It really makes other US cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. seem like quaint little backwater neighborhoods. Most of those have become little more than traffic-ridden strip malls, preserving a tiny downtown district but everywhere else is mostly just a bunch of drive-up destinations with little pedestrian activity and not much liveliness. Chicago's neighborhoods are still super vibrant and full of festivals, and even in the deep snow of winter people will bustle on the sidewalks and converge on the fun pubs and music venues and such. I've never seen anything else like that in the US.
But, yes, walk a few blocks in the wrong direction and you'll soon be dead. Despite that, millions make it their home. It's an amazing place to live.
(1) America's very old and ongoing racism problem, hence "white flight" and cycles of re-development due to segregation.
(2) The "law of rent" and the connection between the growth of the middle class and the use of suburbanization to escape high urban property prices and eternal rent to a landlord class: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent -- This one is tough to solve and is still a problem. There's a new re-suburbanization trend driven in part by young people realizing it's hard to build wealth if you can only ever rent. This is also a major driver of remote work. COVID just accelerated the remote work trend.
(3) A cultural legacy of preference for the outdoors and the frontier and a desire of a large number of people to have at least some land. This is a romantic idea in American culture that is not as strong in Europe or Asia.
(4) Cities were horribly polluted during the early to mid industrial era. Even those who lived in cities often maintained country homes or vacationed in the country whenever possible if they could afford it, with a major driver being to get away from the noise and pollution.
(5) Lastly, cars were invented in the USA and the automobile industry was and still is a major economic engine and employer in the country. America is where car culture really took hold if not originated. Car culture is still quite strong even though younger generations seem less enamored by it.
The people who are not racist generally don't know racism is even a problem if it's not affecting them. Fighting it would require bureaucratic trench warfare, and most people don't have time for that shit. There is probably an inverse correlation between people who have better things to do and racism anyway, since the racists tend to be the types who... lets just say have enough time on their hands to be actively racist because... well... lets just say there's probably a reason they don't have better things to do.
This is only really true for the type of privileged person posting on HackerNews (me included), other groups don't have that privilege in the same way.
>Access to better restaurants, music and sporting events are definitely advantages
Add to this the potential to live without having to own a car. The transportation infrastructure of good cities beat having to drive all the time.
One other popular thing I've heard is a much larger dating pool, which is probably true.
>limited access to nature
Good cities include good green spaces. I can access at least two major hiking trails that stretch for about a week with public transportation, and also a huge archipelago.
>traffic congestion
This is an issue unique to car-oriented development, though, because of how poorly this category of development scales. Cities with high-quality public transportation and bicycle infrastructure don't suffer from the same amount of traffic congestion, and the issue is less relevant as good alternatives for getting around exist.