That sounds like a recipe for suburban housing sprawl, which is what you get in North America when people start moving en masse to a rural area, and it's expensive on infrastructure and unsustainable from a climate perspective.
I am no longer convinced that urbanism is categorically better for the environment. Here's why.
First of all, consider direct energy consumption. A suburban or rural home can probably get >50% of its energy use (including cars if they are EVs) from solar power directly off its own roof and property. This is year round in the sun belt and at least 2/3 of the year elsewhere. Batteries are getting cheap enough that home load leveling or even fully grid-free homes are now approaching middle class affordability.
EVs are now 100% practical as replacements for gas cars even in rural areas. I have a 200 mile range Nissan Leaf which was very affordable and would suit me just fine even if I lived way out in the exurbs or countryside, and they're building fast chargers everywhere where I live (Ohio) even along highways in the country. The next generation or two of cars (or a Tesla today) might even drive me to my destination, allowing me to read on the way the way I did in the subway when I lived in the city.
Secondly, the vast majority of your land use and probably more than 50% of your energy use is not direct. A huge fraction of your energy use is in the embodied energy of the products that you purchase and their transportation around the global supply chain. An even larger fraction of your land use is in farming and resource extraction to support you and your lifestyle.
Where you live changes none of that. A cheeseburger or laptop purchased in the city has exactly the same footprint as a cheeseburger or laptop purchased in the country.
In fact, I can see a future where dense cities are actually worse due to being harder to power with renewable energy. To power a dense city you might have to gather a lot of renewable energy from far away, which means more transmission infrastructure and more transmission losses. If we shifted to local farm-to-table eating patterns food in the city may even have more embodied energy due to a longer supply chain to get it there. Then consider that city dwellers eat at restaurants more and restaurants waste a lot more food than cooking at home usually does. (Seriously... look into how much food most restaurants throw away!)
Cities are hands-down superior to suburbs and the country in a fossil fuel powered world. In a post-fossil-fuel world it's very debatable.
Last but not least, we new urbanists (Gen-X and younger) have discovered that big cities are real estate cartels that make it impossible for the middle class to accumulate wealth. That's already pushing people away. For young people today I would recommend not going to a high cost of living city for any reason other than to level up your career and then leave. Big cities used to be fun centers of art and culture, but that's being driven away by real estate hyperinflation. I'm seeing more and more cool stuff happening in small towns across the country where creatives are settling so they can afford to live without spending >50% of their income on rent.
