Except you can't. Your choices in the US are almost always suburban to rural, especially if a) you don't have a lot of money to afford the desirable urban areas and b) you don't want to deal with the crime in the undesirable ones.
I love cities. But I'm having a hard time with so-called "urbanist" people/policies.
A lot of the philosophy boils down to intentionally make life harder for anyone who isn't living in Downtown urban cores -- areas so expensive, no one who works for a living can ever afford them.
Effectively, they want to punish poor and middle class people simply for being poor and middle class, through the design of the place we all live in. Which is counter to the whole point of cities in the first place.
