&gt; Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up.<p>Yes, but people are making their decision based on out-of-date facts. Because in the United States in 2016, mortality risk goes down as population density goes up, and city kids are statistically safer.<p>The #1 killer of children in US is car accidents. Guess who gets in dramatically less car accidents? City kids who don&#x27;t need to ride in cars so much.<p>The #2 killer of children in the US is guns, and child gun deaths are higher outside the cities, on average. People often don&#x27;t believe this, but it should be obvious when you pause and consider where American gun culture is centered. It&#x27;s not in the big cities.<p>Suicide and substance abuse rates are also lower in the cities. This may be caused by the many small towns with major meth and opioid epidemics pulling down the statistics.<p>(All of this depends on comparing apples-to-apples: being poor makes a bigger difference than the urban vs rural split, so you need to consider people at the same socioeconomic level.)