They're also much cheaper from an infrastructure perspective to maintain

Life in the city is more expensive, in my experience though. Richer, with vastly more options, sure - but more expensive overall.

In the US it's a supply and demand problem. America chose redlining. White flight. More cars, less public transit. They largely stopped building desireable new mixed use medium density neighbourhoods after WW2.

It wasn't even industrialisation - it was agriculture. Do people really like cities? I am not so sure - certainly many do, but many also hanker for the village and there are a bunch of interesting theories about us working well at 'village scale' (I could be easily convinced that no-one hankers for the suburbs..) I think if the economic opportunities were not so heavily weighted towards cities we would see much reduced urbanisation.

"do people really like cities? I am not so sure"

Just look at real estate prices in New York, SF, Boston, etc. Yes, people REALLY like cities. Even the wealthiest people who can afford anything still choose cities

How much of this is because that's where the jobs are? Take that away and where would people choose to live? Wasn't there a notable exodus from SF, for example, during covid when many jobs went remote?

I'm genuinely surprised that you don't know lots of people who enjoy living in a city for its own sake and not only because something is keeping them there.

Well, nice to meet you, I'm a city dweller who works from home and can technically live where ever I want. I choose the city because I like it and I want my family to have nice things. I like walking to the kid's school and not owning a car and being close to amenities.

I didn’t express an opinion, I asked questions. Did you reply to the wrong comment maybe?

I live in a city too, but I do not think that makes me very unique ;)

Most of the stuff people do in cities was shut or severely degraded during Covid, not just the jobs. If you can't take a quick walk to your favorite cafe in the morning or stop by a cool art event in the evening, yeah, city living gets relatively less appealing.

That's a pretty unhinged idea you've presented; feels completely autobiographical.

People move out to the suburbs after they're married with kids? How is that unhinged?

It's just a strange comment; feels off. Like you're an Easterner imitating an American or something. Very odd.

Or AI. No telling.

Peoples talking styles are being changed by AI. Son online, you get real people, AI slop, and real people that are adapting.

But generally, the migration to the suburbs is a pretty studied thing. I assumed it was just a known phenomena.

So

There was farms to city. For few decades.

Then city to suburbs. for few decades. (cities deteriorated)

Then Covid, and here you are correct, some people that lived in cities for jobs, did migrate to 'smaller cities' when they could work remote.

And now? Seems like people are building little mini-cities? Where they can live, work, and walk to shops. People want the city feel, without the large city hassle? Like a village? But, not just a small town, its like new planned small towns. Back to the village.

I had a particular feeling about it and I looked into his other posts and he appears to constantly say explicitly "I'm an American, I'm from America, as an American" (a sentence I've probably never once said in my life) with constant China apologia; very odd.

Believe it or not, it's quite straightforward to get laid (abundantly) and find a mate (and a chain of replacements) in the suburbs, too.

But your ordering works well for remote thinly populated areas. Hungering for a mate there is like waiting on the floor of an ocean trench for a sinking whale corpse.