@LibertyLizard I did watch it. Like most videos of its type, it throws up a bunch of relevant-seeming statistics uncritically. You cannot make a bare comparison of rents between cities with wildly differing income structures and land values.
Did the author not wonder why Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are so low on the list, despite being highly desireable places to live?
@PuddleOfKittens It is very much a mistake to suggest that "traditional" cities grew "organically" or "naturally", or even that they represent "human scale". Human settlement has always been subject to land use restrictions. The European and Japanese cities featured in this article as exemplars evolved they way they did under severe feudal land restrictions, not because there was any kind of conscious choice to build that way. Article is 11 yrs old, "New Urbanism" is no longer fashionable.