> So city dwellers will always pay more per unit area because of building costs. And yet many will pay, because the benefits of cities are desirable. > Second

> So city dwellers will always pay more per unit area because of building costs. And yet many will pay, because the benefits of cities are desirable. > Second, traffic from density imposes costs on transportation. So movement is more difficult in a dense environment. There may be an absolute limit, but with well-executed transit, the density of cities can offer mobility options that less dense communities could not begin to consider. > Eventually, these costs overwhelm the networking benefits of cities, and dispersion is the result. I agree, but in my take, that's largely because cities are artificially expensive owing to the speculative value of land-- you simply can't build better transit because the cost of land rights would be gigantic. You can't afford to build denser apartment buildings because homeowners enforce restrictive zoning to protect their land values... It's exactly correct that this all benefits rentiers. But I think the right solution is better land-use policy which directly targets rent.