To pick a random European city, let's compare Chicago to Amsterdam: http://swontariourbanist.blogspot.com/2015/01/amsterdam-area.... Amsterdam's metro region has about 670,000 people living in neighborhoods above 20,000 people per square mile.

Chicago has between 1.1-1.3 million people (twice as many) living at that density or higher: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Z3ai_T6K_40/T4I6B9akQDI/A.... It's actually more than that, because this data excludes satellite cities, which the Amsterdam figure above includes.

Another point of comparison. Chicago the city has 2.7 million people at about the same weighted density (19k/sq-mi) as the Amsterdam metro, which has 1.7 million people.

EDIT: these are not my charts. They're from this thread: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=198004.

Chicago has 1.12 million people living in census tracts above 20,000 people per square mile, the satellite cities are more in the 10-15k/sq mi range. http://swontariourbanist.blogspot.ca/2014/03/toronto-and-chi...

Chicago quickly drops off past the 20k/sq-mi range too, which is basically typical rowhouse density. It only has 88,000 people living in >50k/sq-mi census tracts, mostly stretched out along the northern waterfront. Amsterdam has almost twice as many at 162,330.

Amsterdam isn't even that dense by European standards, although Swiss cities are probably similar. The densest cities are in southern Europe, ex Valencia has about 800,000 residents over 20k/sq-mi, and 400,000 residents living at 50k/sq-mi densities and it's not even a big city. https://chartingtransport.com/2015/11/26/comparing-the-densi...

But back to the original point... Chicago has fairly dense areas within a short commute of downtown - but those mostly have 2-3 flats and bigger apartments, and the few single family homes are quite expensive. For more affordable SFHs with a decent school and crime situation, I think you'd have to go to neighbourhoods that would be considered "suburbs" by European standards even if they're within city limits.

San Francisco is even more expense, the better neighbourhoods have SFHs at $2m+. More far flung areas like Sunset would be more like $1m which is still not exactly cheap and it's getting to be a long commute (40-50min each way by transit).

I think we're getting pretty close to "No True Scotsman" territory when we start designating neighborhoods --- inside the city limits of a metro statistical area with vast, sprawling suburbs --- as themselves suburbs, despite being on trunk CTA train routes, on one of the city's main drags, because "European cities would call those neighborhoods suburbs".

I'm getting the impression that Europeans would "call them suburbs" because they have affordable single-family houses in them, which makes this debate pretty disingenuous.

What I mean is that in many European cities, the suburbs will be pretty similar to Jefferson Park or Outer Sunset in terms of the commuting situation and walkability. Although in Switzerland the suburbs are still much more expensive. Elsewhere in Europe it's generally not so bad.

That's neither here nor there. The question is whether you can have houses with yards in walkably-dense cities. Southern European cities may be denser, but nobody would say Amsterdam is not walkable.

Chicago neighborhoods like Edgewater are in the 30-35k/square mile range, and are full of little single family homes with yards. That's well into walkable territory.

Those cumulative density charts for population density are the best representation I've ever seen of that stat. Did you make those charts?

Which standards would those be?

The standards of the "City" ending where you go from city style buildings (multiple people per building, density high enough that it’s fully walkable, etc) to suburban or rural style buildings (seperate, one or two family homes, unusable by foot)

Chicago is one of the most walkable cities in the country. Moreover, the stuff people actually want to go to --- the various bar and restaurant districts, &c --- are in the residential north side of the city, not downtown, which basically shuts down at 6PM.

Almost every neighborhood in the city has a mix of freestanding single family homes, townhouses and 3-flats, and dense apartment buildings.

Are most other big cities like the loop after business hours? I'm always shocked at how deserted it is on weekends, and evenings aside from the odd theatre traffic.

I don't know about most, but downtown Manhattan is very similar at night.

Some places like downtown Dallas are even more empty.

Most big cities after business hours are full of life, full of people out going to bars, clubs, other events, etc.

If you go outside in the downtown of most 200k+ cities, on any normal day, you’ll find lots of people there.

On the other hand, the residential suburbs will be dead.

This isn't true in the U.S. Downtowns all across the country are dead at night.

London is interesting, in that the square mile (financial district) while being very busy (even at night) during the week, due to workers drinking and socialising after office hours, is absolutely empty at weekends. On Sundays the streets are absolutely deserted, which makes it a great time to film apocalyptic zombie movies - see '28 Days Later' for an example.

Well, I can’t really compare – I’ve never been in the US.

But I’m gonna assume the relaxed zoning in the EU, and the resulting mix of commercial, residential, and offices, often even in the same building, leads to the people having a reason to go downtown.

Thats part of it, the other part is simple market economics. It is hard for the things that people want to do at night (clubs, art galleries, restaurants and bars) which are much lower margin businesses to compete with the large financial and governmental institutions that dominate places like the Chicago loop, lower Manhattan or downtown Dallas.

These leads to a pretty common pattern where just outside of the financial/governmental centers of US cities there exist neighborhoods that are mixes of residential, cafe's, nightlife, "creative businesses" or retail. For instance, the Chicago loop is literally surrounded by such places.

But the lack of activity in a financial district has very little correlation to the density of the city. Manhattan is obviously a walkable and dense place to live but lower manhattan (wall street) can feel down right empty after hours.

I have much less experience in European cities, but my experience in Dublin, Amsterdam and Frankfort are not much different than this.

I don't think it's so much the financial uses pushing out restaurants and retail but rather housing that's being pushed out.

In Toronto the Financial District doesn't go completely dead, but the 4million square foot underground mall shuts down, and it's just a few ground level businesses that stay open. It's still more lively at night than the typical suburb, but not as bustling as the adjacent neighbourhoods or as the Financial District during the day when there 200,000 office workers there (vs just a few thousand tourists and residents within walking distance at night). From what I heard it's not as dead at night as the Chicago loop.

Relative to NYC, not that many people live in downtown Manhattan either, and there isn't that much stuff open there at night. I'm not sure what conclusions there are to draw from nightlife in the loop.

> I have much less experience in European cities, but my experience in Dublin, Amsterdam and Frankfort are not much different than this.

I only visited cities which don’t really have high-margin businesses, so that’s maybe why I never noticed that.

People have been moving out of the urban core in U.S. cities for the last 50 years. This has hit mid-sized U.S. cities particularly hard. While enough businesses may have stayed behind to maintain a central business district, the residents chose to live elsewhere and commute in.

The St. Louis region, where I live, has nearly 3 million people (about half of which are inside the I-270/255 loop, for some context on a map), but only around 3000 residents in its primary Downtown neighborhood (and another 4000 or so in the adjacent Downtown West). These two neighborhoods have a population density that's lower than the city average (and much lower than in the most dense neighborhoods).

By the way, this actually represents a bit of a comeback for the neighborhood. There were only 800 residents Downtown in 2000. Warehouse-to-loft conversions became popular about 15 years ago, which has reversed the trend, at least for now.

"Urban core" has little to do with it. "The loop" in central downtown Chicago hosts pretty much nothing but large office buildings. It's dead after 6PM because nobody is there. Where are they? Other parts of the urban core of Chicago.

Sorry. "Urban core" is ill-defined enough to be almost meaningless and I was using it alternately to mean Downtown and to mean it in the sense you do, which was bound to cause confusion. I was trying to point out that the St. Louis Downtown isn't even dense by the standards of other places in its urban core (in the sense you mean).

That's my fault.

I live in a neighborhood of 25k people in Chicago that precisely matches that standard. It is surrounded on 3 sides by similar neighborhoods (and a lake on the other). Those style neighborhoods are the norm in Chicago. Further, there are many Chicago suburbs that match that description.