I meant to compare (caricatures of) cities, not lifestyles within a city.

I'll struggle to explain myself concisely.

Basically, the Urban ideal is gatekept - you can't access the benefits without paying for them. The general public is better of moving to smaller cities where land is affordable. They will earn a bit less but keep much more for themselves.

> Any "savings" I would have moving to the suburbs would be cancelled out by the thousands in commuting costs

Absolutely.

1) Within a city, these tradeoffs are balanced by the market 2) If there's more cheap land outside city (outer suburbs), this balancing brings prices in the inner city down 3) As that outer land becomes exhausted (new outer suburbs too far to commute), inner-city prices skyrocket 4) A small city is surrounded by more underdeveloped land and hence workers capture a larger share of their own production 5) Improved public transport helps to rebalance inner and outer suburb prices

If there's a fixed amount of land and a large population, best you can do is lots of 5) (urban ideal). It's not a bad thing. If there's land available though, you also have the option to spread out further into more small cities (suburban ideal). There's obviously a continuum between the two.

Within a big sprawling city like Toronto, public transport investment would be a net positive. But people would be even better off IMHO if they instead spread further out into new cities.

> The fact that the American cities that are closest to the urban ideal are so expensive does signal that people would like to live like that

Desirability is a function of price. What's desirable at 100k might not be at 1M.

People living close together with good transport is economically far more efficient than the alternatives. That's the value - everyone is more productive. To access that benefit though, you have to live there. So the people who own the land have leverage to charge you more for it. You earn more but pay more for housing/land.

If you can afford it comfortably, highly Urban cities are almost certainly better for you. Working people though left high-value European cities en masse for dirt cheap land in America, Canada, Australia, etc. They earned much smaller salaries yet ended up wealthier - because they kept more for themselves.