I live within 30 seconds walk of 2 cafes, 2 grocery shops, and a pub (I can see them down the street from my window as I type this). And you literally can't hear them from my house. There's also a primary school nearby which occasionally gets noisy, but there's no noise from the shops.

Most of the noise I hear from my apartment in a medium-density neighborhood, like 95% of it, is just car traffic. Big noisy trucks and people on Harleys, people honking at each other as they try to leave a parking lot, all that. Building spread out unwalkable areas creates way more noise than the opposite. What is true, however, is that this design was mostly created for the benefit of suburbanites who live in isolated communities with no readily accessible amenities besides a road into the city. Their peace and quiet comes at the expense of mine, and especially at the expense of lower income communities which often exist in the noisiest, most car-heavy parts of the city.

I don't think you can broadly make that statement and back it up with data. Some people do in fact like space and privacy, some really don't care.

I'm one of the latter and I enjoy having no yard and neighbors.

Is there something that tells us that those traits are specific to white people?