It's rent, the answer is almost always rent. Its my rent, its my child-care workers rent, it my kids school-teachers rent. It's always rent.
And the people working in those places provided the customer base for local and regional financial services, along with the rest of the commercial base that made small towns and provincial cities good places to live and raise a family throughout the 20th century.
And of course, a household only needed one person employed, so there was less pressure to move to a bigger city that could provide opportunities for two different careers.
The chaos and noise (especially the car noise) are just an explicit choice American cities have made.
I really hope you get the irony of being a suburbanite complaining about there being too many cars in cities when most of those cars are suburbanites who’ve given up on improving the public transit in their cities.