Why are suburbs awful places? I'd much rather live in a small city or large town with suburban-like neighborhoods than the over-priced and tiny apartments of a large city. 80K here is like 120K in a metro area, and I don't have to pay for parking or take public transportation.
In the end it's a matter of taste, but several reasons:
- Affordable suburbs usually carry lengthy commutes of unpleasant stop-and-go driving. City dwellers can walk to work or read on a train. Lower commute time is strongly associated with overall happiness. I share your preference for driving over public transit, but not in commuter traffic.
- Children have essentially no independent mobility until age 16, and then only if they have their own cars. In the suburb I grew up in, I'd estimate that mothers spend ~30% of their waking hours driving their children around.
- Though there may be good restaurants, art, theater, museums, etc. in the city, going to such things becomes a special occasion. Life instead centers around malls and multiplexes.
- Many find sleepy streets dull, uninspiring, even suffocating. For some, proximity to centers of human activity is a great deal more valuable than space.
- If you live in a city, you can go out drinking without committing DUI or spending $40 on a taxi.
- Many find the maintenance of a house, tons of unnecessary rooms, a lawn, etc. to be an unbearable and outrageously expensive bore that provides no value. I can think of many things I'd rather do on a weekend than put new siding on my garage, and many things I'd rather do with 5 figures than fix my roof. My home is a place to eat and sleep; I'd much rather invest time and energy and pride into other things.
Zipcar, Car2Go, and Uber have done a lot to alleviate that. Car ownership is definitely not needed in Seattle, Portland, NYC, SF, and probably many other cities. In the rest of the US, most exceptions are because the US doesn't do cities well, largely due to the perception in the mid-to-late 20th century that white people had abandoned the cities and left them to black people, and America doesn't care about black people.
For young people in industries that pay CoL increases in cities (most of the hn crowd, I expect), high cost of living is a plus. Typically your entire salary scales with cost of living, so you can save more in expensive cities and then move somewhere cheaper later in life.
