I'm on the Upper West Side. 42,000 per square kilometre. More people live in these 500 hectares than the hundreds of square kilometres of Darwin where I grew up

I'm on the Upper West Side. 42,000 per square kilometre. More people live in these 500 hectares than the hundreds of square kilometres of Darwin where I grew up. At the end of my street there is a cleaner, a hardware store, grocery store and restaurant. Within view of the grocery store is another grocery store. A street over from the hardware store is another hardware store. Two streets down? Another restaurant. You get the idea. And then if I need something really specialised, I hop on a train and go to one of the mini-districts where I can find a whole street of something. Or I ring them, or visit their website, and get it delivered. A month ago I was in a three-story cloth store with a friend. On a street full of cloth stores. I had no idea such things existed. But they do. There's a curtain district. A street where I find several places selling mattresses. Famously, a street of jewelers. Again: you get the idea. Living a middle-class life in a dense city is a kind of convenient normally reserved for the rich.