Preferences are one thing, but you're factually wrong about the efficiency of cities vs suburbs.
"Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than
suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York."
"In metropolitan regions, suburbs emit up to four times the household emissions of their urban cores. While households located in more densely populated neighborhoods have a carbon footprint 50% below the national average, those in the suburbs emit up to twice the average. In metro areas such as New York, GHG emissions in these outlying jurisdictions are readily apparent: Emissions in Manhattan average lower than 38 tons per household annually, but in exurban jurisdictions such as Sussex County, N.J., these emissions exceed 66 tons per household annually."
You're radically under-estimating the efficiency gains of sharing infrastructure. Consider a simple metric like paved road-miles per person, or electricity-line-miles, or distance to school, etc.
It's absolutely fine to have a preference for a rural environment - I grew up in the foothills of the mountains and I miss them terribly - but efficiency is a measurable metric, and cities win, for better or worse.
As answered below that's not what others have observed and more relevant is the capacity to evolve. A NEW mid-rise building and a NEW set of single family homes matching the number of apartment show that the mid-rise new building consume less in operational terms than the single family homes. Though it demand more raw materials to be built, and more infra around it to operate, and typically waterproofs the soil for a large area, killing soil humus, meaning consuming soil, while single family homes do not but the real difference arrive at the end of their useful life: rebuild single family homes it's a common task. Rebuild a mid-rise building it's another story. First of all you have to relocate not a single family for a little time but MANY families for a not so little time, secondly in most part of the world the building owner is not one, they are many and they have to agree rebuilt and how to do so, not counting the issue such large activity create in the surroundings. Long story short: multi story buildings tend to last in degrade for a long time, consuming than much more then newer homes. Homes can easily built in wood, well, it's not pure wood, but it's a self-renewing material in nature if we do not harvest too much. Bigger structures in wood can be made but they tend to be a nightmare. A tall building is not a set of piled containers that packed occupy less soil, it have to sustain it's own weight, have proper foundations, anti-seismic design, fire-safe design etc.
Long story short is like a train: formally is far cheaper than a plane, if you just observe a single fully-loaded trip. But you have to count all you need to build and maintain the train and the relevant infra, and here things start to change much, than you have to count the flexibility over time: a plane can go from any A to B in a certain distance range, a train need rails and build/change rails take an enormous amount of work.
Long story short again: yes FORMALLY under specific windows of observation the city is far more efficient, but in TCO terms is definitively not.
"Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York."
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/taub...
"In metropolitan regions, suburbs emit up to four times the household emissions of their urban cores. While households located in more densely populated neighborhoods have a carbon footprint 50% below the national average, those in the suburbs emit up to twice the average. In metro areas such as New York, GHG emissions in these outlying jurisdictions are readily apparent: Emissions in Manhattan average lower than 38 tons per household annually, but in exurban jurisdictions such as Sussex County, N.J., these emissions exceed 66 tons per household annually."
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-not-just-cities-subur...
You're radically under-estimating the efficiency gains of sharing infrastructure. Consider a simple metric like paved road-miles per person, or electricity-line-miles, or distance to school, etc.
It's absolutely fine to have a preference for a rural environment - I grew up in the foothills of the mountains and I miss them terribly - but efficiency is a measurable metric, and cities win, for better or worse.