[gobbluth]

I do live in an urban environment (NYC for a decade now), and you're... confused on some counts. Public transportation is radically faster than cars, at least in any city with a fraction of the same population. Have you ever tried to drive through Atlanta or Miami? And living in an urban environment doesn't demand high-rise towers -- walkable townhouses and height-restricted buildings abound, and there's no shortage of human-friendly neighborhoods in New York. (I also hate midtown Manhattan, but that's nowhere near representative of city living.)

If you absolutely need a car for big purchases, Zipcar and its competitors are easily accessible. If you're older, you have BETTER options here in the form of delivery services than you'd have in a rural setting. If you'd like to get a little further away from the city in a nice, quiet Queens neighborhood, you can hope on the express train and read a book while you're zipped to your destination.

Hong Kong is a different animal just because it's, well, Hong Kong. But nothing in the world quite compares to that, and you really shouldn't associate New York or Paris with that crazy city.

[briandon]

The walkable townhouses and height-restricted buildings you're talking about (1.) only exist so long as the aesthetic/lifestyle value of a low-risey city balances against the demand for more housing and developers' desire to make money and (2.) make public transport trips take longer because you have to walk past more of your neighbors' low-rise buildings to get to a public transport hub and the bus/train/whatever has to travel farther (past the low-rises) to get anywhere and also make more stops if more hubs/stations have been built to offset the problem of people living relatively far apart in those low-rise buildings.

[gobbluth]

You, sir, have never been to Brooklyn.

[briandon]

Please, do step into my handy dandy time machine. We'll set it for thirty years in the future and then step out for a moment and count the number of hip, low-rise brownstones that we can see and then try to pick out the Brooklyner from amongst the other highrises.

I think that you're living in Brooklyn and enjoying it, which is great, and idealizing it without thinking about how Brooklyn is actually changing right around you.

[The Brooklyner is a 51-story skyscraper recently built in Brooklyn: the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyner ]