> A couple of things off the cuff, but economies of scale affect infrastructure costs, so centralized areas take far less money per person to operate. For example, a dozen busses provide much better return on investment in an urban area than suburban or rural because they can each complete a single route quickly and service more people per mile and thus you have service every 10-15 minutes. When you spread those same busses out over a larger, less dense, area you have much longer between stops and far fewer people to use them for the same cost. Water, sewer, electrical, communications all scale better with more dense living as well. Bigger pipes are far cheaper than much longer runs. Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31961508

I can't and won't disagree with what you're saying. If we're talking about how much money it costs to bring services out to rural areas, you're 100% correct. However, I'm not sure what your point is, because rural folks also pay taxes for services, like urban residents. It makes total sense to me that a concentration of people paying taxes for the cost of services to serve the entire city/county/state would of course be paying more than necessary for those services if they excluded rural citizens from those services. The grandparent didn't mention anything like this though, except maying saying "cheaper" (but I took that to mean day-to-day life honestly):

> Cities are cheaper, safer, greener, more social, places to live with higher incomes, better educational and health outcomes. We need to stop subsidising rural under performance.

> Crime and violence rates similarly don't match up with what we might expect, though it's a complex topic. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...

I agree this is super complicated! Anecdotally I felt much safer when I lived rurally. I have experienced unsafe situations more than a handful of times since being back in the city. That's not real data, just a single data point from my experience though.

> I don't have anything for socialization, but access to more diverse population gives you far more options to interact with people of shared interests. For example, if you're the only person in your small town who likes Sci-fi, you aren't going to get to discuss it with anyone. In a more dense/diverse area you'd likely have options of dozens of book groups and meetups. The same holds true for any number of interests.

I don't disagree - rural communities tend to monocultures and some of the social activities are hard to do out there. Other activities are much easier though: bonfires, hunting, fishing, harvesting, etc. The same way some folks might go to a book club to discuss a sci-fi novel they are reading, my neighbors and I went to a fence-building workshop on the weekends to learn about building better fences that involved erecting livestock fence on a pasture. Definitely wouldn't have the interest or ability to do that in a city.