I used to live on the UES of Manhattan and now live in flyover country on a half-acre wooded lot in a house that is 6x larger than my studio apartment and yet costs less -- the extra space is quite useful for kids and a work-from-home office. There are pros and cons to both arrangements and I certainly miss some things that NYC had to offer, but articles like this exaggerate the advantages of city living. Other comments have pointed out some of them, so I'll point out just one item -- the geographic proximity of rich and poor in cities is way overblown. There may have been poor people living within a couple hundred yards of luxury apartments in NYC, but that doesn't mean there was any interaction between them. NYC is very stratified by socioeconomic status and living geographically close to people in other socioeconomic classes does not change that at all.