>Our basic goal, in all this, is to deliver roughly triple the density as this “New Urbanist” model, while still preserving what looks very much like a “traditional Small Town America single family house,” including a nice backyard and lush, tree-lined streets. This is what gets us from 8,000 people per square mile, for a typical Los Angeles suburb (with 5000sf plots), to maybe 10,000 for the New Urbanist example and more like 25,000-30,000 for our example. We have already seen how our basic house plot shrinks from 4000sf to 2000sf, which doubles the density right there. We even have some smaller house plots of 1,250sf and 625sf. Then, we have a huge amount of land now being consumed by vastly excessive roadways and associated Green Space, that we can replace with Really Narrow Streets, thus freeing up more land for houses. For example, if the house plot/total land area ratio rises from 50% to 75%, that is a 50% increase in density right there. The combination of half the lot size plus a 50% increase in density due to reduction in land used for streets/Green Space/parking lots gives us our triple density bogey. Triple the density means that every store or restaurant now has 30,000 people who are within an easy walk of 15 minutes or so, which means that they can have a viable business without a parking lot. It means that every school now has three times as many students that are within an easy walk. No more chauffering your kids to school. No more school buses. At 30,000 people per square mile, and if 15% of the people are school age (6-17), that means 4500 kids are within walking distance of the school. It means that the four-year high school would have about 1500 students, all within a half-mile walk of the school. It means that, if a train station is introduced later, three times as many people will be able to walk there as well. In short, everything becomes a lot more “walkable.” By making it walkable, we thus eliminate the need for cars unless travelling outside the immediate neighborhood, which eliminates auto traffic and also makes the neighborhood much more peaceful, quiet, and suitable for kids, families, and seniors.
I think the issue with this approach is it doesn't take away individualism. Everything is still too far away. Most people still have cars and look for parking for hours. The parks are few and something like 30 minute walk away. Your friends and gym are also going to be 30 minutes walk away. It's not dense enough for subways everywhere and buses stop on every block so it makes just as much sense to walk. Nobody walks anywhere besides their neighborhood and there is usually nothing in their neighborhood.
So it's really worse than suburbs and worse than city center that has buildings. Worse than city with buildings because you don't share common resources so everyone is still for themselves. You also don't get nice things like common public playgrounds and parks.
It's worse than the suburbs because you still get the same problems of it being difficult to get places but now it's even harder. You still get "what's mine is mine and I don't want public things" but now you have less of your own stuff and fewer public things because real estate is expensive. You also don't get the diversity of food or clothes that you would get in a city.
I think the ideal is 90k/sq mile in the places where people live with 4-6 story buildings.
I do see your point. The author is modelling this as a transitional form of a suburban neighbourhood that could later be intensified. Additionally, it should be read with understanding of his previous writing on cities [1]. You'll see he capitalizes a lot of terms (e.g. Really Narrow Street) which are intended as references to concepts he has fleshed-out in other posts. A major component of his vision for cities is the idea that (most) streets should be pleasant, attractive Places (as opposed to Non-Places) to spend time, and should be public spaces in their own right. Rather than have urbanites "get away" from the city by visiting parks, he would have the city be a place that people do not need to "get away" from. A street could
In a city with 10x the people, you can have 10x more shops, restaurants, etc, and you’ll as result also get 10x more variation.