Yes, sprawl = progress. It means more people with the money to live where they want, in their own home, with a little land. Everywhere you look, sprawl is associated with freedom and wealth.
As to running out of places to plant foor - you're kidding right? Have you ever flown across country? Look out the window. The whole country is nothing but woods and farmland, desert and mountain. People have hardly made a dent on the land in the US.
Did you know that if every single household in the US lived on a one acre parcel, that would leave 96% of the country untouched?
Could you possibly be as big a moron as this posting suggests?
Sprawl destroys the most precious and scarce type of land; agricultural. Contrary to your idiotic statement, there is not an overabundance of arable land, either in the US or the world in general. Arable land worldwide is dissappearing, primarily due to desertification, at a rate of over 7000 square miles per year. Futhermore, modern farming methods are stripping the top soil off of arable land, particularly in the U.S., at an unprecidented rate, and sending it and the phosphates that go with it into the oceans, where it destroys the fish population. Add to that that we are sucking our fossil aquifers, such as the Oglala aquifer beneath the great plains states, dry, and the drought/storm/erosion cycle of global warming, and the need to grow biofuels, and we've got one hell of a shortage of agricultural land. Sprawl, and presumably shitbags such as yourself who choose to contribute to it, is the number one environmental disaster facing this country at least.
All this in addition to the generally agreed upon fact that there's nothing uglier, less sustainable, and more environmentally damaging (perhaps, of soviet style concrete apartment blocks, at least for the first criterion) than American style sprawl.