you could try
Foreclosure.com - Home Foreclosures, Pre-Foreclosures, Bank Foreclosures
No matter what you may have heard or read, there is no such thing as "free land from the government." There is no federal homesteading program and public land the government finally does sell is sold only at market value.
Under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLMPA), the federal government took over ownership of public lands and abolished all remaining traces of the often-amended Homestead Act of 1862. Specifically, the FLMPA declared that, "the public lands be retained in Federal ownership, unless as a result of the land use planning procedure provided in this Act, it is determined that disposal of a particular parcel will serve the national interest..."
Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees the use of some 264 million acres of public land, representing about one-eighth of all the land in the United States. In passing the FLMPA, Congress assigned the main duty of the BLM as "the management of the public lands and their various resource values so that they are utilized in the combination that will best meet the present and future needs of the American people."
U.S. would seem to have enough land to accommodate that demand easily. America has about 7% of the world's land, but only about 5.6% of its population. Little of the nation's surface is inhabited; nearly three-quarters of the population lives on 1.5% of the land. If all Americans were to move into Texas, the resulting population density would be no greater than England's. If the country seems crowded, it is only because so many of its residents insist on clustering in cities and suburbs.
The U.S. is not running out of land, but the empty areas are not always available for development. Close to half of the country's 2.3 billion acre surface is still taken up by farm and pasture land. More than one-third of the land is owned by the biggest single holder: the Government. The bulk of this consists of timberlands, national parks, grazing land and military reserves in Alaska and the Far West.
Even much of the vacant land is acreage that no one wants to live or build on. Large tracts of fairly cheap land -less, say, than $300 per acre - can still be found in such relatively unpopulated places as northeastern Vermont, Alabama, Oklahoma, Missouri and northern Michigan. There is even some good shorefront land available for less than $5,000 an acre in North Carolina and Washington - though along many other shorelines, houses are jammed wall-to-wall and prices are outrageous. Trouble is, people settle not just where land is cheapest but where there are jobs, schools, hospitals, roads and other amenities.
To spread those population attractors around, the Government is financing a modestly ambitious 'new-towns effort'. But little significant population redistribution is taking place, because developers like to site their new towns near existing metropolitan areas in order to increase their chances for success. I'm pretty skeptical of the chances for much reshuffling.
