I can’t tell if you intend to agree with the parent or if you are trying to rebut his argument, but this is the parent’s point. Moreover, the US is still not very dense, and there is plenty of sparsity for everyone. People should leave their metropolises a couple of times in their lives and experience the vast expanses. suburbs aren’t threatening nature in most parts of the country (agriculture OTOH…), and I say this as someone who personally dislikes the stereotypical American suburb for many other reasons.

I wasn't trying to rebut the parent's argument (assuming the parent wasn't trying to be ironic or so).

Denser cities make it easier to leave them for a short stint, too, because there's less sprawl.

Yes, it's probably a good idea to live outside a city for a while in your life. Though that's up to individual preferences.

I'm not quite sure whether it makes much sense one way or another to say that the US is 'still not very dense'.

In some literal sense, that is obviously true. In another sense, just because eg Russia has huge empty lands in Siberia bringing down the average density on a federal level, doesn't really make a difference to someone living in the suburbs of Moscow.

Similarly, if Russia lost Siberia tomorrow, the person in the Moscow suburb wouldn't experience density any different either.

I only chose Russia as an extreme case example. You can replace Siberia with Alaska or the flyover states, and Moscow and its suburbs with eg San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

After spending years in quite a few different places around the globe, I'm quite happy to live in Singapore these days, one of the premier global cities.

In the US it is sad that because of building restrictions so many people are excluded from its most productive cities; unnecessarily setting back the economy and thus the prosperity of the people. Including even of those people who wouldn't want to live in those most productive places.

>> there is plenty of sparsity for everyone

This will be my koan for the day.

Fun fact. We could fit the entire world population in a mega city the size of Texas.

Not sure what numbers you used. For comparison, here's a worked example:

Singapore has a size of 728.6 km2, and a population of 5.7 million people. For a density of 8,400 people per km2. (That includes water reservoirs, military bases, an international airport, areas for heavy industry, nature reserves, garbage dumps, power stations, 1.5% of the world's crude oil refining capacity, a few semiconductor fabs, etc.)

There are 7.96 billion people on the planet. That means if you scale up Singapore at the same density, you'd need 952,000 km2 to fit everyone.

Texas has a size of 696,000 km2. So our mega-Singapore would need about 1.37 Texases of area.

That's pretty close to your number.

Wikipedia gives New York City's population density as 11,313.68/km2, but the borders for that calculation will by necessity be drawn a bit arbitrarily. And I assume that doesn't include as much of the support infrastructure as Singapore does.