Consumption goes up when things are more spaced out. Electricity needs to travel farther on lossy lines. Water needs to be pumped over longer distances. Deliveries need to be sent to farther and farther points. Heating needs to cover a wider surface area. Unfortunately all of these relationship grow as a power law of density so your consumption must increase by a substantial amount with a more and more spacious development plan. A quick look at the CO2 emissions per capita of high standard of living countries quickly shows that expansive countries like Canada, Australia or the United States have much higher energy consumption than dense ones like the United Kingdom, Sweden or Japan.

Because the land use is that much more productive. High density cities pay for suburbs which are a net-drain on city finances and are terrible for the environment. The numbers in North America are pretty staggering.

There are plenty of examples around the world where dense urban living can be rather pleasant. You can walk to get your food, kids can cycle around town, and you can sit and gather in public places that are designed for people instead of moving traffic.

That can always be an argument. You could place all humans in Great Britain easily. Would perhaps be more productive as well. Imagine all the biotopes that could strive again. But it isn't a question about productivity and I believe the vast majority live in high density setups for utility. At least I do. It is nice enough but it remains a compromise.

Not from the US, but expect this story about high density areas paying for the others is a stupendous political argument to get people angry at those suburbians and not too much else. The distribution of funds is probably unjust, but the solution is certainly not to bring everyone into high density living.

The solution is to enable more mixed-use zoning and enable more dense development. The situation in North America is that we can only build low-productivity, high-cost, environmentally damaging suburbs. Which, in turn, leads to noisy, polluted cities with high levels of traffic congestion, collisions, and massive amounts of unproductive parking lots.

Plenty of European and Asian cities are good examples of how one can transform modern cities to be better balanced and pleasant for humans to live in.

US cities don’t do well without the suburbs, it’s a symbiotic relationship, you can’t separate the suburb cost from cities, suburban residents go to the cities to work where they register their economic value.

It absolutely is not, it's a parasitic relationship. Enough suburbs are aware of this dynamic that their local leadership tries really hard to annex their suburb into the city so that suburbanites can vote to change policies in the urban area. Suburbs strong arming cities into annexation is a common theme in the US and Canada.

How is it symbiotic? The developed, urban areas generate enough revenue to subsidize suburbs. Without those urban zones suburbs cannot generate enough revenue to provide the infrastructure and services they use.

If the suburbs were to be re-zoned for more dense development and mix-use zoning I don't think the urban areas would see any drop in revenue. They would probably see an increase.