A lot of people live in cities because they have no frame of reference of anything else, and (at least in the US) an active fear of being more than 5 minutes away from Starbucks. I am being somewhat facetious on their preference for bad coffee, but the amount of times I've been told that my living arrangements (dead end rural country road with very few neighbors) is to them scary. They can't deal with the lack of city noise, etc. Reminds me of the t-mobile ad with the couple camping in the woods then using their phones to pipe in the sound of Times Square to get to sleep. Sad really.

Personally, I'm in the opposite camp of urbanite types. I grew up rurally and have no desire to go back to hour-long trips to get groceries, no commercial services existing after 8PM and no social events to attend without taking half a day between reaching them and coming home.

Not to mention the degraded infrastructure (be it power, internet, roads or otherwise).

Sub/urban life, although noisy and less peaceful, is just far more convenient for an active adult. I'd be happy to go back to the country when and if I ever get to retire.

I think a better solution is exurbs where we have suburban clusters of low to medium density housing but centered around hubs in the middle of nowhere instead of radiating out of a major metro area.

This is much cheaper but still gives “culture” and community opportunity’s over pure rural life.

Telework makes this much more possible.

I live in such a setup in Norway. Much smaller scales all up than anything in the us, but my little city has about 60k people in the metropolitan area.

Gives great options for food, culture and whatnot, but I am only one hour by train from the million plus capitol (Oslo). I telework and go in for meetings as needed. One and a half hour to drive to measure it in american terms hehe.

Kids love it too. Roam freely around the neighbourhood, buy area is dense enough that they have all the options for after school clubs and sports and we even have an eSport club now :)

One hour by train from the major city is probably the missing link in the United States.

One hour by train from a given major city in the US is "just" a bunch of major suburbs, or by European standards, another major city.

Absolutely!

I currently drive longer than that to get to work in Atlanta.

I would happily live further away in a less densely populated area if there were reasonable commute options.

Gosh I wish we did suburban planning in that way, instead of acres and acres of housing developments served by a single gas station and perhaps a grocery store with a starbucks attached.