Actually, it is less financially difficult if you're comparing the price of public transit to the price of gas for commuting by car for an hour each way.
I'm sure, but how many rural people are commuting that far?Even if they are, the health effect is a wash even if it's financially more difficult (I don't know the cumulative cost of bus fares/subway usage; gas prices fluctuate but are often cheaper compared to large coastal city gas prices, but maybe by not enough).
Your rhetoric is misleading and obfuscating. You make it sound as though the people who get to enjoy public spaces in cities are some privileged minority, which isn't true at all. Even the lower middle class has time for exercise.
I can only infer that your judgment of what counts as the "successful few" is also skewed. I assume that you'd include graduate students in that group; yet, being a member of that group (as are you, but I think you tend to extricate yourself from it), I can attest to the fact that grad students barely scrape by financially. I'm in the minority of that group purely because my wife works in corporate tax. All my colleagues either pay for cheaper housing, take second jobs, or make do by other means. And yet grad students routinely exercise and work out. Having a lower-middle class income doesn't mean you have no time for physical health. You make it sound like exercise is a luxury only the wealthy can afford. That's simply not true.
While graduate students are financially restricted, they do get access to university amenities (which usually includes a conveniently located exercise facility) at a minimum, and are cognitively and typically conscientiously gifted enough to find time to work on their health (although my experience is that there's some extremes at each end in this category of people).
Lower middle class persons might have time, but will they have the interest, finances, or general access? I know when I have worked at minimum wage jobs I could count on one hand the number of people I knew who discussed regular exercise. They go home and watch TV or go out to eat or maybe attend their kids extra curriculars. Of course, exercise and getting out in nature aren't necessarily the same thing, but in terms of access to do either in an urban environment there are many barriers, both material and mental (I'm physically tired from my job, exercise is for rich people, for white people, etc) for the indigent and working poor. At least in smaller towns, one doesn't have to go out of one's way to get a bit more nature in their field of view. For instance, I can stand in the middle of my street and turn in a circle and always have more trees than I can accurately count in my field of view, and I'm more or less in the middle of town, and there are whole neighborhoods like this. The only ones not like this are brand new exurb developments where they bulldoze everything and build a bunch of medium-large houses on small lots.
You can't tell me these different environments don't have different or have negligible effects on the psyche:
Finally, nothing you're saying suggests that the physical health of rural residents is somehow going to surpass that of urban residents in twenty years. Even if all your critiques of urban living stand, rural living offers no correctives.
It's a matter of the old, sickly rural boomers dying off. Age plays a substantial role in the more rural/urban differences in medical diagnoses among the many metabolic diseases.
