Resettling the Plains

Spotted a feature somewhere in the past couple of weeks about how some
Plains towns are offering homesteads to residents. It’s a twist on the
old homestead idea: Instead of 160 acres and five years to "prove out"
your claim  by farming it, you get something less than an acre in
town and need to build on it in a year or so. After seeing the National
Geographic article, I checked and found the story;
it was in the Washington Post. As an aside: What’s with the fascination
of the eastern papers — The New York Times has been running a series
of in-depth features on the depopulation of the Plains for at least a
couple of years — with the Plains?