If renting, you may suffer a rent control reset.
If owning, you lose 10% of the home's value to various middlemen. You also get a reset on property taxes.
Either way, you also have the opportunity cost associated with a house search, and you have the moving expenses.
1. super-dense city core (your current situation)
2. mega sprawl like LA and Houston
3. traditional suburb, with long commute into a city
4. out on the farm/ranch, maybe telecommuting
5. small town
6. small city
In this sort of place, commuting is easy by both bicycle and car. Traffic is seldom much of a concern. Parking is plentiful. Usually the houses are cheap, frequently 100 to 500 thousand for free-standing homes with yards. Usually the schools are good, with enough people to have a full set of advanced classes at the local high school.
I've lived in several of these in several states. My commute is typically single-digit miles. I normally drive, but walking isn't much trouble. Currently I walk less than a mile. I'll need to do 5 miles in the near future, which should take 10 minutes by car.
What is not to like about it?
Scale by making more cities, not bigger cities.
If you don't live in SFO or NYC you're doomed to a miserable existence of restless toil.
But... a significant percentage of professional jobs are in the NY Metro area, but not in the movie ideal NYC environment.
It has Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Harris, Embraer, GE Transportation Systems, GE Energy Management, FightLite Industries, Thales, Raytheon, DRS, and a bunch of little cyberwar startups.
So there is plenty related to aircraft, cyberwar, and generally all sorts of engineering/manufacturing/etc. for government (especially military) purposes.
Working in a specialized industry is fine. The city is specialized.
OTOH, moving elsewhere is not the end of the world. There are many other fine small cities all across America. You don't have to live where there is more than one job suited for you. Moving every now and then will let you experience more of America.