Most of Chicago, the third-largest city in the US, is single-family houses with yards. For that matter, when I lived in San Francisco back in 99-2001, I had a yard.
Chicago has between 1.1-1.3 million people (twice as many) living at that density or higher: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Z3ai_T6K_40/T4I6B9akQDI/A.... It's actually more than that, because this data excludes satellite cities, which the Amsterdam figure above includes.
Another point of comparison. Chicago the city has 2.7 million people at about the same weighted density (19k/sq-mi) as the Amsterdam metro, which has 1.7 million people.
EDIT: these are not my charts. They're from this thread: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=198004.
Chicago quickly drops off past the 20k/sq-mi range too, which is basically typical rowhouse density. It only has 88,000 people living in >50k/sq-mi census tracts, mostly stretched out along the northern waterfront. Amsterdam has almost twice as many at 162,330.
Amsterdam isn't even that dense by European standards, although Swiss cities are probably similar. The densest cities are in southern Europe, ex Valencia has about 800,000 residents over 20k/sq-mi, and 400,000 residents living at 50k/sq-mi densities and it's not even a big city. https://chartingtransport.com/2015/11/26/comparing-the-densi...
But back to the original point... Chicago has fairly dense areas within a short commute of downtown - but those mostly have 2-3 flats and bigger apartments, and the few single family homes are quite expensive. For more affordable SFHs with a decent school and crime situation, I think you'd have to go to neighbourhoods that would be considered "suburbs" by European standards even if they're within city limits.
San Francisco is even more expense, the better neighbourhoods have SFHs at $2m+. More far flung areas like Sunset would be more like $1m which is still not exactly cheap and it's getting to be a long commute (40-50min each way by transit).
I'm getting the impression that Europeans would "call them suburbs" because they have affordable single-family houses in them, which makes this debate pretty disingenuous.
Chicago neighborhoods like Edgewater are in the 30-35k/square mile range, and are full of little single family homes with yards. That's well into walkable territory.
Almost every neighborhood in the city has a mix of freestanding single family homes, townhouses and 3-flats, and dense apartment buildings.
Some places like downtown Dallas are even more empty.
If you go outside in the downtown of most 200k+ cities, on any normal day, you’ll find lots of people there.
On the other hand, the residential suburbs will be dead.
But I’m gonna assume the relaxed zoning in the EU, and the resulting mix of commercial, residential, and offices, often even in the same building, leads to the people having a reason to go downtown.
These leads to a pretty common pattern where just outside of the financial/governmental centers of US cities there exist neighborhoods that are mixes of residential, cafe's, nightlife, "creative businesses" or retail. For instance, the Chicago loop is literally surrounded by such places.
But the lack of activity in a financial district has very little correlation to the density of the city. Manhattan is obviously a walkable and dense place to live but lower manhattan (wall street) can feel down right empty after hours.
I have much less experience in European cities, but my experience in Dublin, Amsterdam and Frankfort are not much different than this.
In Toronto the Financial District doesn't go completely dead, but the 4million square foot underground mall shuts down, and it's just a few ground level businesses that stay open. It's still more lively at night than the typical suburb, but not as bustling as the adjacent neighbourhoods or as the Financial District during the day when there 200,000 office workers there (vs just a few thousand tourists and residents within walking distance at night). From what I heard it's not as dead at night as the Chicago loop.
I only visited cities which don’t really have high-margin businesses, so that’s maybe why I never noticed that.
The St. Louis region, where I live, has nearly 3 million people (about half of which are inside the I-270/255 loop, for some context on a map), but only around 3000 residents in its primary Downtown neighborhood (and another 4000 or so in the adjacent Downtown West). These two neighborhoods have a population density that's lower than the city average (and much lower than in the most dense neighborhoods).
By the way, this actually represents a bit of a comeback for the neighborhood. There were only 800 residents Downtown in 2000. Warehouse-to-loft conversions became popular about 15 years ago, which has reversed the trend, at least for now.
That's my fault.
That being said, yeah, Chicago real-estate is still affordable for the middle class. I think Toronto is in a bubble (or somehow experiencing severely constricted supply) simply looking at the price of housing versus salaries in the region.
I'd buy there too if I wasn't planning on leaving this city in the next year or so. Housing prices are not what make me want to leave here, the climate and congestion are.
Obviously, if you're looking to buy in Lakeview or Logan Square or Lincoln Square, the numbers change. But I don't know why you'd want to do that.
Congratulations! I'm aware Oak Park has some affordable homes (but higher taxes) since much of my family lives there. But Oak Park is not Chicago and I was talking about Chicago. If I were going to live in one of the more remote Chicago neighborhoods that had $200k houses, I'd probably opt to live in Oak Park or Evanston since you'd get more for your money (sane school systems, etc.) without much more commute to the city center.
I don't think you can legitimately call Jefferson Park "remote" while saying you'd like to live in Evanston, which is much farther from the center of the city.
Jefferson Park is a straight shot down Milwaukee from the center of the city, and a pretty good chunk of every restaurant or bar you'd want to go to is along that shot. It's also got a Blue Line station, with better service than the Purple Line. For that matter, Jefferson Park is bisected by I-90. Have you ever had to commute between downtown (or anywhere else) and Evanston? It's a nightmare: you're a 20 minute drive from any major commuter road.
(I was born and raised on the south side of Chicago and moved to Evanston, and then Lakeview, when I was 18).
Bringing this all back to the point of the thread: a decent house in a nice neighborhood in Chicago will cost you $200, maybe $250 if you're optimizing. Well within reach of anyone in our industry. You can spend more. You can spend $500, or even a million. But it would be weird to do that. The fact that there are family-oriented neighborhoods in Chicago that people have barely heard of with all the conveniences of (say) Jefferson Park is the reason you can get such good deals on houses here. Chicago is just a well-designed city.
http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Illinois/Chicago-heat_map/
For what it's worth: I paid nothing close to 500k in Oak Park, 5 minutes on foot from the Green Line, in one of the best school systems in the area.
http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/house_type/3-_beds/0-25...
This is dominated by auctions and homes in very rough west-side neighborhoods. Yes, there are a small handful of exceptions which are typically very old homes that have not been updated in decades, but to act like above $250k is "weird" or out of the norm is just not in line with reality.