US suburbanites usually react with honest horror at suggestions that increasing population density can improve their lives. (Even as they complain ceaselessly about the long.... US suburbanites usually react with honest horror at suggestions that increasing population density can improve their lives. (Even as they complain ceaselessly about the long commutes and traffic congestion that low-density development inevitably engenders.) Almost always, some crank will throw in lines about "tenements" or being "packed in like sardines in high-rises." And yet high-density development in no way requires any of this, and has rarely actually involved either paradigm--both tenements and high-rises being the results of efforts to maximize ROI, not quality of life.

Think on these things, O fearful lawn-slave:

Paris, France--yeah, the place you paid so much to enjoy on your vacation--has twice the population density of New York City. Yet it's a lively, pleasureable place, with almost no buildings over 4 stories tall....

Shinjuku subway station in Tokyo moves 4 million people through every day--peacefully, politely, with little stress. How would your neighborhood look if the local freeway interchange had to accommodate 3.7 million cars per day? Would it be a lively Times-Square like area with hundreds of thriving shops and cafés and plenty of street life, or a smoky metallic hell of quivering steel?

More US teenagers die (per capita) in the suburbs from car wrecks than in the worst ghettoes of the country from violence. If you want to improve your children's chances of living to productive adulthood, you should move to the inner city now!

Speaking of gun violence: Littleton, Columbine, West Paducah...how come nearly every mass school shooting involving the usual ostracized boy or boys takes place in suburban bedroom communities? Could it be that without enough people, and enough diversity of people, and enough public spaces where people of all sorts can mix, you can't have a healthy environment for growing souls?

I often wonder about these things, as well as others, O lawn slave. Maybe you should too....