(I'm sure that sounds goofy, but it's a serious question/thought. I've never lived in an area that could be dubbed 'urban')
When I used to visit the countryside 1 hospital would serve an entire county or more. And if you couldn't be driven it was an expensive helicopter ride.
Are people going to want to live in Tudor City if they only have to go to work 1-2x per week? Or do you get a bigger space in Brooklyn or Queens since the commute matters less.
NYC will always have desirable qualities, it always has, but if you look at the desirability of different areas of the city they have changed significantly over time, and could shift to include more distant areas that still have convenient access to the city (Newark, Poughkeepsie, etc.).
There's something to be said for the sadness of not having the money to travel the world, but that doesn't seem particularly better for people out of cities in my experience.
And probably most of the people I know live in smaller towns outside of (many quite a way outside of) major cities or in/near smaller cities and many travel a great deal.
My assumption would be that the amount to which someone travels is fairly correlated to their income, adjusted for local cost of living? I'm not sure where that would be higher though.
I can't get the land in city at affordable price.
But if you're a 45 minute drive from a smaller airport, you've got to spend time dealing with parking, then padded layovers, and often by the time you get to your destination you're kinda wiped, so you end up burning a whole day of PTO just to move from point A to point B. Long-weekend trips aren't even really viable.
Not being in the County of San Francisco is not a different or more significant fact than not being in the City of San Francisco, they are not merely geographically coextensive but the same entity, the City and County of San Francisco; which has a mayor as it's executive (like other CA cities) but, instead of a City Council, a Board of Supervisors (like other CA counties) as it's legislature.