I’m not saying that cities are bad, but to claim rural people don’t have beautiful and interesting things easily available to them is just misunderstanding what some people find beautiful and interesting.
They may have accessible nature, though not all of them even enjoy that in my experience, but they often do not have easily accessible cultural experiences at all. Not everyone appreciates the things they live by, and that’s just humanity. We can be miserable anywhere.
But it’s been my experience living in the states that it’s extremely commonplace for people to shit on the very idea of cities, and especially raising children in them, and overwhelmingly encourage people to set up shop miles away from their jobs in the suburbs and rural areas despite the downsides.
The main thing I see is our cities still often require you to have a car, yet rent is 3x or more what it is out in the burbs. It’s hard to make that work. I don’t think anyone likes commuting a long way. Though I think we need both more housing in cities to try and drive the prices down and more WFH so less commuting in general.
Yeah it’s a pretty sad situation exacerbated by the pandemic too. A lot of people left cities, but in many cases (e.g. my city) prices still went up anyway. I bought in early 2020 before the insane price hikes, and now I’m very glad I did as basically nobody can afford these prices unless they’re already in the market.
But I agree with everything you said, and I vote against the “preserve our single family neighborhood” politicians whenever I see them on the ballot.
The problem is just, people picked where they live partly based on the environment. People don’t want their neighborhoods changed. That said I don’t like zoning that makes it impossible to try and buy people out so you can build a apartment building.
