To color it in with an anecdote as a 27 year old who grew up in the suburbs and spent the last 7-ish years of my life in city centers: my personal preference is

To color it in with an anecdote as a 27 year old who grew up in the suburbs and spent the last 7-ish years of my life in city centers: my personal preference is just that I like the presence of other people. I don’t feel bothered by lots of people walking around the streets, hearing their conversations, living in proximity to others; and I only feel marginally bothered by crowds and packed trains, definitely less than I enjoy the bustle. In fact even if I don’t talk to a single person or enter a single establishment it just makes me feel energized to be around it. Bars are antisocial and I don’t go often, but even when I’m just walking past one on the way home, the atmosphere around them makes me feel happy (and you can be social at a reasonable volume with all the smokers and loiterers outside if that’s what you like). There’s something deeply depressing to me about the American suburban life I grew up in: always deserted, copy-pasted strip malls; giant, humanless roads clogged with hurtling metal death traps; cul-de-sacs of strangers spending large fractions of their lives solitary in cars. (I do acknowledge it can be different to some extent—the ethnic suburbs in LA are vibrant in pockets, for example—but even in the best cases they’re still pretty desolate to me.) Where I came from in the Midwest, my life involved never talking to anybody within a 20 mile radius of my house except in business transactions, and only rarely even seeing my neighbors. As a child I didn’t mind, but after having lived differently there’s no way I’d choose to go back unless it’s prohibitively expensive to choose otherwise (which is, to my knowledge, a major driver of people moving out of cities into suburbs). Separately, I personally dislike driving and greatly prefer public transportation. It’s far more comfortable (not much acceleration and far more space than a tiny car unless it’s rush hour), I don’t have to pay attention to anything except where I’m getting off, it’s super cheap, no risk of accidents or headaches from other drivers incompetence, I don’t have to ever find nor pay for parking, I don’t have to worry about the safety of my personal property, I don’t have to worry about my car breaking down out of nowhere, I can drink and not personally endanger myself, the list or positives is basically endless to me but I’ll stop there. But that all said San Francisco isn’t that dense (in my opinion), has such glaring social issues, is ludicrously expensive and doesn’t have particularly good infrastructure/transit. Given that I can get all of those things automatically by living in pretty much any major east Asian or European city, that’s my preference, but the one and only thing drawing me back is the concentration of jobs and money. I weaned myself off San Francisco and lived in east Asia for a couple years, but I found myself back now for a job. Hopefully not too long from now I’ll be able to head back over, or at least work remote for a significant part of my time.