If it's cheaper to live in the middle of nowhere, with water and electricity and internet needing to be piped all that way out there, and the gas bills, and the road wear, then the government has failed. High and medium density housing costs the government less in maintenance, stimulates the economy, and is cheaper to build. Any functioning economy would price those homes cheaper. If you're saving 300,000 by costing the government all that extra money and polluting the environment, someone fucked up on a colossal scale.