq mile.

The most densely populated US state is New Jersey at 1,263/sq mile. If NJ was a country, it would rank 29th out of 249 nations, just ahead of Burundi.

Where does America rank out of those 249 nation-states?

We stand at 186th place at 91 people per square mile.

Focusing on such global rankings, let’s go with the more prevalent measure of people per square kilometer. The US averages 35 people per square km.

Excluding Antarctica, the world records an average of 60 people per square km, so, by that standard, America is about 1/2 full.