There is nothing 'natural' about the evolution of NL cities as demonstrated by the fact that (e.g.) Amsterdam started to go down the car-centric route:
* https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...
It was a policy choice to not go in that direction—or rather to stop and turn away—as opposed to some kind of physical law of the universe. Not Just Bikes uses Rotterdam as an example of how even in NL† policy can go in other directions:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22ovt1EMULY
My dad used to work at the post office facility in this area:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/4577+Eglinton+Ave+E,+Missi...
In the early 1990s there used to be strawberries fields across the street, and now the entire area is filled with generic suburb strip malls. Perhaps agriculture would have gone away eventually, but there's no reason why it had car-centric, low-density development that replaced it. How close is agriculture to some NL cities?
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s
> Suburbia can be denser but than it must be cheap. Dense expensive suburbia is the worst of all worlds.
No: low-density expensive suburbia is the worst of all worlds because it necessitates cars, which has leads to all sorts of externality costs. The total OpEx is also much more expensive with low densities:
* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
And just because you have sprawl doesn't mean you have cheap housing:
* https://thetyee.ca/News/2018/03/23/Urban-Sprawl-Not-More-Aff...
See LA and even the Greater Toronto area (GTA) as examples:
* https://dailyhive.com/toronto/toronto-ranked-least-affordabl...
† I use "NL" in the international ccTLD sense, and not in my Canadian sense of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. :)