[zuppy]

those places are nice for vacations, but without denser apartment buildings the city tends to expand a lot horizontally and after a while it's very expensive to have a decent public transportation system. it's mostly impractical for large cities to be built this way. i've seen very few cities that managed to make this work.

[cmarschner]

Not true, there are many places with traditional courtyard blocks and 3-5 stories that reach the population density of Manhattan