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Stephen King wrote a whole ass book about this.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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I just moved from a dense urban area to a rural area. Taking everything into account - yes, really - things are unambiguously cheaper here. That's a common result in the US. If you want to blame a single thing, I'd go with lack of housing supply in cities due to exclusionary zoning, but I hit some other weird figures like municipal water+sewer being more expensive than a well and septic system (again, yes, taking everything into account including construction costs).
You are correct, but we're not talking about urban vs rural, we're talking about dense urban with mature mass transit vs car-centric suburban sprawl. There it is unambiguous that dense is better, and can it be done well enough to even be cheaper than a lot of rural communities. There are no cities in America that are currently doing that though. They vary from pretty bad to terrible, and the ones that are only pretty bad are preposterously expensive due to crazy unmet demand for cities that don't suck. That's not a city problem, that's a North America problem.