(playing devils' advocate) City/population-center living is wildly inefficient for a host of reasons, and a dollar of urban development towards a major metropo

(playing devils' advocate) City/population-center living is wildly inefficient for a host of reasons, and a dollar of urban development towards a major metropolis goes much less far than a dollar of urban development for a rural community. We deal with the inadequacies of living in such big population dense areas because we want to; not because it's efficient. Turns out it's not efficient to stack up as many people vertically as possible. It over-burdens local municipal systems to the point of skyrocketing economic costs, creates more job scarcity due to sheer population and high real-estate costs, and creates untenable situations during times where population density is a net-negative, like during a pandemic. Rural living has major problems too; lack of access to high quality services and travel come to mind -- but these are things that can be improved upon, and by every metric these things are improving. There is no such game-plan for dealing with the burdens of heavy density populations mid-city; it's considered to be a fact of life.