To answer your question about households with smaller numbers of people, it all depends on what you do outside of work and what's important to your life. For me, having a home office, home computer lab, gardening, astronomy, hiking, casual birdwatching, and turning pieces of wood and metal into sawdust and metal chips are all important and completely incompatible with apartment living. For my partner, having an art studio is incredibly important. Again, it is incompatible with apartment living.
Traffic and city noise are not good for me (they raise my blood pressure), which is kind of why I am okay with losing my hearing. I can't hear it as much as my partner can, and I'm not sure I want to get hearing aids. I would've moved farther away from the city, but my partner works deep in Cambridge, Mass., and we went as far as she could stand the commute.