There is only one American city.
Okay, maybe there are two: New York and San Francisco.
But after spending the past three years in major cities around the world, I keep coming back to the same thought: when it comes to the sheer scale of dense, urban life, the US has only one city that feels like it belongs in the same conversation as the world's great cities. That city is New York.
San Francisco is the closest thing we have to a second. I love it, and parts of it have the density, walkability, and character I want from a city. But it is much smaller, and the dense part doesn't extend nearly as far.
I'm talking about how a place is built and how it feels to live in it: how many people, homes, shops, restaurants, and streets are packed together; how far you can go on foot or by train; and how much of your life can happen without getting into a car.
Density changes how you live
In a dense city, you leave your apartment and you're already in the middle of things. You walk downstairs for coffee, pick up groceries on the way home, and see people on the street at every hour. A friend can meet you for dinner without either of you planning your day around a drive.
There are more restaurants because there are enough people nearby to keep them open. There are more small shops because customers can walk past them. There is enough activity to make a neighborhood feel alive on a Tuesday, not just when there's a game or an event.
These things sound small, but they add up. In a dense city, you don't have to make an appointment to participate in it. You can just walk outside.
This is what I miss in most American cities. They might have a beautiful downtown, a few walkable neighborhoods, great restaurants, and plenty of people. But often those places are separated by highways, parking lots, or long stretches built for cars. The city is there in pieces. The experience of moving between them is different.
New York and San Francisco
New York is the exception. It has the scale to sustain dense neighborhoods across multiple boroughs, with transit connecting them. You can walk for hours, cross from one neighborhood into another, and still feel like you're in the city the entire time.
San Francisco has a lot of the same ingredients in a much smaller package. Its neighborhoods have their own identities, and in the right part of town you can do a lot of your daily life on foot. But San Francisco's city limits contain less than a tenth of New York's population, and its urban fabric gives way much sooner.
The numbers help, although they don't tell the whole story. In the 2020 census, New York had roughly 29,300 people per square mile, while San Francisco had roughly 18,600. New York also had about 8.8 million residents to San Francisco's 874,000. Both density and scale matter.
City boundaries can be misleading. The Census Bureau measures the wider Los Angeles urban area as denser than the wider New York urban area, for example. Those figures include very different mixes of city and suburb. I'm talking about the continuous, walkable urban environment you experience on the ground, not claiming New York wins every density measure.
Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities have neighborhoods that get close to what I'm describing. I wish they had more of them. My point is that New York's density and connected urban life extend across a much larger area than anywhere else in America.
What China can build
Hong Kong makes the contrast hard to ignore. It is a place where millions of people live close together and where you can get around by walking, trains, buses, and ferries. Dense housing supports an incredible amount of life at street level. You can go from a residential tower to a grocery store, a train, and a restaurant in a matter of minutes.
Across the border, Shenzhen shows what happens when a country is willing to build at a different scale. In 1980, China designated Shenzhen a special economic zone, with favorable rules for trade and investment. Its location next to Hong Kong mattered enormously, as did the factories, jobs, infrastructure, and housing that followed.
Shenzhen wasn't built overnight, and it wasn't built from nothing. The point is that it became a major urban center within a few decades. China was able to create a new place for people and industry to gather beside an existing one, then continue building as it grew.
In America, we struggle to add enough homes and transit even in the places where people already want to live. Building an entirely new city with comparable density feels almost impossible.
We don't build cities anymore
Of course we build things. We build houses, offices, shopping centers, warehouses, and entire subdivisions. What we rarely build is a complete, dense, connected city where millions of people can live close to one another and get around without a car.
Housing, transportation, and public space need to grow together. If you build apartments without transit, everyone needs a car. If you build a train without allowing enough homes near the stations, too few people can use it. If every project takes years of approvals and fights, the result is too little of everything.
Meanwhile, the few places we already built at scale keep attracting people who want that kind of life. When we don't add enough housing for them, existing space becomes more expensive and more people get pushed farther away. The result is a city that is harder to enter and harder to sustain.
The US is a huge country. There is no good reason that the experience of living in a dense, walkable city should be limited to one or two places. But a new city won't appear just because we call a neighborhood a downtown. We have to actually build it: the homes, the trains, the sidewalks, and the space for everything that grows around them.
Until we do, New York will remain the only American city that feels truly comparable in scale to the dense cities I've spent time in elsewhere. San Francisco comes second. After that, there's a pretty big drop.