this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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Stores shouldn't be included though. You still need stores whether the housing is dense or not. People still need to eat and need clothes whether they walked to the store next door or drove from their house. And parking lots again is weird because that's not a suburban sprawl thing quite as much either. You could do parking garage and walkable downtown areas much more than is done in the US. Sure it's still not the most efficient, but it should be counted separately from housing.
Stores should be included for both clearly. It's all part of the overall density.
Parking garages are expensive and still take space. More people driving also inflates roads, around stores just as much as elsewhere.
And the fact that suburban sprawl stores simply don't build garages and instead have massive lots should definitely be counted into density.
If you call it housing density or suburban density or any other density I don't really mind, but this is the metric to cut down to make places nicer. And cheaper. Since ultimately all of this is also paid for with the economy, i.e. the peoples money.
If your road bill is small but your store's bills huge, you'll still pay more.
But that's not housing density which is what this entire discussion has been about. That's city density (or urban density, depending on which city planner you talk to), an entirely different metric. You should not conflate the two as then discussing city planning becomes impossible because nobody will be using the same terms.
Housing density is, should be, and will always be, how many residences you have per chunk of land (acres in us, hectares in UK).
I would read that as the entire settlement. Same way as replacing "suburbs" with "cities" would also include commerical and utility.
If americans don't consider commerical areas part of suburbs, where do you go to buy stuff?
Suburb is specifically residential. You might have a pharmacy here or there but by and large it's residences. Thats the definition of suburb. The commercial area at the edge of suburbs you go to get groceries and clothes is exactly that, a commercial district.