alt Hacker NewsBut if you don't do that, what you end up with is housing projects - "villages", they're often called in the marketing brochure, built on greenfield sites with no access to amenities except by car. They're expensive, built to really crappy standards, and there's kind of nothing for anyone to do except stare at their huge flat-screen TV mounted too high on their grey-on-grey living room wall.
That happens because development is so absurdly regulated that the only way to get it done is to amortize your fixed costs over the whole "village" and then once that's done there's no subsequent infill development because those little things can't absorb the fixed costs.