[taeric]

Because efficient is not the same concept as cheap.

Worse, you are likely looking at the costs of single family home purchasing, without considering cost of upkeep and transportation. Not to mention efficiency of getting work done.

That is all to say, because it is complicated. Scale fundamentally makes things hard to reason about. And cost discussions typically micro optimize a single factor.

[lacker]

Because efficient is not the same concept as cheap.

It is not precisely the same concept as cheap, but I think you are mistaken about efficiency. Economic efficiency means that goods are produced at the lowest possible average total cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_cost

A wide range of economic goods have a lower average cost in rural areas. Anything from a 5 bedroom house to a case of Bud Light.

Urban areas are inefficient for most goods. They are popular not because of their general efficiency, but because they have better-paying jobs.

[taeric]

They have a lower unit cost per item to the individual. Sometimes. But typically only if you ignore transportation and storage costs. And often infrastructure costs are effectively billed to society.

Consider, I can literally walk to the grocery to buy beer. I suppose I have to replace my shoes from wear, but no upkeep or gas on my car. No miles of road that need maintenance to subsidize my trip to the store.

Now, yes, there are miles of road to subsidize getting the store supplied. But that is shared for all people supplied by the store. Same is true, of course, for the trips to the store, but again, my side of that equation is zero. Which is all part of what makes me argue it is more efficient.

And again, complicated with general scale making most observations necessarily simplistic.