Edit: I phrased something very very poorly in my comment: "But even somewhat small changes in density can open up massively more land for use.". This should instead say that small changes in density can allow less land accomplish far more use. The entire idea is to make sure that land is not wasted, which means that humans will use less land overall, and will let more of it stay as nature.
No, the anti-pattern is sprawl and living far from other people, impacting huge amounts of land at low density.
Look at any suburb in satellite view, and see how much area it takes to get to, say, 40 houses. Compare that to a standard apartment complex with park space. Now add in all the roads that are needed to service the suburban detached housing, which requires driving for every single trip be it kids going to school or picking up some groceries. Then all the extra insulation, building materials, roofing, needed to create housing that is still far less energy efficient to heat and cool than an apartment building.
There are two efficient living forms: 1) urban life where needs are mostly within walking distance (be it a town of 5,000 or 500,000 or 5,000,000), and 2) isolated farm life where you only go into town infrequently because it takes too long, and you're kids take the bus.
Suburban living promotes daily driving for every task. Check out this map of consumption-based carbon emissions, which roughly track with most other pollution:
Do you have numbers on that? The last time I looked it up, over here at least, that wasn't really the case. It seemed that while people in cities use less energy on personal transportation and housing, they consume much more goods and services than people in rural areas.
Services are usually extremely low carbon, and shifting consumption from goods to services is a form of "carbon degrowth" without economic degrowth. And a dollar spent on "good will typically have far far less environmental impact than cars, and inefficient heating/cooling of houses. It would take an absolutely massive amount of, say, clothes to match the amount of embodied carbon that goes into manufacturing even a single car. Or compare 35 $1000 high end new phones, at 79kg of emissions each [1], to the typical new car which has an average price of $35k. The iPhones are the CO2 equivalent of 16,000 miles driven in a 2017 Prius, excluding the carbon from the manufacture of the car.
It's really hard to spend money to catch up to the carbon emissions from fossil fuel activities like driving, heating, and flying.
Personal transportation and housing are precisely the source of most energy usage:
> "The average emissions in New York City are about 30 percent less than the U.S. average," said Dodman. "This is because the primary factors contributing to individuals' greenhouse gas emissions are their use of energy and transportation. New York City residents tend to have smaller dwellings than the average American, so their heating needs are less, and they are also more reliant on public transportation."
