Pew Research found in late 2021 that 43% of urban residents would move to a different community if they could, compared with 35% of suburban residents — an 8-point gap that puts city living on the action-regret side of the ledger. The gap is real but narrow, and it widened during the pandemic: between 2018 and 2021, the share of Americans preferring suburbs climbed from 42% to 46%, while urban preference dropped from 23% to 19%. Separately, Home Bay’s 2023 survey of 1,000 recent movers found that 75% expressed some regret about their move regardless of direction, suggesting that relocation itself — not the destination — is the primary regret generator.
The asymmetry here is unusually weak compared to most regret-pair entries in this dataset. Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal framework predicts that inaction regret dominates over time, yet the city-vs-suburb question resists that pattern: choosing the city (action) produces slightly more dissatisfaction than staying in the suburbs (inaction). One explanation is that urban living imposes daily friction — cost, noise, space constraints — that keeps action regret salient rather than allowing it to fade. Another is that suburbs are not really an “inaction” in any meaningful sense; both choices are active, and framing suburbs as the default is itself a cultural artifact of post-war American planning.
The main caveat is measurement. Pew asked about desire to leave, not about regret for a past choice. A 25-year-old renting in Brooklyn who wants to leave may be responding to rent pressure, not regretting a life decision. The 75% Home Bay figure is similarly blunt — it includes people who regret their moving company, their timing, or their square footage, not the city-vs-suburb axis specifically. The directional finding (city dwellers are modestly more dissatisfied than suburbanites) is consistent across multiple surveys, but the 8-point gap should be read as a signal of mild asymmetry, not a strong verdict.