I'm not a city-dweller. I live in a small town in England, but not a suburb. But, I think there are a few reasons, having lived in the near-centre of a big city in the UK for a few years.
- Everything is close by, you basically never need to drive. You can go car free if you want. This is great for your physical health too. Not everyone can or wants to drive, especially not everywhere, whereas in suburban America you can rarely even go get a pint of milk without driving. Say you want to go have a drink with friends. What if there's no bus? Are you going to pay $50 for a cab to get to the area with the bar?
- The risk of being mugged or harassed is really not that significant (at least for me, being a 6 foot tall white guy). It never happened to me, and I didn't exactly live in the posh area of town.
- It's only usually expensive if you want a lot of space. Some people don't care as much about space. I rented a 1 bedroom flat for less than £600 per month. Easy to keep clean as a single guy, the whole vacuuming job was like 15 minutes. Now I have a whole house, mortgage is much more, heating cost is higher (even before energy cost rise), land tax is higher, and I've started hiring a cleaner as a lot of our time was taken up by keeping the place looking halfway decent. If you're a more extroverted person, you probably don't care as much about where you live, so smaller and closer is better for you.
- Community, some people like living near a lot of other people.
- Jobs, especially if commuting to the job by car is impractical (e.g. centre of London, there are some ridiculously good paying jobs there, but you would never drive there because parking would cost half your salary)
I think this being an engineering forum means there is a strong tendency to introversion, as that just seems to come with engineers as a package deal. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with living in suburbia per se, the problem is many of these suburban areas are not sustainable in the longer term when they consist solely of housing sprawl and big-box-megamarts served by Walmarts and Home Depots with huge surface car parks -- and it's better to address that now than face huge problems later.