I'm talking mega cities that are the size of NYC. I know there's always demolition, but it just seems with the population continuing to grow (as well as new businesses) that there will be a continuing need for more office towers, hotels, and apartments and condo's. But my question becomes, say 50 years from now (which I'll be in my late 60's) when much of the open land is occupied, but there's still a need to grow and develop, where do these buildings go?

 

I know in Dues Ex (a video game), one concept was that you have a city build on top of a city. So essientially this:

 

http://media.moddb.com/images/games/1/11/10007/dx3_shanghai.1.jpg

 

My question, how real of a problem is this? Lack of new land to build and grow, and have there been any discussions on what potential solutions for this might entail?

Demolition, building further out, or creating new land somehow (like Battery Park City in NYC) are the only real options.  This is why cities like NYC or Tokyo are so expensive.

It's going to require serious planning and intelligent space use. As it stands there are hundreds of millions of square feet of unbuilt air space in NYC which will need to be used in full in order to continue the upward trend of the city. Though we'll likely always have several of the historic small scale neighborhoods in NYC, many locations will continue they're change towards high rise neighborhoods. Places like Downtown Brooklyn, the entirety of the waterfront in Brooklyn, Queens, and eventually Brooklyn will be redeveloped to house hundreds of thousands of people. Formerly industrial space will become new high rise centers. Places like Sunnyside Yards will be covered over like the Hudson Yards. Eventually many of the public housing developments will be torn down and rebuilt since they're awfully inefficient with their land and only use 16% for buildings and the rest for poorly planned open space and parking. We'll likely see more land reclamation in the future to further expand Manhattan, likely into the East River. The outer boroughs will continue to densify.

 

Basically what I'm getting at is that we'll get more creative with how we use the space we do have left. And we'll continue to redevelop neighborhoods that are currently built out but don't necessarily use their land to the fullest. Though the current supertalls being built are basically exclusive to the rich, we'll likely see a future trend towards ultra tall residential towers that focus on packing as many units into the square footage as possible to combat housing demand. The future is going to be a lot taller than it already is.

I guess there's always the option of building a city below ground as well? I know there's a park in development in NYC thats in an old abandoned subway station.

It's going to require serious planning and intelligent space use. As it stands there are hundreds of millions of square feet of unbuilt air space in NYC which will need to be used in full in order to continue the upward trend of the city. Though we'll likely always have several of the historic small scale neighborhoods in NYC, many locations will continue they're change towards high rise neighborhoods. Places like Downtown Brooklyn, the entirety of the waterfront in Brooklyn, Queens, and eventually Brooklyn will be redeveloped to house hundreds of thousands of people. Formerly industrial space will become new high rise centers. Places like Sunnyside Yards will be covered over like the Hudson Yards. Eventually many of the public housing developments will be torn down and rebuilt since they're awfully inefficient with their land and only use 16% for buildings and the rest for poorly planned open space and parking. We'll likely see more land reclamation in the future to further expand Manhattan, likely into the East River. The outer boroughs will continue to densify.

 

Basically what I'm getting at is that we'll get more creative with how we use the space we do have left. And we'll continue to redevelop neighborhoods that are currently built out but don't necessarily use their land to the fullest. Though the current supertalls being built are basically exclusive to the rich, we'll likely see a future trend towards ultra tall residential towers that focus on packing as many units into the square footage as possible to combat housing demand. The future is going to be a lot taller than it already is.

 

Still it's kind of a scary concept.

 

Sure, not really to much of a concern for us, since we'll probably be munched up by maggots in the grave by that point..but still for our kids, kids. For their kids and so on...I mean obviously technology will advance, and will allow for unique concepts in the urban development space..But still to see the population continue to grow exponentially, and you think, okay New York City 2150...Again, not an issue for us, right who cares? But it's essentially my grandchilds lifetime (Im a millennial).

 

Sure we can become smarter with how we develop the land..but you got to ask is that enough? It's just a scary concept that you continue to build and build and build, and there becomes a point where you just simply run out of room. And sure you can grow taller and taller, or grow a new city like they did with battery park, or even potentially grow  a city underground.

 

But there comes a point that makes me ask..when is enough is enough? When do you wave the white flag and say no more...I just guess I'm not fond of how there could be a potentially a future generation of our blood children who don't know what a park looks like, or don't know what daylight will look like. I know, extreme, but there's just something about this constant attitude of grow, grow, grow, that it makes you wonder when enough becomes enough...and when the government has to step in and impose regulations on population control.

^your fears are misplaced. Once a country reaches first world economic development standards, population growth naturally levels out and even starts to decline. That's because people have less children (they become more certain the ones they have will survive into adulthood) and have them later in life.

 

The real question is whether the global systems we have in place is conducive to Third World countries developing to First World levels. The third world is where some truly huge mega cities are emerging with very poor infrastructure and sanitation.

Yes and no. We might not continue growing as quickly, but we, as a country, aren't projected to stop growing at any point in our lifetimes. Most estimates put as us at around 450 million by the end of the century. That's a 50% growth in 100 years. And it's due to immigration. We'll continue being a net importer of people. With that brings the need for smart growth. Places like NYC are going to continue they're massive population gains because they're centers of immigration. And as more and more third world countries develop, many will have the means to choose to move to a more developed place like the United States if they so choose. The future of the United States is one that grows through heavy immigration policies.

Even a massive city like NYC does not truly run out of space. It just runs out of space where it's easy to build. At that point, you have to do projects like Hudson Yards, where an entire rail yard is being decked over so that new towers can be built above it. And you start demolishing existing buildings to replace them with taller ones.

 

But in the vast majority of cities this is never going to be an issue. Think about a city like Seattle or Atlanta or Houston. There is a ton of space to add many times more residents than they currently have.

I think back to when I was in Bangkok.  A very fast growing city and metropolis, with horrible traffic, etc.  They retrofitted in rail lines in the past 2 decades and are expanding, and all along the the rail lines they are demolishing 3-4 story buildings to make way for towers.  Really quite impressive.  And it seems they fence off the areas and demolish from the top down, so as not to disturb the street level below which is consistently packed. 

We should be concentrating on improving the quality of life for the citizens of cities, not mindlessly chasing population growth.  The quality of life for many New Yorkers is very low as their housing is of low quality but it consumes a huge percentage of their income.  The subway is cheaper than car ownership but it is still a significant expense and the quality of its service from the outer boroughs is often quite poor. Recently the New York Times editorialized that LaGuardia Airport should be closed, its flights shifted to JFK and Newark, and the old airport redeveloped into housing.  Meanwhile an express rail link should be established between Manhattan and JFK. 

In earthquake-country it can be difficult and expensive to build higher.  San Francisco has relatively wide streets, so one proposal is to build housing in the middle of the streets, between two 15-foot pedestrian alleys.  Divert the cars to underground parking.

 

http://narrowstreetssf.com/

 

In earthquake-country it can be difficult and expensive to build higher.  San Francisco has relatively wide streets, so one proposal is to build housing in the middle of the streets, between two 15-foot pedestrian alleys.  Divert the cars to underground parking.

 

http://narrowstreetssf.com/

 

 

Yeah I've had that exact idea for various areas around Cincinnati.  Specifically construction of a residential tower above the Gov. Square transit center that could help fund Metro and a rail network.  Then residential in the middle of Gilbert Ave. on the hill and in Walnut Hills, and then Liberty St. in OTR and the West End, and Central Parkway DT and up to Liberty St.  The weird thing about Cincinnati's road layout is that the wide streets are often used *less* than the narrow streets because they were added after the original road network was established and so don't follow natural traffic patterns. 

 

I'm talking mega cities that are the size of NYC. I know there's always demolition, but it just seems with the population continuing to grow (as well as new businesses) that there will be a continuing need for more office towers, hotels, and apartments and condo's. But my question becomes, say 50 years from now (which I'll be in my late 60's) when much of the open land is occupied, but there's still a need to grow and develop, where do these buildings go?

 

I know in Dues Ex (a video game), one concept was that you have a city build on top of a city. So essientially this:

 

http://media.moddb.com/images/games/1/11/10007/dx3_shanghai.1.jpg

 

My question, how real of a problem is this? Lack of new land to build and grow, and have there been any discussions on what potential solutions for this might entail?

 

Heh.  We're still a long way from needing the Shanghai of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.  But the game did touch on one thing: If you want to see where the truly superscale housing projects are coming online, you need to look to Asia.  When I was visiting my wife's family in Mumbai (population 12 million, as opposed to NYC's paltry 8.4 million), there were cranes across the skyline for basically as far as the eye could see.

 

In part, economic pressures will push people out of the largest and most expensive cities like NYC and San Francisco.  And that's really where America has an advantage on much of the world.  In many countries, even rich countries, the major cities (particularly the political capitals) are where you need to be.  Our economy is much more decentralized, following our political structure.  Cleveland could absorb millions of additional people without annexing a single square inch of land.  In fact, it could do so without even a huge number of residential highrises, as long as it built enough neighborhoods like the Short North in Columbus dominated by midrises.  Even Houston and Atlanta, known for a certain willful blindness when it comes to autocentrism, have shown some enthusiasm for building up.

 

At a general level, your options for the landlocked megacities you're talking about are (1) build higher, (2) pack tighter, (3) build under, and (4) build artificial land.  The last two are low-viability options, for the most part.  But we have a lot of potential for height.  Even NYC has a lot of potential for height, and it only takes one political moment in which the NIMBY forces lose to open up a lot of the insanely protected areas of Greenwich and other such areas for high-rise development.

I don't see why we should be encouraging New York City to further densify.  It's already the country's dominant city by a longshot and I don't know what it gets that it doesn't already have by adding 10-20% to its population.  Something is definitely lost in our overall national culture if we allow the Village and other traditional corners of Manhattan to be exploited by developers.

 

I think people should also be careful to root on densification of the Midwestern cities because the next generation could be priced out.  High housing costs frustrate class mobility, which is one of our country's founding tenants. 

There are dozens of mid-sized cities in the U.S. that have room to add millions more people without feeling uncomfortably dense. Imagine if a city like Cincinnati built new towers on all of its downtown parking lots and started to fill in the gaps in its other neighborhoods. That's enough room for hundreds of thousands of new residents right there. Now think about all of the other cities in Ohio that could do the same. That's what we should be trying to encourage -- not adding millions more to metros like New York or LA.

I generally agree, and I think economic pressures will gradually push people in those directions anyway (in fact, they already are--thousands move from New York and California every year because of that).  But just within the topic of the thread, it's still fair to consider.

We should be trying to encourage jobs in these cities first, before the people to work them.

We should be trying to encourage jobs in these cities first, before the people to work them.

 

Jobs are people my friend.

 

-Mitt Romney

 

Ha! Sorry that's the first thing I thought of. I'd personally like to see more industrious immigrants coming into the urban midwest; people who aren't as complacent as us 'Mericans.

 

There are dozens of mid-sized cities in the U.S. that have room to add millions more people without feeling uncomfortably dense. Imagine if a city like Cincinnati built new towers on all of its downtown parking lots and started to fill in the gaps in its other neighborhoods. That's enough room for hundreds of thousands of new residents right there. Now think about all of the other cities in Ohio that could do the same. That's what we should be trying to encourage -- not adding millions more to metros like New York or LA.

 

Except that you can't, and history shows that it just doesn't work that way. Primate city theory was a good attempt at classifying this phenomenon. Even the vast, diverse United States basically has primate cities: NYC and LA. Washington is the artificially appointed center of federal power. In respect to livability for the average US worker, these three are pretty horrible places. You're materially much better off in smaller places. But these big prime cities attract because that's just human nature, apparently.

If you're a top performer in a specialized field you're better off in those primate cities where compensation goes through the roof- think a Wall Street broker, or a Hollywood actor.  If you're less specialized, or a merely average or good performer, then yes, you are probably better off in a less expensive location.

If you're a top performer in a specialized field you're better off in those primate cities where compensation goes through the roof- think a Wall Street broker, or a Hollywood actor.  If you're less specialized, or a merely average or good performer, then yes, you are probably better off in a less expensive location.

 

Except I think a lot of "average performers" somehow get glamorous jobs in the big city through family connections or in the case of a few women I went to college with "doing what it takes".  These people would be answering the phones in Ohio but in New York and LA they're attending fancy dress balls and flying around the world. 

Also keep in mind that New York and even many 3rd-world megacities aren't seas of skyscrapers.  Yes, Manhattan is filled with high rises more than anywhere else in the US, but the overwhelming majority of Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island, not to mention the rest of Long Island and New Jersey, are decidedly low-rise. 

The real question is whether the global systems we have in place is conducive to Third World countries developing to First World levels. The third world is where some truly huge mega cities are emerging with very poor infrastructure and sanitation.

 

They are working.

That was an awesome video. Thanks for sharing that.

 

I'm mostly curious what will happen in the coming century as entirely new metropolises show up in Asia and Africa who aren't trying to emulate the post-WWII "American Dream." We've seen a lot of Chinese development follow our patterns, though at higher densities, in the past 30 or so years and the results are really awkward, uncomfortable cities that feel like giant version of the CBD of Houston. Not much in terms of street life or pedestrianism yet lots of people. It's not the nicest example of how to build.

 

But as the United States, Canada, etc. shift towards living denser and remaining closer to the core than they have in decades, I wonder if the shifting understanding of the "American dream" will influence the developing world in a different way. I'm curious if we'll be seeing large-scale development efforts along the lines of many Chinese cities but with the planning tactics of, say, False Creek in Vancouver or Battery Park City in NYC. Super dense yet pedestrian. Ground levels that go up to the sidewalk yet towers above. Plenty of well-thought out parkland instead of random leftover greenspaces. Entire cities the size of the many Chinese megacities with these planning tactics would be amazing places to live. They'd be game-changing from an urbanism standpoint.

I don't see why we should be encouraging New York City to further densify.  It's already the country's dominant city by a longshot and I don't know what it gets that it doesn't already have by adding 10-20% to its population.  Something is definitely lost in our overall national culture if we allow the Village and other traditional corners of Manhattan to be exploited by developers.

 

I think people should also be careful to root on densification of the Midwestern cities because the next generation could be priced out.  High housing costs frustrate class mobility, which is one of our country's founding tenants. 

 

You need to be a little careful with density, particularly in the Midwest.  In particular, you should be extremely cautious emulating Asian cities where the culture does not emphasize personal space like it does here.  Even Asian Americans are less averse to crowding than the general population is here.  Ignore this, and encourage more sprawl.  And yes, the options are often gentrification and sprawl.

 

As I’ve said, a city which can embrace and integrate the sprawl, allowing people to pick density when they are willing and escape it when they wish, will have a leg up on those which simply sprawl.  New York is already doing this….for the super rich.

There is no reason for most American cities to encourage the sort of super-dense apartment tower living seen in Asia and a handful of other places around the globe.  Except for San Francisco, New York, and a handful of other places in North America, there is plenty of room for infill and outward expansion.  Meanwhile a much higher quality lifestyle is possible, as well as big improvements to class mobility, if we expand high quality public transportation service into mid and mid-low density areas. 

E Rocc, do you have even a slight bit of quantifiable evidence to support your claims that Americans are more averse to density than other humans? Or that the Midwest somehow is moreso than other parts of the country? I think you're merely projecting at this point. There's very little to support your claims.

E Rocc, do you have even a slight bit of quantifiable evidence to support your claims that Americans are more averse to density than other humans? Or that the Midwest somehow is moreso than other parts of the country? I think you're merely projecting at this point. There's very little to support your claims.

 

I'm not sure you can quantify it.  But look at any less than full gathering place where there is not a central point of interest, such as a restaurant,  bar, waiting room, beach, or even a bus or train.  People spread out.  From what I have seen, that isn't the case in Asia.  Europe seems to be mixed.

 

There could even be genetic traits involved.  We would tend to get the part of the teeming masses that weren't shall we say inclined to be "teem players".

Also don't confuse density with overcrowding, they're two completely different things.  Density is units/acre or people/acre.  A highrise "tower in a park" can be less dense than a traditional city of 2 story semi-detached houses on narrow streets because the tower is surrounded by so much empty space.  Overcrowding on the other hand is measured in people/unit.  Usually a building is considered overcrowded when there's more people than there are rooms.  These are the tenements and shanties with multiple people per room sleeping on bunk beds, and they usually go hand-in-hand with high density, but you can have overcrowding in otherwise low-density trailer parks, poor farm houses, or what have you. 

 

Historically the reaction against cities was directed specifically at overcrowding.  Five families living in a single row house with no plumbing, etc.  However density became vilified as well despite being unrelated. 

Also don't confuse density with overcrowding, they're two completely different things.

 

But close, and one man's density is another man's overcrowding.

E Rocc, do you have even a slight bit of quantifiable evidence to support your claims that Americans are more averse to density than other humans? Or that the Midwest somehow is moreso than other parts of the country? I think you're merely projecting at this point. There's very little to support your claims.

 

I'm not sure you can quantify it.  But look at any less than full gathering place where there is not a central point of interest, such as a restaurant,  bar, waiting room, beach, or even a bus or train.  People spread out.  From what I have seen, that isn't the case in Asia.  Europe seems to be mixed.

 

There could even be genetic traits involved.  We would tend to get the part of the teeming masses that weren't shall we say inclined to be "teem players".

 

If we got the people who disliked density then why did they get here and build...cities. Dense cities. Big cities. Your theory falls apart when you look at how immigrants settled when coming to the Americas. They didn't sprawl out until the government made it super cheap to do so. They built just as densely as they did where they came from.

 

The idea that genetics plays any factor whatsoever in liking density sounds very pseudoscience.

 

Nature vs. nurture. If you've spent your entire life being told you "need" personal space, you're going to believe it. Go to any bar or restaurant in an urban area and the idea that people need to spread out finds some opposition. Think about events like Taste or Oktoberfest that draw suburbanites. They're ULTRA packed with people. If we were genetically against that those events would fail.

Also don't confuse density with overcrowding, they're two completely different things.

 

But close, and one man's density is another man's overcrowding.

 

One idiot man maybe.

Also don't confuse density with overcrowding, they're two completely different things.  Density is units/acre or people/acre.  A highrise "tower in a park" can be less dense than a traditional city of 2 story semi-detached houses on narrow streets because the tower is surrounded by so much empty space.  Overcrowding on the other hand is measured in people/unit.  Usually a building is considered overcrowded when there's more people than there are rooms.  These are the tenements and shanties with multiple people per room sleeping on bunk beds, and they usually go hand-in-hand with high density, but you can have overcrowding in otherwise low-density trailer parks, poor farm houses, or what have you. 

 

Historically the reaction against cities was directed specifically at overcrowding.  Five families living in a single row house with no plumbing, etc.  However density became vilified as well despite being unrelated. 

 

 

What's always remarkable to me is when visiting New York City and walking past the hi-rise public housing towers at night the sidewalks are often completely devoid of people.  There is hardly anyone outside doing anything in the "city that never sleeps" even though 50,000+ people live within a mile radius. 

 

 

Fun story, the average New Yorker gets more sleep per night than the average Cincinnatian or Clevelander.

 

The projects are awful from a pedestrianism standpoint. Only 16% of the land designated to public housing is actually occupied by a building. This could almost work if the remnant space was well thought out, the buildings created a continuous street wall, opened to the sidewalk, etc. Instead they are plopped aimlessly in a heavy-handed gesture across grass lawns that do nothing to inspire usage by residents. They kill all street life. Despite housing upwards of 100,000/sq. mile at times.

E Rocc, do you have even a slight bit of quantifiable evidence to support your claims that Americans are more averse to density than other humans? Or that the Midwest somehow is moreso than other parts of the country? I think you're merely projecting at this point. There's very little to support your claims.

 

I'm not sure you can quantify it.  But look at any less than full gathering place where there is not a central point of interest, such as a restaurant,  bar, waiting room, beach, or even a bus or train.  People spread out.  From what I have seen, that isn't the case in Asia.  Europe seems to be mixed.

 

There could even be genetic traits involved.  We would tend to get the part of the teeming masses that weren't shall we say inclined to be "teem players".

 

If we got the people who disliked density then why did they get here and build...cities. Dense cities. Big cities. Your theory falls apart when you look at how immigrants settled when coming to the Americas. They didn't sprawl out until the government made it super cheap to do so. They built just as densely as they did where they came from.

 

The idea that genetics plays any factor whatsoever in liking density sounds very pseudoscience.

 

Nature vs. nurture. If you've spent your entire life being told you "need" personal space, you're going to believe it. Go to any bar or restaurant in an urban area and the idea that people need to spread out finds some opposition. Think about events like Taste or Oktoberfest that draw suburbanites. They're ULTRA packed with people. If we were genetically against that those events would fail.

 

You're misunderstanding me.  I didn't say tightly packed crowds never occur.  I said that there has to be a reason.  The exact lines were "less than full" and "no central point of interest".

 

If a band is playing at a bar, people will cluster close to the stage.  If it's just a jukebox or a DJ, people spread out.  Seats or tables are left open between groups, couples, or individuals. 

 

Consider riding a bus or train.  When it's full, it's full. But when there are complete empty seats, isn't about the rudest thing you can do sit next to someone you don't know?

 

My understanding is this isn't the case in Asia or parts of Europe.

But that doesn't have any relation to how densely we live. You can live densely and have plenty of personal space when needed. You're using density as a synonym for crowding which just isn't the case. Not once have I felt crowded in my 500 square foot studio in my building of 33 units that occupies the same land area as the house I grew up in. In fact I actually feel like I have more personal space due to the nature of suburbia. When you have so few houses per acre everyone can see what everyone else is doing because there's so much open space. You can peer out your window and see all your neighbors. I look out my window and see a handful of other buildings' roofs and then the hills.

 

I still am not even close to convinced with your theory that immigrants represented people looking for more space. They were looking to escape the terrible conditions of their home countries. Invasive laws, tyrannical leaders, religious restrictions, extreme poverty, etc.

The United States from the very beginning had a different relationship with land ownership than Europe.  There were no Crown Lands here after the Louisiana Purchase, The Pope did not give away large tracts of American farmland for fighting in the Crusades, and there was not a Catholic Church that insidiously accrued vast holdings by claiming the inheritances of male heirs who were forced into celibacy.  As late as 1900, just 10,000 families controlled 90% of England's land.  Meanwhile there were literally *millions* of land owners in the United States.

 

But the weird thing is that all of the focus on land ownership in the early 1800s was old hat 100 years later as the profitability of farming (and tenant farming) waned.  The big money was in shares of ownership of banks, railroads, and industries. 

 

So the mid-20th century obsession with "land" depended on the short memories of the children and grandchildren of those who had escaped tenant farming in Europe.  We see in other ways how upward class mobility seems to inevitably point toward behaviors that resemble the old world aristocracy.  Golf, tennis, Dinner en Blanc, etc. 

 

Industrialization also made Midwestern cities particularly unpleasant places to live.  It's been a long time since Manhattan had significant manufacturing and it never had what Ohio and Michigan did in the industrial heyday.  Workers were attracted here because the same socioeconomic development that made agriculture less manpower-intensive (mechanization) also made factory work more lucrative, if dirty, which generated a powerful centripedal force that brought people into the cities even though they were less than pleasant in those sooty days.  People spread out when there was more opportunity to spread out (interstate highway system, etc.) and less keeping them here.

 

Also, with the exception of the cities that are right on the Great Lakes (and even they don't deal with it to the same extent many coastal cities do), Midwestern cities are almost never physically landlocked.  They might be politically landlocked, but that's a different problem.  It will be decades if not centuries before any of them run into the problem of the thread of really having "no room left to build."  Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati all have room to add tens of thousands of residential units--hundreds of thousands, with proper planning--without really threatening to burst at the seams or witness SanFran-style residential scarcity pricing.

I read an interesting article recently about how the Millennial generation doesn't remember pollution.  Smoke stacks, water pollution, car exhaust smog, etc.  I am just old enough to have seen Gary, Indiana in its red-air heyday and to remember Cincinnati's basin filled with smog and the multi-colored Mill Creek. 

 

In the late 90s is when I started to notice how much cleaner Cincinnati's air had gotten when it occurred to me that I hadn't seen the smog coming down from the hills in years.  I remember a smog cloud forming in the summers in the mid-90s between the GE plant and the I-75/275 interchange, 15 miles north of the city, but that doesn't happen anymore.  By the late 90s the trees had strongly recovered from the 1988 drought year and also the Ohio River started clearing up because of the invasive mollusks that came over from Asia.  Thanks to the mollusks the Ohio River now gets clean enough during the summer that you can see your feet if you wade in up to your knees. 

 

Interesting point, Jake.  On two fronts, the fact that we now have a generation who has no idea what smog is and the fact that pollution has been curbed so well.  Old photos of the skyline from the 70s and 80s show a shrouded city and soiled facades.  I suppose the advent of cleaner fuels has had the most effect.

Trouble is that leads to anti-environmental sentiments from the people who have no idea what it was like before.  "We don't need regulations, the air and water are fine!"  It's the same with the anti-vaccination nutbags, they haven't seen what measles, mumps, or polio can do to a person.

there was not a Catholic Church that insidiously accrued vast holdings by claiming the inheritances of male heirs who were forced into celibacy.

 

Damn, never thought of that and I've always been a big critic of the celibacy policy. 

 

My favorite joke now that there is a Pope Emeritus is where he finds out in the old documents that the word actually translates to "celebrate".

But that doesn't have any relation to how densely we live. You can live densely and have plenty of personal space when needed. You're using density as a synonym for crowding which just isn't the case. Not once have I felt crowded in my 500 square foot studio in my building of 33 units that occupies the same land area as the house I grew up in. In fact I actually feel like I have more personal space due to the nature of suburbia. When you have so few houses per acre everyone can see what everyone else is doing because there's so much open space. You can peer out your window and see all your neighbors. I look out my window and see a handful of other buildings' roofs and then the hills.

 

I still am not even close to convinced with your theory that immigrants represented people looking for more space. They were looking to escape the terrible conditions of their home countries. Invasive laws, tyrannical leaders, religious restrictions, extreme poverty, etc.

 

Those were the driving factors, but when there's a myriad of causes every little bit helps.  To someone with claustrophobia, or oversensitivity to noise and smells, the idea of living in a place like America would be more appealing.