The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.
It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "paving over more of the environment" and you can see that with just minutes spent with Google maps looking at satellite views of urban vs rural areas. Rural areas are filled with grasslands and trees (and farms) while urban areas are vast expanses of concrete and asphalt with tiny islands of grass and trees.
People in rural areas take up more land while at the same time using (and abusing) far less of it. Having largely unspoiled nature around you is a big part of the appeal to rural living, or so I'm told, I actually prefer living in cities.
Rural people don't pave over all of the land that they have, but they certainly pave over more of it than each person's share of paved over land in an urban setting.
If all the people in the entirety of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota lived at the density of NYC, more than half a million square miles or more than 99.9% of the entire land area in those states would be completely untouched wilderness[1]. If you think that all human habitation in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota combined has a smaller impact on the environment than 469 square miles of NYC, then you are clearly delusional.
[1] https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/10/popul...
Like I said: the greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment.
We need to find a better balance between stacking people on top of each other and destroying the ecosystem in the places where we live without any thought to biocapacity or local wildlife, and spreading out so far that it's impractical and inefficient to deliver or provide the goods and services humans want.
Since every human takes a massive toll on the local ecosystem, spreading that impact out more than we do in highly packed cities would be better for the environment and also better for humans who also suffer under those types of conditions. As I said, I don't think I've seen that balance hit quite right just yet, but it's something we're going to have to start thinking about more carefully as resources like drinkable water grow scarce, climate refugees from around the world are taken in, people along the costs are forced inland or to higher ground, and much of the western US succumbs to desertification and high temperatures that threaten to make large population centers unsustainable.
The US is likely going to get a lot more crowed in the future. We'll need to find a better way than absolutely trashing the land we settle on and suffering all the effects that go with that.
It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest that it's better for the environment to take up 1000 times as much of it.
And the parent commenter does not consider a garden "environment/nature".
Nature in general is important because it creates biodiversity and space to roam. Forests in particular are sequestering CO2 and are producing oxygen.
The average garden behind a detached house does approximately none of that.
It's cities that depend on gardens and parks to serve as the only available "nature". Rural areas are filled with forests and woods and grasslands and support far greater numbers and varieties of wildlife than cities do.
We could decide to pack people like sardines into the smallest possible space, completely destroy the local ecosystem in the areas where we live (allowing the pollution to spread outside of our overcrowded cities the same way China's pollution currently crosses the ocean to fill the skies in California), while also suffering the countless costs to our own health and safety those conditions cause in the process just so that we can have vast expanses of polluted but undeveloped land that no human can use for anything, but I propose something a bit more balanced, where we spread out enough so that the biocapacity of the land we settle on isn't exceeded, but still near enough to each other that we can still efficiently sustain a civilization. That means a population density that isn't overcrowded, but not so far apart that we lose all of the efficiencies we gain by living near each other. I'd much prefer to have biodiversity within the places we inhabit and keep space to roam for humans as well as the other animals.
[0]:https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/press/pr2023/2020-vital-s... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/life_expectancy/li...
You are saying “Rural areas have lots of forest”
Yea, but they do because not everybody is living there. If all the city people were moving to the countryside and building houses with big driveways and terraces like the country folk do, there would be much fewer forests.
That’s the point, I don’t know how to make it any clearer.
Cities are not the dirty hellholes you seem to think they are. Pollution doesn’t come from cities, it comes from power plants and factories. And that’s a totally solvable problem
I have actually seen this with concrete, but it is usually grass without trees. However, it isn't really the point. The point is this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/13/climate/clima...