I agree. But we should be seeing a spectrum of density with the urban core having some skyscrapers and as you go out from the core, density drops exponentially like a bell curve. Vancover is a bit nuts b/c they have single family homes next to sky scrapers (nimby driven, no?). Janky density distributions are a sign of bad urban planning, endemic to North America.

Side note (slightly rambling): Florida is hitting a wall. Traffic flowed smoothly for a while until the last 10 years in places like South and Central Florida. Miami is full (inefficient urban planning meaning it is prematurely full). Orlando is next to fill up.

Suburbs have a fixed capacity to handle people. Jobs cluster geographically (see Hotelling law[1]), so getting people in low density suburbs to work becomes logistically challenging when the population hits a certain number (~2M?). Like an N to M network problem that expands in complexity exponentially O(n^2). The graph with x-axis in population and y-axis in traffic jams is flat till that limit is reached, then the chart spikes up like a wall.

[1] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/09/17/why-do-competi... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling's_law