I have nothing against people who want to live in the country. What I object to is people who want to live in the country but who insist on dragging the city with them, plowing under zillions of acres of beautiful farm and wilderness land and replacing them with ugly housing developments, strip malls, and concrete deserts. If people would move to the country and live a country lifestyle, that would be fine, but to destroy the little natural beauty we have left in the name of sprawl is a waste and a crime.
The cycle of sprawl is well-established. Like a plague of locusts, white-flighters abandon their city to the ferals, descending upon some country town where the people are too poor to turn down the developers' money. They then transform the town into a wasteland of concrete, with acres and acres of cheaply-built "homes", big-box retailers, and fast-food joints held together by rivers of asphalt. They then raise one generation of alienated kids in this environment of isolation, sell their now-shabby homes to those who can afford them, then abandon the whole thing in place. As they leave, the suburb is taken over by feral humans, completing the transformation of a once-beautiful country town into a slum. The rings of decaying 1950s-1990s suburbs around every major city in America are the result. Meanwhile, the kids of the white-flighters, now adults, are invading the next little country town, 20 miles further out, to begin the process again.
Read Aristotle. Man is a social animal, meant to live in cities, not isolated strip-burgs connected by freeways. The very word "civilization" is based upon "civitas"; no cities, no civilization. Suburban sprawl is bad for the human race because it goes against these core ideas of civilization. It is also ruining the land and bankrupting the public coffers.
Fortunately, it is also economically unsustainable over the long term. Fifty years hence, God willing, the suburbs will be gone, the countrysides will once again be the sole province of farmers, ranchers, and wild animals, and the money we as a society now waste on running away from the problems of living together will instead be spent on solving those problems.
What about people who already lived in the country? Do you think they like the idea of *civilization creeping towards them?
An unfortunate aspect is living in country but, having to commute to cities to carry on your business (we aren’t ranchers although we are farmers in a sense). You can’t wait to get home.
It’s definitely a conundrum.