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That right implicitly exist in America.
The people living in big cities with the highest population densities, in short 'urbanites' are the ones electing lax-on-crime government, supporting crime and rioting.
Sprawl is intimately-related to white flight, which has been a thing for quite a while. Local example : affluent neighborhood votes against a bus line coming through. Why? On one hand they would benefit from their kids being able to take public transit, or just being able to ditch their vehicle once in a while, on the other hand having a bus line come through their neighborhood means having people from the other side of the bus line (ie poor people) commute through and potentially stop in their neighborhood. For the same reason these people pay premium to live in gated neighborhoods, they vote against bus lines.
Riots are not unfrequent. In living memory, notably the 1967 Newark riots, 1992 Los Angeles riots, 2014 Ferguson riots. Unrest also followed the death of Trayvon Martin, in an altercation with a member of a neighborhood watch, just the kind of people that would oppose policies that would help more Trayvon Martins to show up in their neighborhoods.
25 this year apparently. But subway-pushers are not the only criminals in NYC.
Bernie Goetz is simply the avatar of the American vigilante. More recent example is Rittenhouse. Americans are simply not going to live next to one another without violence, simply because a whole 13% of their population commits a lot more violent crime than the rest.
America itself can be very peaceful locally. Sprawl is just a way to pick your neighbors when the federal government made every other tool illegal like redlining, Jim Crow etc.
For the record I actually support reducing the influence of the car, but I understand that it simply is not practical in America without ramping up the efficiency of the police or relaxing self defense and gun control laws in big cities.
This is exactly the opposite than what the urbanites are voting for, so it's not surprising that anybody that gets to work remotely would move to safer, less dense areas.
I don't think even most city-dwelling Democrats actually supported the riots, but so? What do you think is actually going to happen? Do you think that living slightly closer together would cause suburbs or small towns to radically change their voting patterns?
Voting against a bus line is whatever. I'm thinking about zoning laws that say "you own this land and pay thousands of dollars a year in property taxes, but you are legally barred from building anything except a single family home of this size and which your neighbors have say over how it looks." In my mind that's not the proper role of government. If you want to keep someone out of a space, that's up to the owner. You don't get to buy 1 acre and control everything that happens for a mile every direction.
That's not very frequent at all, especially since you're typically referring to events in 1 city. An individual's chance of being affected by any of these riots is quite small, even among people living in a downtown; for someone living in an outskirt or suburb, the chance is smaller still, and would be unaffected by making that suburb slightly denser (it's not like rioters pause their destruction while they wait for the bus to the outer part of the city).
Millions of people choose to live along the Gulf Coast or the Southeast Atlantic, despite a regular threat of storms that are more destructive and probably more regular than that. For example, Hurricane Ian from this year, which is already passed out of the collective memory, inflicted 50 times as much property damage as the Rodney King riots and killed over twice as many people.
NYC has a violent crime rate of about 0.005 per year per person, in contrast to the nationwide car crash rate which is about .02 per person per year. Unfortunately I can't easily find good statistics on how bad most crashes are, but even a "small" crash can result in injuries and thousands of dollars of damage.
Focusing on deaths, the comparison is much easier--more than 3 times as many people die in car crashes as in all homicides combined (and that's not counting vehicle crashes that kill people not in cars). You are almost certainly much safer taking the NYC subway to work than driving a comparable commute.
I don't think that reducing NIMBYism is going to radically alter the demographics of many neighborhoods. Many walkable places are quite desirable, with apartments in mixed-use developments being snatched up by yuppies. Lots of people probably rent in a neighborhood they might like to buy in, but can't afford to. People who are very poor are still not going to be able to afford to live in nice middle-class neighborhoods, and really sprawling areas can still exist for the people who want them.
I went to college on the South Side of Chicago, in a very nice, walkable, dense neighborhood. It reaches a population density of, I believe, 18K per square mile, despite consisting of mostly single family homes, duplexes/triplexes, and small apartment blocks. And despite being surrounded by some of the most notoriously dangerous urban areas in the country (which, by the way, are on the outskirts, not downtown) very little of that trickled in. Yes, sometimes, it does. But for how close it is physically, and how easy it is to walk or bike or take the bus into the neighborhood, it happens pretty infrequently. And, if Zillow is to be believed, it's still very desirable.
This I'm really curious about, do you have data? I know many people left the Bay, specifically. And Austin seemed to explode in popularity--not as woke or dense as the Bay, but pretty blue nonetheless, and certainly not a small rural town.
edit: one last thing. Some of the ritziest places in the country are either in cities (NYC's Tribeca and similar areas, Chicago's Golden Mile, etc) or are in small, remote towns but which still manage to be walkable. Fire Island, Vail, Telluride, etc. The former bans cars and the latter 2 are dense, with pedestrian plazas, free buses, mixed-used development, duplexes and apartments, etc. It's entirely possible to build these places without succumbing to urban blight and crime.
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