If cities are your personal Hell, then even if on some intellectual level you know that other people can tolerate them, it becomes hard to fight for subjecting more and more people to hellish conditions.
If I had to live fulltime somewhere like NYC or San Francisco, I’d honestly rather be dead. And that is not an exaggeration for effect. I’d rather be deceased, gone from this earth, in the ground. Defunct.
Many people — about half, I’d guess — find cities of any type utter Abaddons and to them the liberal fantasia of tight-packed concrete highrise boxes sounds like the worst torture imaginable. Most libs can’t seem to understand this, but it’s still true. I know my preferences because I lived in Seattle for a year and a half and it was miserable. We never did anything or went anywhere because so much was difficult to get to (with a car or without) or otherwise too inexpensive, inaccessible, or just overcrowded.
If you want to make me live somewhere like NYC, just go on ahead and put me down and save your trouble.