That place is a nightmare

Is it? I have a quiet neighborhood, nice neighbors, a great bike shop 2 miles away and if we ever go back to work my office is 2 miles the other way. I've got group rides nearby 4 or 5 days a week, I can walk or ride to the grocery store or post office, amazon same or next day delivery for most things. Hospital with good health care network 3 miles another direction. And so on down the list.

It is an interesting discussion, but i think "living satisfaction", at least in north america is directly tied to cash flow. people and families who earn a decent living, significantly above the poverty line have a lot more flexibility in where they can live and have significantly more discretionary "leisure time" to do things they like to do. people who earn a marginal "paycheck to paycheck" amount of money are much more tied to the infrastructure associated with their jobs and are much more likely to feel "stuck" in a place they dont really enjoy living but need to in order to survive.

seems to me all the other stuff is fluff and personal preference. mostly people live in the best place they can afford to live based on their individual cash flow.

The statistics don’t bear that out. Among the states with the highest COVID rates (per every 100,000 residents), only one would be considered “densely populated”: Florida. Public policy has much more to do with health than density.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...cans-by-state/

when it comes to NY, state data is worthless. what happens in the Bronx and what happens in a deep upstate small town may as well be two different countries.

I agree, but to each their own. One of my daughters lives there and loves it. All I felt was noise, crowds, and pollution. I saw a playground that was completely paved. Not just the basketball courts, but also the monkey bars, swings, etc.

I am glad you like your home

I ain’t trying to make decisions for other people, I’m glad cities exist for city people.

I do and I get that its not for everyone there's a lot of appeal to having some space and clean air - but not everyone wants to have long travel times just to afford housing and this is the problem we're in. I would have a hard time living in a filing cabinet (apartment building) at this point in my life but I dont think that has to define "density" either.

Amen. I can't imagine living in a city....or a suburb for that matter.

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,
With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;
And men are whithered before their prime
By the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.

And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed,
In the smothering reek of mill and mine;
And death stalks in on the struggling crowd—
But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine.

Nessmuk (George Washington Sears), 1884

It's funny to quote the 1880's. The lovely pastoral life you enjoy now is not the life the rural communities enjoyed back then. I think the country squalor was just as bad for average folk as city squalor. That's why many moved to the city. You should review what living on a croft was like in Britian back in the day. Or be a sharecropper in southern US after the war. Or why there was mass migration from the countryside in China to modern Chinese Cities. It wasn't forced. It was to escape poverty. Your romance is misquided.

It sucks to be poor no matter where you are.

Except that article's premise has nothing to back up the author's opinion. It's also entirely possible that CA's forest fires are mostly due to poor or nonexistent forestry management. I'd say they're cleary due to the combination of draught and mismanagement, neither of which have anything to do with population density.

Where is this utopia you speak of?

This is what I was thinking....NYC, London, really any big city of the 1880s was pretty miserable....not that I was there mind you....

Forest fires are a combination of mismanagement but more importantly drought caused by climate change. The Camp Fire of 2018, one of the two most costly in CA history, was caused by PG&E equipment that the company had failed to improve. PG&E was found responsible but only paid out a tiny fraction of the cost. (https://www.npr.org/2020/06/16/87900...rted-that-fire)

The losses in dollar amounts are caused by population densification at the forest along rural, suburban, and urban interfaces. In fact, I was on a call two weeks ago where one of California's leading insurers said that California is basically uninsurable with respect to fire. That person was talking about homes, mainly, but also other structures. Paradise will not be rebuilt without additional safety measures in place.