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Expecting 31,416 square miles of area with a median height of 5 stories would be wild. That's most of the entire Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale MSA (~37,000sqmi).

But yet people think the heart of Paris, Rome or even Hong Kong are wonderful. Build the neighborhoods correctly and beautifully and the city can continue indefinitely

The Paris metro area (Aire d'attraction des villes) is only ~7,300 square miles, with the city proper only being 41 square miles. They're talking 31,400 square miles of essentially Paris proper.

So imagine the city of Paris, but stretched about 766x. If you want to include the whole metro area, then ~4.3x

Hong Kong is ~431 square miles. So about 73 Hong Kongs. But not really, because only ~25% of that area is actually urban. So more like 291x the urban area of HK.

Just because the scale doesn’t exist today doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built.

500 years ago people would have thought any of the cities described were impossible.

> doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built.

I never said anything contrary to that. I'm just saying it would be wild to see a metro area that size with that high of average development.

The above commenter suggested:

> It might literally be nowhere in the US.

It's definitely not a thing in the US. It's almost certainly not a thing in Europe either, but I'm open to being proven wrong there. It might exist in China, I haven't looked. A 100mi radius circle is massive in area. Pies are squared, if you get my point.

I'm actually inclined to believe it was a typo for 10 mile radius.

But if you design the city correctly around self contained neighborhoods that are no more than a 15 minute walk no one has to commute that far.

This makes no sense. People want to commute to the best job they can get, not the one that happens to be in their neighborhood. And people aren't going to move neighborhoods when they move jobs, especially with spouses and kids who have jobs and schools in the existing place.

Id argue you are just taking the status quo as inevitable when it is really just a result of policy choices and not how human society has ever been structured before

Madrid is doing this. Savanah Georgia did this. Manhattan did this. You could also reverse the consolidation of everything. Instead of CVS owning every pharmacy, incentives to prompt the pharmacy being owned by the pharmacist. Or a local butcher. And most jobs that require commutes don't require it now, and if cities were built with the appropriate mix of housing all incomes could live in a section of down further cutting down on commutes.

> My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle.

That's kind of the point. Notice that housing demand is recursive.

The area you're talking about is NYC metro. If you draw a 100 mile radius around Manhattan then Poughkeepsie is inside it. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute to Manhattan? Probably not. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute in the direction of Manhattan? Absolutely. Which in turn recursively alleviates housing pressure in that direction. More housing in Poughkeepsie frees up existing housing in Peekskill, more availability in Peekskill frees up existing housing in Yonkers, lots of people are willing to commute from Yonkers to Manhattan.

And both "100 miles" and the NYC metro area (the highest population density metro area in the US) are far extremes. The point is that even that would improve affordability if it was the only option. Meanwhile in reality there are single family homes that could be 5 story buildings in Yonkers, if it wasn't prohibited by zoning.

> If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.

If you actually did that, would housing affordability improve? Yes it would. It's in fact what's slowly happening on its own when the better alternatives are banned; it's why housing in Manhattan isn't twice what it is now. But that's sprawl. Sprawl sucks. People pay less for housing but have 60 minute commutes. Why do that by adding far away single family homes instead of adding medium-height buildings closer to where people work?

Is your suggestion "we should do the status quo, except the bridge and tunnel commuters should be confined to tiny high-rise enclaves clustered around train stations strung out over a hundred miles"?

My suggestion is that we should get rid of zoning density restrictions and allow the market to respond to high housing costs in a sensible way instead of the nonsensible way it's being forced to right now.

It's the people who like density restrictions who keep trying to force people to build high rises next to train stations. But that's the thing that doesn't work, because high rises cost significantly more per unit to build and if you constrain where things can be built like that then the cost of land in the few areas that allow multi-unit housing gets out of control because of the legislated scarcity.

If NYC lifts all its density restrictions, why do you need people commuting inward over a hundred mile radius?

High rise buildings cost significantly more per unit to build than mid rise buildings or single family homes. They would continue to exist or even increase in number in places like Manhattan because some people are willing to pay the extra cost to have even a slightly shorter commute, and then the cost of land closer to that area will still be higher than it costs further away because of expected future growth. Building mid rise buildings reduces the effective scarcity of land, doesn't eliminate it.

So the availability of housing 100 miles away still affects the price, because there are still people (e.g. retirees who only go into the city once a month) who would choose a longer distance for a lower rent, or who prefer to live in a lower density area even for a similar cost, and giving them a place to get that means they're not bidding up the price in the city.