After living in 'cramped old london' for over a decade (still), I can only dream of the luxury of 800 Sq.m. Where do I sign up? :) fitting multiple people/families into anything less is just bad living standards as far as I'm concerned. You work hard all day long to go back to such a depressing existence. Time to start living fellow HN'ers!

Eh, grass is greener. Some of us worked hard to live in lively, crowded European cities. The suburbs have their downsides. For me, it was crushing loneliness.

You live in the centre when you're young and single and changing jobs. You move to the suburbs when you have married, settled down and want kids, a garden, good local schools etc.

When the kids have moved out, you can downsize to that retirement place in Spain... except that may not work as well after the UK leaves the EU.

Well, I don't live in the UK, so there's that. I am expecting a child within a few months and hope to stay in the city; we'll see how it pans out.

Which is why Londoners move to suburbia...

..and always dream of places like Spain (or better yet "Texas")

Time was Greater London was suburbia.

Does that make Luton, St Albans etc. the 'suburbs' of London?

Suburbia started at Aldgate, which is just outside the city walls ;-)

A good rule of thumb is (or was): Does it have black cabs?

Or time to charge more and get bigger

Yeah.. I mean, space is nice, but in homes of 800 or so square feet I've been pretty happy.

How much carbon is emitted cooling and heating an 8k sq ft home in Utah? How far do you have to drive to do things?

Our utility bills certainly have gone up, which we aren't thrilled with. We are considering some solar panel options to help bring our carbon footprint down. Being fully remote, I try to make up for that by not driving very much :)

Overall, the valley we live in has pretty much everything we could want, from a retail perspective.

A nice small-town grocery store about 3 mins away, and larger national chains further down the road.

Yeah, seems fairly ridiculous. You'd spend your life vacuuming.

That was actually an onerous task at first. But I bought my wife a Neato robot vacuum a few years back and it has been such a nice thing to have.