That's because most people live in cities because they prefer it, not because their office was there.
As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Also, not all suburbs are created equal, and this is even more true outside the US.
If someone else does all the maintenance, dusting and vacuum cleaning, maybe. Other then that, actual swimming pool for doing laps or actual water park with slides is kind of better in most cases. There are some people who would use that large house or would be using their backyard swimming pool often ... but most just dont.
> As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Someone with kids appreciates not having long drive to and from work, those take away from time with kids. And someone with kids over 7 years including kids themselves appreciates presence ability to do go to sport clubs, music clubs, libraries, school or whatever else without parent having to drive them each time.
There is some advantage to big house in remote place with kids, but it also causes you and the kids to be more isolated from everything else.
I know farmers who think nothing about hunting off their back porch - and why not their gun doesn't have the range to kill a neighbor so they don't have to worry about missing their shot. I know people who shoot guns in the suburbs, but they have done extra work to create a safe range in their house (and generally only safe for the lowest power rounds). The denser your living the less viable having a safe space to shoot is.
There are things that are only possible in a dense city. You need a lot of people to have enough interest to support a symphony orchestra. There are a lot of niche stores that can only make it in a dense city because that is the only way to get enough people interested in that niche to support a store.
If you live in LA or San Diego, you can live close to the beach and go there all the time. Most people there don't, but if that's important to you, you can achieve it.
If you live in Vancouver, BC or Seattle, you can ski in the winter and hike in mountains outside of cell phone reception in the summer AFTER WORK, never mind every weekend.
I assume most american cities have gun clubs. If the attraction to shooting a gun can be satiated with target practice, that can be a decent compromise. (Of course if the attraction is feeling like a frontiersman by shooting straight off your porch, that's a different thing. I can understand it even if I don't share it)
This is not possible with every city and every hobby, but that ends up kind of becoming the point. The cities that have this overlap become even more in-demand. It's why housing is so expensive in places like YVR and SFO.
Of course, variation exists
It is numbers game. Its not about what any single wants best, but how many times you can sell people their 2nd choice using the same land.
Some dream of living in a condo in the city, some of a rural ranch house. I don't think anybody dreams of a rural condo.
Given equal cost of a home, most people would prefer to live in a city. Especially if you look globally, cities are absolutely trampling suburbs with demand. Yes, people in the suburbs often chose that preferentially, but there are less people in suburbs.
In America, suburbs are disproportionately popular. I’m guessing that has more to do with civics than preferences. Most of suburbanites I know in America either live near their suburban job, or express some fear/distrust of various aspects of city life - and it’s mostly related to cars and transportation.
My point is that if you remove jobs and pay from the current incentives, city demand would decrease dramatically.
I agree that if you remove zoning, many areas of single family homes would be built up if they are in and around urban cores. That isnt new demand, but existing demand, not able to be expressed by current law.
However, my point is that if your [random small town] job paid the same as NY or SF, you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns.
WE are describing two different situations.
> you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns
Having actually tried this, hated it, and moved back, I am skeptical.
This mistakes the price one person can pay for a piece of land with the price many people can pay to to use the same land. A single family home does rent for more money than a condo if they are on the same block in the city.
A major reason zoning exists is because with out it you'd have developers and investors out-bidding the homeowners to redevelop plots of land as they became available.
It's a collective response to the power of $$$ in a free market.
Even if all of those condo purchaser who would buy a unit in the building that replaced a single home would've preferred a single home, they didn't have a direct say in that lot being turned into condos. The person with the most money did.
And of course, they couldn't have all fit there. But I am skeptical of "enough people with money want to live in your area now" as being a sufficient justification to say that local control has to be eliminated. Why favor the future richer potential-resident over the current resident? (I would extend this broadly, for incumbency protections for renters and owners alike - why is it an inherent good for an existing area to get denser forever? Why not encourage less centralized development? Why would "the people with the most money should get to decide how this area is developed?" the best plan?)
People work minimum-wage jobs and choose to live in cities. These individuals are not preferencing a city for the wage, but rather the lifestyle, access to amenities, the lower cost options it offers, car-free life, etc.
I think it's super disingenuous to claim that people only live in cities for work. There are tons of social options in cities, tons of civic amenities, and tons of lifestyle differences that draw people to a city.
> their perfectly natural tendency to want as much space/land/house as they can afford
Is this a natural tendency? I don't think this "natural" tendency holds true globally, and I'm even skeptical it actually holds true in America, where suburbs are unusually popular.
> I'm quite confident the majority of suburbanites would strongly prefer living on 20 acres if they could still get to work in 20 minutes and the grocery store in 10.
I'm quite confident that the majority of people (ie city dwellers, which are the majority of humans) would preferentially prefer the access and amenities of a city home at the expense of 20 acres. Which is the reality we see globally.
But it's of course a ridiculously illogical claim that people would prefer rural living if only it had all the benefits of city living. What are the benefits people derive from the hypothetical 20 acres? What does it even mean in this context, because it's incompatible the whole premise of this argument. People prefer "grocery store in 10 [minutes]" more than 20 acres, and that's why cities exist.
People working minimum wage jobs have very little choice in their lives and certainly can't afford to move arbitrarily.
> I think it's super disingenuous to claim that people only live in cities for work. There are tons of social options in cities, tons of civic amenities, and tons of lifestyle differences that draw people to a city.
All of which is available to people that don't live in the city. We have various forms of transportation options. Hell I once flew halfway across the country just to catch KMFDM in concert. At no point during that trip did I feel the urge to move to Denver.
> I'm quite confident that the majority of people (ie city dwellers, which are the majority of humans) would preferentially prefer the access and amenities of a city home at the expense of 20 acres.
I'm dead-ass certain that's your own biases speaking. Of course we could settle this if either of us can be assed to put together a poll and go flog it on social media. Want to co-author a paper?
Not really. It is a big difference between having mat 30 min to gym, school, whatever or whatever and not even needing a car and having to drive almost an hour to get anywhere. It is difference between "I can and will actually do it" vs "nope, cant do it".
> Hell I once flew halfway across the country just to catch KMFDM in concert.
That is definitely not something an average person would do on the regular.
Man if you think adult humans are that helpless I really don't know what to tell you. They aren't, but apparently you'd need some convincing.
> That is definitely not something an average person would do on the regular.
Sure, it's a pretty extreme example. It's nothing for folks to drive up the eastern seaboard between Atlanta and Baltimore to catch shows though. Anyway point stands, none of the entertainment and cultural experiences that folks who are stuck in major urban areas use to tout the experience are denied to folks who don't live in the city.
It is not about being helpless. It is about day having certain amount of hours, you needing minimum 8 of them for work, another 8 for sleep and showering, then another time for cooking, cleaning, putting kids to sleep, ensuring they do homework and simply being at home supervising them. If your kids cant engage in hobbies without you driving them there and back, then congratulation, you just spent 3 hours driving and waiting.
Additional 3 hours a day needed to get to work, back from work, to gym and from gym are a time you simply cant use for anything else.
> none of the entertainment and cultural experiences that folks who are stuck in major urban areas use to tout the experience are denied to folks who don't live in the city.
Sure, it is just that they require more effort, time and money to get there and back. So much, that you just wont do it on the regular.
Im happy to trade that for having to spend an hour in car/train a few times a year to see a show or museum.
I would take a pay cut to work closer to home.
Ditch the suburbanite identity politics and start advocating for the development of shows and museums in your local area that you could walk to, instead of taking your money away from your economic center at the benefit of oil companies (bc let's be real, suburban identity sells car dependence and even if you take the train, all the cultural momentum from the propaganda shaped your life decisions to move there and what's that train run on?).
For this conversation, we're talking about the cores of tier 1 cities where the high paying jobs are most abundant. I considers a location suburban if they are predominantly single-family homes and if many of them commute into the Metro for work.
I'm going to ignore all that identity politics stuff because frankly I don't understand what you were trying to say there
I do implore you to attempt to reengage your brain, despite the the mental anguish it will require to actually comprehend what somebody was saying to you when it conflicts with an identity you don’t know that you hold.
It's not for everybody but it's not an oil scam either.
Your situation is a completely irrelevant red hearing for the discussion we are having. You are actually rural, and are describing an actually rural life—not a suburban rural identity & not an urban suburban identity.
If you don’t even have state or county roads, like no paved roads going anywhere near where you are and there’s nothing around and there’s no police around and everything else you described then that’s not at all what I am responding to. Because what you describe sounds to me like you don’t have anything within walkable distance, and I was directly responding to somebody who says that they have shit they can walk to.
You are living an actual rural life because you are outside the range of services provided, relying on yourself instead and in terms of my own personal Urbanist Theory that’s exactly how it should be.
When I moved to US, I chose to live pretty much as far as I can from the nearest large city that wouldn't be considered straight up "rural" (although we do have a bunch of farms around here). And the reason is because I don't want to live in what is, in effect, a giant human anthill.
It’s OK to admit that you don’t actually know or maybe that you even have learned something today, but I did actually do a research paper with how and why we came to live in suburbs as a core point of research, and guess what? It was a result of master planned communities by white supremacists and their oil and motor industry buddies.
Most of the best old suburbs in America were built organically through bit by bit demand around street cars, not car cars. Then the motor industry executives and oil industry executives got together and lobby the government to create the crime of jaywalking, to buy up all the street cars and remove them from American cities, to build out the highway system, and to change zoning laws, to encourage if not outright force the building of car dependent American suburbia.
Do not get me wrong streetcar, suburb, designed suburbs are fantastic, walkable compact, wonderful wonderfully tight communities. But today in today’s world this year of our Lord 2025? Today those street car suburbs are urban compared to the car dependent suburban sprawl that we have now.
Personally I find city people the most boring and socially/culturally stunted because they think a cultivated/curated 'mall like setting of stuff' = culture. They also tend to think buying access to art/culture because they have money = having artist style/culture. The music scenes/art scenes are overly (often self) curated pap.
Lots of cities 'diverse' districts are just... suburbs... that the cities absorbed.
Even for things like 'exotic' foods I routinely find bombed out suburban strip mall restaurants to be superior and less 'catered' to American Paletes than places in cities that have to be more generic because they serve such a large population.
I also have personally found when I have been lonely in life, being lonely in the city is the worst kind of loneliness.
Looking out my window, I can't even see another house. If I twist my neck, I can see a neighbor's barn about half a mile away, though.
It is sprawling, car-dependent, low-density development I can't abide, the kind of cul-de-sac-ridden suburbs the US has been building around its urban fringes for the last 80-odd years. It feels suffocating to be surrounded by mile after mile of other people's stuff, with nowhere to go but strip malls and nothing to do but drive from one parking lot to another. People talk about wanting a house with a yard, but when that yard is the only place you can be without justifying your presence there by participating in some transaction, it can feel like a very confining space indeed.
This already happened during Covid, and no country substantially de-urbanized. In fact, urban real estate prices skyrocketed.
The only cities where prices stayed flat or went down were highly over-priced places that people hated living anyway (like the Bay Area).
That is very different than a Tier 1 city.
It's funny that cities various 'interesting districts' are normally just suburbs that the city absorbed. But yeah, suburbs are just awful places without their own culture or interest (unless absorbed, then they are a distinct interesting district).
Big cities pay top performers the most, by far, but median incomes tend to be quite a bit lower than small town/rural areas. If you are a professional sports star or F500 CEO, the city is unquestionably the place to be†, but for the normal person who will end up in a drab job the money often isn't there. Many will accept the low pay due to being temporarily embarrassed CEOs, of course.
† Although knowing some of these people, they tend to live rurally as well, having the means to be able to live in both settings. The rich rarely live in just one place.
Where I live in the Suburbs of Des Moines, McDonalds starts at $16/hour. There are rural towns not far away where they start at $14, and I know rural towns farther out where you start at $10 (McDonalds isn't in these towns so it isn't a full comparison but that is the closest I can give). Where I live apartments can be had for under $1000/month so it is feasible for someone working at McDonalds to live on that wage. In the more rural areas apartments might be $500/month but you are making less plus the local grocery stores are more expesnive than the Aldi you could walk to from the apartment (thus meaning you don't need a car though crossing the highways isn't exactly safe).
Of course the real issue is people pick where to live based on factors other than cost of living. They care where their families live.
I expect the median income is often higher in rural areas because, while there is little on the high end, there is more mid-tier opportunity. In the big city if you don't make it into the big leagues, only the dregs are left. Cities amplify the extremes. In rural areas, the $30 per hour jobs are willing to hire any warm body that shows up.
Of course, rural is a difficult categorization as it is a catchall for everything that is left. A rural area with a strong agricultural sector, for example, is nothing like a rural area that is not much more than barren wilderness. In the former, there is a lot of money to be made, comparatively, while in the latter the McDonalds at the highway rest stop may be the only business there is for hundreds of miles. We are definitely talking about a certain kind of rural here.
That is true of anywhere, but employment metrics (e.g. unemployment rate) tend to look a lot better in these rural areas. The average Joe has a better chance of finding a job, and a higher paying job at that, in these rural areas. Something that hasn't gone unnoticed, of course. Population data since the mid-2000s shows relative decline in large urban areas and relative growth in small towns, although all area types are seeing population growth.
It won't be a superstar job, but Average Joe isn't getting that kind of job no matter where he is located. He may think so while in his temporarily embarrassed CEO state, but in the end he never does. Only a small segment of the population reach those heights. A SV tech salary is quite unusual.
> If you are a farmer
A farmer is, by very definition, a business owner. That may be beyond our discussion, but certainly those farm businesses are hiring anyone they can get, and paying a pretty penny for it. Those farm jobs are an opportunity for most anyone.
> so working at a cafe for minimum wage may be all you can get.
Cafe workers tend to be tipped, so it is far from a minimum wage job. I have the books for an industry-adjacent small town restaurant in front of me and the workers are making around $50/hour all in (maybe even more; I don't usually see the cash tips).
McDonalds isn't in that realm, but only foreign workers who come with some binding to the business, limiting their options, with a willingness to sacrifice to come into the country ever end up there.