Of course, but I wasn't referring to those people. I was talking about the people who prefer to live in apartments, like, for example, my parents who moved from a house (that was actually in a great location) to an apartment by choice (in a worse location, and some years after that in another apt in a better location). Now they live in a house again (not by choice), but keep their city apartment. And my mom keeps telling me how she hates the house, and can't wait to move back to the city apartment :)

and she even has a housekeeper so it's not like she has to do the whole work around the house by herself. This is why I say it's really deeply culturally embedded. You are not able to step out of your cultural conditioning and imagine that there are people who really truly prefer to live in apartment.

His basic point is that if your sample set consists of people who don't actually have the choice of buying a large home, then that's a major confounding variable whose influence you cannot reliably determine on the results. Beyond that, the sample set also must be large enough for it to not be anecdata. A single couple doesn't imply much about societal trends at large, but the behavior of an entire class of people -- the wealthy -- does, to at least some degree.

Someone who is forced to live in a tiny apartment because they can't afford anything better isn't really making a free choice, even if they rationalize it by claiming that it is.

If I won Powerball tomorrow, I'd tell my boss I could either work 99% remote, or he could try to find someone else to take over. Then I would go home, and be a somewhat more comfortable version of the subsistence farmers my great-grandparents were. Sawing and splitting firewood would be an excellent break from debugging ASP.NET applications, and hilling potatoes would be a great distraction from fighting with upgraded Windows installer tooling. I would never have to bag up another dog turd. I'd have free, non-chlorinated, decent-tasting water. I could plink at tin cans in my back yard without violating any town ordinances, scaring the neighbors, or having the police called on me. I could see the stars at night without the baleful day-glo glare of halogen streetlights polluting the sky.

I am hopeful that this utopia might be achievable within a foreseeable timescale, sans massive lottery-related cash infusion. Much more hopeful than I am about the possibility of an urban environment that could possibly meet my requirements for livability.