"in addition to now having to sit in traffic jams for an hour or two every day" I think you're taking for granted that everyone who lives and works in the gene

"in addition to now having to sit in traffic jams for an hour or two every day" I think you're taking for granted that everyone who lives and works in the general area of a city is commuting to the very center from a long way away. My reaction is "well, don't do that!" I briefly worked in the DC area, and I still had a 10-15 minute commute as I am used to. That's because I was living a few miles from the center, in NOVA, and going outwards another mile or two in the morning. Right now, I'm living just barely within the city limits of a smaller city, so technically you could say it's not a suburb, but practically it is, and again, my commute is (or was) about 10 minutes. Any time you actually are living downtown in a significant urban area, it seems like a luxury to me, wouldn't you expect rents to be expensive when housing is competing with office space and fancy restaurants? I was able to afford that in Richmond, but in major, desirable cities, there's no way.