People want to live near their work so they can spend less time commuting and more time with their families. The people that successfully do this are usually hi

People want to live near their work so they can spend less time commuting and more time with their families. The people that successfully do this are usually highest in the food chain and push out of that area all the others lower on the food chain. Thus cities filled with high-level management types as they're the only ones that can afford the rent and the mortgages. To be fair, not everyone hates commuting, but many people do, thus the drive towards urbanization. Furthermore, even if people don't mind commuting, they'd want to find a reasonably nice area to live to commute from. Those nice places get populated and overrun and people lower on the food chain get priced out; again the cycle continues. Until all the people lowest on the food chain must commute very far distances. At some point, many of them realize that if they were to calculate the commute as unpaid work hours, that they're actually being paid way less than what they make on paper. So now even those people lowest on the food chain move away in search for higher wage jobs with shorter commute times, and the cycle continues again and again. The sweet spot is finding a short commute time with low-cost housing. That's truly maximizing your wage. It's not just about being a hip urbanite.