It all depends on what terms you're looking at. You're right about infrastructure - rural housing has much larger per-unit quantities of electric/transport dist

It all depends on what terms you're looking at. You're right about infrastructure - rural housing has much larger per-unit quantities of electric/transport distribution. Water is mostly a non-issue, anywhere I'd call rural has well water, which is in some ways more efficient than communal water (no treatment). In other metrics, though, rural living could be more efficient. Someone homesteading can have much less issue with nutrient and topsoil runoff, while producing much higher volumes of human-consumable calories per unit area. Not saying they do by default, but they could. Suburban living is the least efficient land use, though - large distances travelled daily by everyone, large per-unit quantities of water/wastewater/electric/transport infrastructure, large per-capita land usage, low-to-negligible production of useful stuff (solar energy or food)