Ray Delahanty of CityNerd recently rebutted Conor Dougherty’s New York Times recent pro-sprawl op-ed. In a video titled “Density vs. Sprawl: A Spicy Top 10 List,” Delahanty shows how density generates high-amenity, livable neighborhoods that are far less car dependent than the sprawling suburbs that Dougherty celebrates in his hot take. Sprawling areas that seem affordable largely achieve that by requiring a lot of driving, which spikes transportation costs for residents, largely off-setting their housing savings while driving up climate pollution.
CityNerd’s top ten list shows a variety of housing affordability outcomes. A high-density cross-section of San Francisco or Los Angeles do have high housing prices (as does sprawl in those metro areas), but similarly dense cross-sections of Chicago and Philadelphia are relatively affordable. And Delahanty notes that suburbs obtain the appearance of affordability only temporarily and in mirage fashion: they do not have a dense enough tax base to cover maintenance needs over the long term, which leads Strong Towns leader Chuck Marohn to call sprawling suburbs a Ponzi scheme.
I wrote about how we need more sprawl and the word itself is sorely misunderstood. It took me a while to get here, but I got here. Find your hate-read here: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/m…
— Conor Dougherty (@conordougherty.bsky.social) April 10, 2025 at 7:47 AM
[image or embed]
Seattle did not make the top ten population density list for U.S. cities. The densest three-kilometer radius circle of Seattle had a population just over 152,000 in Ray’s analysis. That’s less than half the density of the densest sections of LA and San Fran and a fourth the density of New York City’s densest cross-sections. In fact, Seattle’s figure was modest enough to be beat out by the densest section of Las Vegas. Clearly, Seattle has some work to do.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.