Nah, corruption.

Nope but the nearest mall to me is 2 hours drive.

Have you considered that this is because most of space in USA is allocated only for cars? Or that if this space wasn’t allocated to cars, then you wouldn’t need to traverse such disyance in first place?

but people forget how spread out we are here in the usa.

The solution: trains

Maybe I’m biased living in a “European” part of the US, but it can translate very well to our country. the problem is not that the place is large, but so many places are suburban or trying to keep that rural feel, yet you want massive warehouse stores for everyday shopping. Everything wants to be its own destination, so there is no real concentration of snything

But every town can have a center where common areas are common. Every town can have a center with whatever shops and restaurants. Every town of every size can have some things in a higher density area that’s walkable. In our mythology, we call it “Main Street, USA” and look back at it as a long gone ideal, but it’s still a useful concept, still around in some places, and can be re-created. In my towns case it did well focussing on restaurants, because you can’t ft a Costco or modern grocery there. But there’s also a library, small movie theater, town Common. All the buses run there, and you can find taxis, bicycles or scooters, a nice river walk,etc. it also has a concentration of apartments and condos, so there are always people around

(No train schedule can predict when the milk runs out!)

How about YOU predicting when milk runs out? I’m not asking you to do five-year plan, but it’s easy to know when milk will run our.

The country is so big, and we have so much empty land

Russia is bigger and has more empty land. Despite Putin’s idiocy with invading other country.