> The nice thing about indoor space is that we can make pretty much as much of it as we'd like.
What? Have you ever been in Lisbon? The city is pretty dense as it is. You could mostly just build higher, and that has its limits too, depending on the structure and foundation.
Adding more housing outside the core of the city might not be attractive enough. And increasing the density of people also means you need to increase the density of services (public and private) and utilities, which also comes with its own problem.
Libson is a global city, easy air access to pretty much everywhere in europe/us/asia, good international schools, low cost of living, and very importantly, very mild, california-like weather. Once you have kids, you need access to good international schools so that they can integrate back into US public schools/colleges without getting left behind academically. Also you have access to a lot more culture and night life than out in the country. For young people the dating pool in large cities is very deep. Getting out of Libson/Porto as an expat, dating can be difficult if you're not a fluent speaker of the local language, and Portuguese is wildly different from Spanish when spoken, even though they look similar on paper.
Yep. Gotta love even more cars and people / m2, as if traffic wasn't bad enough as it is. Some people really just think the solution is to cram more people into an already overflowing place. And please don't compare with SF or NY. Those are definitely not models. Everyone knows how shit the traffic is there. A good urban planning will limit population density by, among others, limiting height of buildings.
They can build higher than that. New apartment/condo towers in Tokyo are routinely over 50 stories, and that's in a place that gets earthquakes routinely.
What? Have you ever been in Lisbon? The city is pretty dense as it is. You could mostly just build higher, and that has its limits too, depending on the structure and foundation.
Adding more housing outside the core of the city might not be attractive enough. And increasing the density of people also means you need to increase the density of services (public and private) and utilities, which also comes with its own problem.