Why is no one asking the biggest question; why are people piling into cities when there are towns and smaller cities that could be developed instead and thereby lower cost of living. It’s a global phenomenon it seems, as much as it doesn’t make any sense regardless.

Please save yourself the quality of life arguments. Those are post hoc arguments that only express laziness.

What state governments should be doing is “redistributing the wealth” by heavily taxing successful cities to fund and develop less successful counties and districts and towns. When businesses stop clustering and concentrating in places like Silicon Valley and NYC then you know that taxation is at the right level to compensate for the cartel and monopolistic like behaviors and phenomenon of, e.g., Silicon Valley and SF.

In the USA that should look like heavily taxing Silicon Valley and NYC, etc and using that money to fund high speed Internet and education and companies and business centers in under developed regions like rural Alabama or Mississippi or North Dakota.