[friend_and_foe]

And all those benefits cease to exist if people don't have to be there all day just to pay their bills. You don't go to the city to eat deep dish pizza, you go there to work and get paid, the deep dish pizza is just there so you can enjoy your life while you're there and spend some of that money you made. The choice people appear to be making is that they'd rather pay for their own home office and cook their own deep dish pizza.

Cities aren't entirely nonviable, just nonviable in their current iteration from the current paradigm. Their main attraction is that you have to go there to make good money. If cities are to survive into the future, they have to change from that to being attractive to live in regardless of your source of income. The only viable jobs in a city are ones that require workers to be present for practical reasons, such as dockworkers and service workers, and cities have evolved into service economies that cater to information workers, which is nonviable in an age of global connectivity. To survive, housing has to be the largest market for real estate development. Cities have to be made more walkable alongside this transition. Most cities cannot afford to make such a transition because their tax bases would dry up and they'd go insolvent. Those that can, some of them won't make the hard choices before it is too late. I expect at some point some cities will do it and survive, albeit very changed and different.