> If every single person in New York city got themselves a suburban house, they'd take up 0.1% of the United States (about the area of two counties).
Not sure what you're trying to say with this, but putting 10 million people anywhere and packing them into any density would require enormous infrastructure that needs to be built and paid for.
Of course, this does happen at much smaller scales and in many places. The pattern is repeated all over the USA: developers buy up land from farmers who want to retire, then quickly erect sprawling tracts of cookie-cutter mcmansions, selling a pipe dream of rural living in plywood and tyvek box with a 2 car garage. This always has the effect of straining the local infrastructure, making traffic into a nightmare, boosting the cost of housing to the point where it's out of reach for locals, and sucking the taxbase out of the nearby urban area.
Not sure what you're trying to say with this, but putting 10 million people anywhere and packing them into any density would require enormous infrastructure that needs to be built and paid for.
Of course, this does happen at much smaller scales and in many places. The pattern is repeated all over the USA: developers buy up land from farmers who want to retire, then quickly erect sprawling tracts of cookie-cutter mcmansions, selling a pipe dream of rural living in plywood and tyvek box with a 2 car garage. This always has the effect of straining the local infrastructure, making traffic into a nightmare, boosting the cost of housing to the point where it's out of reach for locals, and sucking the taxbase out of the nearby urban area.