Why Density Matters
A couple months ago, a new website launched that I found quite interesting. I finally found a bit of time to go through it.
The site, now called UrbanStats, provides a variety of density-related data and more including education, income, election-related data, and more.
I thought it’d be fun to poke around and see what kind of things I can find.
For instance, the most dense zip code in the country is on the Upper East Side: 10075. There are 22.5 thousand people in a small spit of land between Central Park and FDR Drive around 79th street. There are 113,394 people per square-mile. It is also one of the wealthiest and Democrat-leaning in the country.
On the opposite side, the zip code 99695 is the least dense zip code. One person lives here for a density of 0.82 people per square-mile. There must be some data inconsistencies since it says the 6% of people here make more than 100K a year. They also voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
As a whole New York City is quite dense, being the most populated and dense city in the country by a wide margin. Los Angeles is second in population and West New York town, New Jersey is second in density.
I also wanted to look up my hometown, which is surprisingly dense by American standards.
Skyscraping
New York has a lot of dense neighborhoods, but it’s interesting to see the exceptions. City Island, zip code 10464, is one of the least dense by New York standards at 2879 people per square-mile. Zip code 11363 in Flushing is also quite sparse, at 7102 people per square-mile. It’s even slightly less dense than the ultra-suburban Staten Island, whose least dense zip code of 10307 has 7129 people per square-mile.
It’s important to acknowledge that square-miles are not necessarily the best metric for personal comfort. Tall apartment complexes are able to let more people live in the same area while giving them enough space to live. So perhaps the database should also include density per cubic-mile.
But I digress. I really want to talk about climate change. We know it’s a problem. We know we should be preserving trees and nature. Yet Americans in particular have a tendency to sprawl. Highways will displace communities and nature, and our need to burn cheap gasoline is making the world worse off.
We are making progress, but too often this progress is stymied by those who would prefer to protect their nest egg of property value than let one single affordable apartment be built in their neighborhood.
New York City houses 8.8 million people across just 302.6 square-miles. That’s quite dense! But we’ve seen that even that density isn’t evenly distributed. What would the world be like if we tweaked some of those numbers?
Let’s start with Douglaston, the neighborhood within Queens at 11363. If their density was uniform, the city could only house 2.1 million people. That’s a sharp decrease and would definitely limit the opportunities for cultural and personal enrichment. In the other direction, a city full of skyscrapers like the Upper East Side could hold 34.3 million people. That’s more than 10% of the entire country.
Build the Cube
This is a pretty funny meme, and of course would be a challenge to actually build in practice for all manner of logistical and political reasons. But we should think a lot more about the value of density in climate change.
Denser communities don’t require long highways. High-frequency public transit becomes financially feasible. People can easily re-use resources like building-wide electricity, water, and temperature control. Smaller units even need less energy to cool down in the summer.
The USA is about 3.8 million square-miles. If it was setup to be as densely packed as Douglaston, we could hold nearly 27 billion people. If it was entirely full of skyscrapers, we could hold 431 billion people.
Certainly neither make a lot of sense. There are only 8 billion people in the world today, and that’s not going to double anytime soon. In fact, a Douglaston-like project to hold every person in the world would only need 30% of the country’s land devoted to housing, 1.14 square-miles. The rest could be used for agriculture and then even more could be rewilded.
Of course, if we’re only talking about Americans, we’d only need to use 1.2% of the country’s land for housing if everywhere was like Douglaston. Currently, 3.1% of land is used and that’s probably an undercount. Maybe we can’t rewild a large percentage, but it would be great just to curb the tendency to sprawl.
(As a sidenote, if we housed every American in a skyscraper, we’d only need 0.08% of US land, which amounts to just 3100 square-miles.)
Anchorage Analysis
But I noted that even Douglaston was quite dense in the list of zip codes. Let’s see what would happen if every zip code was as dense as the one in Alaska, with about one person on four square miles.
The entire country could only hold 3.1 million people. That’s about how many Americans there were in 1780. To hold every New Yorker, we’d need 10 million square-miles. There’s only 57 million square-miles of land across the entire world.
It’s not just an isolated community in Alaska. Polk County, Texas, Green Lake County, Wisconsin, and Philadelphia’s Navy Yard are all places with opportunity for housing and urban development.
We can dream bigger. We can give people the benefits of community and neighborhoods while protecting our natural resources. We need to build, but look up rather than out.
