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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> Can't tell from your comment - do you think that is higher-density or lower-density compared to where you are now?

Ah. I live in California, population density 254 per mi², so about a third. California is also 2 times smaller than Pakistan - since a lot of California is inhabitable (contrast with Pakistan) and the surrounding areas easily accessible, it translates to a lot of "breathing room", even if you live in a densely populated county like San Francisco or Los Angeles.

> That is high compared to the USA as a whole, but 742/sq mile is low compared to ~50 other countries.

Made me look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

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It's really easy to forget how incredibly large a mile is. A single square mile is just under 28 million square feet. A population density of 742/sq mile means each person would have about 37,000 square feet to themselves. Not exactly a struggle for leg room.

Large scale population densities don't tell you anything, due to the fact that we have this habit of trying to fit as many of ourselves into the smallest places possible. San Francisco city, for instance, has a population density of 18,634/square mile. And while that's relatively dense it's dwarfed by places like Manila (Philippines) with a density > 111,000 per square mile. And if you want to go full on crazy there was Kowloon Walled City [1] in Hong Kong which had a population density in excess of 5,000,000 per square mile! That number's a bit misleading due to verticality, but not by much! That's probably the most densely packed area of a sizable population that there has ever been, and by a pretty wide margin.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

Amusingly, Trantor -- the Galactic Capital World in Asimov's Foundation series, a world covered by one giant city, so populous it was -- only works out to around 534/sq mile.

California is kind of unusual in that it consists almost exclusively of places that are either extremely dense or extremely empty [1]. Compare that e.g. to Germany [2], with 2.4 times the average population density but much more evenly spread out.

Pakistan is a bit of a mix of both: three quarters are pretty empty, but the population is spread somewhat evenly over the rest [3]

1: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-population-de...

2: https://i.redd.it/oz7m4lfy37b51.png

3: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8e/fb/11/8efb11c1d9cc698ddca2...

This is very important - local population density matters much more than some sort of "average" - if California ordered their army into Nevada and added it to their territory, the population density would drop from about 253 to about 154.

But nothing at all has changed!

Population density is only one aspect of "what it feels like to live somewhere" - local density, land usage, etc all play into it.

In Mountain View, California (~Silicon Valley) the density is 6,700/sq mi.

what's your county population density? http://www.usa.com/rank/california-state--population-density...

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