For those "youngsters" out there from us over 40

Rice Nuker said
The amazing thing is the scale of effort to migrate majority of the population to high density cities,

.,

You're going way back...to the Industrial Revolution. In the 70's and 80's populations started to get pushed into suburbia. I grew up in Fremont. In the 60's, it was mostly farmland. By the end of the 90's, it was completely developed.