> I'm sorry you feel it's inflammatory to question urbanization & public transport as panaceas.

That's not what you did and its not what I objected to. But do play up the whole victim complex you have going on.

You are truly hitting all the 'alt-right' highlights. First make grand statements using totally misleading statistics then when this is pointed out to you react with 'Oh sorry I'm not allow to question things'.

There are actually good statistics that you could have used to make your point, but you didn't.

> Second, nobody is saying public transport doesn't make sense inside the most dense US cities like LA, SF, etc (yes NYC exists).

All of these huge places are by far big enough to have a robust local and regional public transit network. And then you connect those networks with an inter-regional connection, making both networks stronger by doing so.

That argument might not make sense to connect NYC with Denver. But it makes a hell of a lot of sense for LA and the Bay area. Specifically when both are trying to expand their public transit network and there are major cities in between where people would like to access both the Southern and the Northern regional transport networks.

> The issue is the network beyond those areas, due to suburbanization.

Aggregate density statistics would look the same no matter if urbanization or suburbanization.

> Third, when discussing internet people's fetishization of European density over American suburban sprawl, its not crazy to bring up downsides -- of which there are many.

And yet of those many non of the ones mentioned were correct or made sense or had statistical evidence backing them up. Maybe that why you got pushback.

Then you spun into some nonsense argument about Hitler.

> It's true, the German desire for territorial expansion (and resulting World Wars and Genocides) were a direct result of perceived overpopulation.

Assuming this was true, the term 'perceived' is meaningless. People can 'perceive' anything if they want to with enough ideology. The evidence would have clearly point out that they were wrong.

And people like you making argument in favor of those wrong positions against evidence are part of the problem with that perception.

> I dunno...I would call that a downside?

You are literally reducing WW2 to an argument about housing density. That completely ridiculous.

What matters to the Nazis was not relative density of urban areas but rather the TOTALITY of LAND and RESOURCE under state control. The wanted this to compete with continental scale powers like US and the Soviets.

So their conquests and ideology had LITERALLY nothing to do with urban housing density. They didn't see Berlin and think 'man people are so close together here, I guess we need to conquer Ukraine. That just total wrong, your argument is 100% wrong.

I suggest you read Adam Tooze work on Interwar and WW2 economics.

In terms of their architecture and city design they were french and Napoleonic inspired.

> I know it's impossible to understand for an internet person in 2024, but childless urban living wasn't always cool and aspirational. Why do you think the automobile found such strong product-market-fit in the 1900s.

The largest expansion in human population happened when humans started to live together more closely during the industrial revolution. And immigrants who usually have more kids most often move to cities as well.

The biggest fear of the 'over population' crazy people are mega cities like Delhi and Lagos.

Unless you have really amazingly solid statistics about humans living in density having much lower child rates when taking into account education, wealth and other factors. But you have not presented any such evidence. You have just asserted it to be true.

And even if it was true, to create urban sprawl just in the vague hope that people are gone have more kids is insane.

> If we want to argue of the semantics of "roughly the same,"

If you think '35%' qualifies as 'roughly the same' I question your sanity.

Need I remind you that you used pre-WW2 statistics and millions of people got displaced or killed? And millions of men died, leading to less kids? That had long term effects on population.

So if anything that 35% totally under-sells how many people would be in Europe how had WW2 not happened. So the argument that Europe grew less was related to housing density is nonsense.

WW1 had happened and reduced long term growth potential, then WW2 happened and made it worse. So of course for the next couple decades the US had a powerful economy and literally millions of Europeans went to the US and had kids there and many millions of Mexicans and Cubans (and many others) moved to the US. And non of that happened because of housing density.