[asiachick]

> You might be surprised to find out that when people’s living quarters don’t occupy every inch of land in sight, it turns out that everyone can live comfortably and cleanly.

I'm not sure how to take that. Given the rest of your post I took that as people are at each other throats because they live too close but there are plenty of big densely packed cities were people get along with each other and "live comfortably and cleanly". That SF or NYC is not one of those has nothing to do with density.