> I can't think of anything else that might be lacking in any rural area you'd reasonably consider living in.
Also reasonable bus service to anywhere "intersting".
I was actually thinking about that, and I think it comes down to what you do outside of work.
If you only hang around the house or similar, yeah, it doesn't matter much. My mom loves gardening, so she doesn't need "infrastructure" to "travel" to the back of her house.
But I do like going out, having a drink or two with friends, go dancing. Activities that can end late at night, possibly with some amount of alcohol in the blood. If alcohol's involved, I can't drive, so it's either an expensive taxi to the suburbs or some form of transit, hence infrastructure. Driving is a pain, because these activities happen in the city, and the mayor's policy is to make it as painful as possible to drive - and she's good at it.
However, I figured I didn't do those things that often, so with the difference in housing price, I could pay for a taxi fare now and then if I lived in the 'burbs. I also ride a motorbike, which somewhat mitigates the driving issue if I'm not intoxicated - but that's a separate hassle of its own when going out.
Depending on the activities, these may very well also exist in smaller, more affordable cities, which also helps with the infrastructure issue since you don't have to travel as far and are more likely to be able to bike or similar. I don't have kids, so I don't need a big house. Which means that, aside from my work, which holds me in the big city, I could move to one of those smaller, cheaper ones and not live in the boonies.
> But I do like going out, having a drink or two with friends, go dancing.
I'll point out that the original comment said "small town". The followup comment introduced "rural", but, given the context, we can infer that the same thing was meant.
With that said, why can't you do that in a small town? The small town (population ~1,000) I grew up in has eight bars, some of which cater to the dancing crowd. You can walk the whole town over in like 15 minutes, so there is no need to drive home after a late night drinking session. While not a train, there are buses that run to the nearest large city if you really need something you can't find locally, but I'm not sure what that would be.
It is fair to say that you can't spin a globe, randomly place your finger down, and move to where it lands and expect a good result. Infrastructure absolutely is lacking in the expansive forest, desert wasteland, and across the frozen tundra. But if you carefully select the small town, I wonder what infrastructure one actually finds missing?
> suburbs
That sounds like city living. Small towns or rural areas don't have suburbs. It's an interesting perspective, to be sure, but might have missed the mark around where the original question was asked. That is a very different environment.