That said,
> high-density living (like SF) is pretty much the standard
I don't believe this. Yes, there are denser cities than San Fran, and yes, San Fran probably has more floor space per square mile than most European cities. Still, my default guess is that people living in San Fran have less floor space per person than average, for most reasonable choices of population to average over.
If you have statistics that show otherwise (don't have time to look currently), I'll gladly admit that I was wrong.
It's also not really relevant what the U.S. As a whole looks like.