Because a lot of people don't want to live in a more-cityish city. Some of us prefer the suburbs.
A place like Houston or Phoenix is perfect for me. Actually, I live in suburban Dallas (and I work farther out in the suburbs), and I have no desire to move. Though it's possible I might have to move out of state next year, in which case I'm seriously looking at St. Paul, MN.
Yeah, but a "suburb" like San Jose is just annoying. It has the population of a city, but the life of a suburb (=nothing going on). So basically the worst of both.
I mean, I am like you, that I would rather live in a smallish community where it's calm and everything over a city, but if you combine that feature with "there are people everywhere" then it is not that great.
Try visit Zurich. It's very much like village-city by an America' standards. Slow life, quiet, know your neighbours etc. with all good inventions from XXI century ;-)
Yeah the Twin cities are nice. If you want to live in the burbs around here it's not that hard to get around. Mind you, I'm from Wichita where the worse commute time was around 30 minutes (metro is tiny comparatively). At worse in the Twin Cities it's maybe... 45 minutes to an hour at the worse it seems to depend which route you take. It can be much worse if you take 694 heading to St Cloud, though. I can't figure out how the anyone takes that route without losing their minds.
Sure. And you could do that. It's just that a lot of services doesn't make sense in such setup and the infrastructure cost per person is few times higher than in a dense areas. Usually this means higher taxes.
I'm used to the large amount of Asian food that's available in Dallas. I could go off on long tangents about how much I love the variety of food I can get here. Unfortunately, most suburban areas I've looked at are snow white, which really disappointed me and cause me to scratch a lot of places off my list. St. Paul on the other hand has a very large Asian population.
It helps that I have a friend who moved to Minneapolis after college (I think he specifically lives in St. Louis Park), and he's been trying to convince me that I should move there if I need to leave Texas. So I started looking at the demographics of the area, and St. Paul's 15% Asian population jumped out at me.
By the way, St. Paul isn't the only place on my short list. Another one is the San Gabriel Valley in SoCal (Monterey Park, Alhambra, etc.), but a big turn-off to that area is the high cost of living.
A place like Houston or Phoenix is perfect for me. Actually, I live in suburban Dallas (and I work farther out in the suburbs), and I have no desire to move. Though it's possible I might have to move out of state next year, in which case I'm seriously looking at St. Paul, MN.