I LOVE density. I still live in the same place I grew up and they are "trashing" our location. I know this because that's what all the people age 50+ who live here are saying (it's actually just a subset of the 50+ people, but mostly in that demographic). Takes forever to take a left turn now and they HATE it. They hate sitting there waiting for 4 lanes (2 lanes in both directions) of traffic to clear so they can speed off to work out of the Bojangles parking lot.
Growing up here, I hated how walking places took a whole hour to go anywhere fun, had to walk on medians on a highway to get to the movie theater.
We finally have enough demand due to increased density that they're building out a bus stop within walking distance. I already can walk or bike to get groceries and the pedestrian infrastructure is good enough that I can walk to a few different places, adding the bus route gets me to the train station and even the airport. I experienced the tyranny of the car, first in my childhood, without a car, now in my adulthood, with a car, but soon a closer step free of that tyranny with increases in these kinds of transit services.
Not that I don't think the urbanization is perfect. One of the bigger ones I've noticed is everyone has sterile landscaping, dead grass lawns (even when not in a drought) and other stuff that provides little wildlife value. At least we have serviceberry trees in our neighborhood...
Thing is, even in rural areas, the landscaping will be messed up or sterile too. I even saw someone with a HUGE thicket of bamboo, easily a quarter acre, maybe more, I could only see it from the road. Now that trashes a location!! Not moving anywhere close to that! Yet, the rural life affords more space for less money, which allows, in the correct non-trashed location, the ability to create a valuable space for wildlife.
I find it a really hard choice to make. I'd have to live in a smaller house in a rural area accounting for the fact that I would absolutely go the cheapest I could get, down to a single wide. And giving up the nice infrastructure! I mean, I don't think density is perfect, there are tradeoffs, but I do find the version that I'm experiencing to be enjoyable. I think the only thing that would make it unbearable is if they started rolling back the transit/pedestrian/bike infrastructure progress we've made.
I do think there's an argument against over development, but that's still a "building up" problem. Build up tall, but with bigger green space - like 2-3 acres at least.
Really? Cities like Cleveland, Memphis, or Wichita aren't particularly dense but they're affordable in terms of median price-to-income ratio. The unemployment rate in Cleveland is only 4% so there would seem to be job opportunities.