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?