Exactly. The "better life" in America generally means living in suburbs in a McMansion and driving 2-3 hours per day in traffic because your house is so far from your job. Why anyone thinks this is better than living in a walkable city is beyond me; Japan and western European nations have shown by example that you can certainly put lots of people into a fairly dense city where the main transport methods are walking and subways while still having extremely low crime rates, and a lifestyle like this requires far fewer resources than a typical suburban American one.