Edit: This is not to say 50% cheaper is useless, it is a point of information for people living in houses and not realise large population around the world cant afford a house.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/17/two-thirds-of-global-populat...
Having half the world converge on urban centers scrambling to pay exorbitant rent and taxes for the privilege of 100sq feet of personal space while sharing an apartment with five strangers is misguided at best and dystopian at worst.
I doubt “rural” will continue to be “low crime”.
In our fully automated future I expect criminals will also be telecommuting — stealing, vandalising, or trading illegal substances with drones, drones which are quite possibly either bio-mimicking or even bio-printed so as to make it less appealing to shoot them.
I imagine we'll also see small robots that scurry into your garage when you open the door and whose one job will be to open the door later for thieves. That is probably already possible. So we'll need intelligent security cameras in garages too.
Drones that crash through a window and set the place on fire - I don't know what we'll do about that one. But anticipating and solving such problems would make an interesting startup.
There are various window films that can do an excellent job of making it quite hard to break a window. But they're currently quite expensive. E.g,: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/home-window-solutions-us/ (sorry for previous bad link, 3M website bozos make it hard to get a sane URL)
I live in a "stick house" and it would be quite easy to set it on fire from the outside. Cedar siding, shrubs near the walls, etc. No need to crash through a window.
Edit: I forgot to mention a roof made of "kindling". It wore out and I replaced it with a composition roof, but in Oregon it's trendy to have a "shake" roof. If you've ever examined a shake you will know it's just a very dry piece of wood (at least in summer, in winter it's very wet).
Fortunately we don't live in such a dystopian world ... yet, at least not in most parts of the USA.
Then there’s the varnishes and oils that you apply to repel water, which just makes it more flammable.
It seems to suggest that suburbs are generally the biggest emitters per-capita. Inner cities tend to be fairly low and some rural areas are low too, though that varies (rural areas in the midwest seem to be high).
If more people moved to rural areas, my guess is they'd start looking more like the suburban areas in energy usage, though.
I guess the question then is it easier to have more small towns or to have high density cities without surrounding sprawl.
Also it's a US only map. It would be interesting to compare with cities like Amsterdam, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, etc. And of course the corresponding rural areas and small cities too.
I would definitely be interested in a more international version, too.
I see these small families in the new developments I sometimes drive through, there is maybe a meter of sand or grey gras between each house, each house has its own roof, water heater, windows looking into the fence 1m away. All of this has to be maintained. These people would have been better of living in a apartment in a high rise.
Maybe 20-30 YO college graduates will do a tour of duty in SF/NY for fun, but nobody in their 30s+ is going want to go to bed listening to their upstairs neighbors party, their downstairs neighbors screw, and the homeless schizophrenic outside systematically shatter glass bottles on the sidewalk.