Outside of a very small number of admittedly very large coastal cities, the action is in the burbs, not the city.

Metro areas that are under, perhaps, 10M people, generally have nothing to do in the legacy cities. Everything fun has been built in the burbs for half a century. NYC is fun to visit, but only 8M people live there compared to 319M not living there. 98% of the population will never participate in "new urbanism" and so forth.

You're flat-out describing an alternate reality than the one that actually exists. Go down the list of largest American cities and tell me the first one you can find that you think has more fun things to do in the suburbs than in the city proper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Well, yeah, I think we're aggressively agreeing with each other that life is quite a bit different for 5% of the population in megacities vs 95% of the population outside those cities.

Take for example the location of the 2020 democratic national convention, Milwaukee. I know for a fact there's literally nothing to do in the city other than drive to the burbs.

Generally fun follows the people who pay for it, and anywhere there's no geographic constraint or travel time constraint, people always do the burb thing, and the fun follows them. I visit family in that area, and there's just nothing to do in the city, all the action is in the burbs.

You can have a burb 20 minute drive from Milwaukee so all the fun moves to the burbs to follow the money. You can't have a burb 20 minute drive from downtown NYC, so without the people moving to the burbs there's no fun in the burbs.