Even in cities you have "the apartment problem". The noise of the streets, neighbors, an even other residents in the same apartment (if sharing, because there'

Even in cities you have "the apartment problem". The noise of the streets, neighbors, an even other residents in the same apartment (if sharing, because there's not enough single / studio places at good value) invade. The smells from neighbors and others invade. The shared garbage chute, elevator or stairwell where you interface with the lingering smoking, pet, or messes invades personal space as well. The building code (at least in the US) in the cities isn't high enough to provide actual solitude and escape from being so close to everyone else. Inside cities the rent seeking keeps rents there too high. Outside of cities, rent seeking helps to prevent new home ownership (rather than temporary rental), while the lack of regulations and taxation for infrastructure (like transport of goods and people) undervalues and under-taxes the opportunity cost. Much like many of the other social ills in the US the problems require a national framework and local solutions; but the balance and distribution of planning is out of scale and stuck decades if not a hundred years or more in the past when the speed of transportation provided pressures that made local management good enough.