There's plenty of people who hate their jobs in environmentally destructive industries, hate their long commutes, hate their energy and water guzzling homes, hate mowing their lawns, hate their automobiles, hate their business travel... etc.
Given an opportunity to reduce the stress in their lives, and reduce their environmental footprints, many would eagerly "change their lifestyles."
I think the key to this is affordable urban housing -- neighborhoods with good jobs, grocery stores, and interesting shops within easy walking distance.
I'm not talking about science fiction concrete multi-story urban arcologies, just smaller homes with small gardens, in places with good public transportation... much as all cities were built before the automobile age, but better without the coal furnaces and dirty air, without the horse shit in the streets, and all the modern conveniences including high speed optical fiber internet.
It's not a coincidence that some of these pre-automobile age urban areas are now posh neighborhoods.
Homes in the San Francisco neighborhood where my grandmother was born, just after the Great Earthquake, now sell for at least one and a half million dollars. That's for a smaller home that's been subdivided into apartments and run down by absentee landlords and struggling tenants. Restored these homes sell for two million dollars or more. These homes, built shoulder-to-shoulder, weren't anything special when new, the tract homes of their day, and became less desirable when automobile culture opened up the suburbs and affluent white people left. But now they are desirable again and much finer places to live than they ever were in the past.
(My great-great grandfather's San Francisco home is a colorful gilded Beauty Queen. My grandma and her sister didn't stay in San Francisco, which they considered a stodgy working class town, and went on to run wild in Hollywood.)
The old downtown of my own small city used to be a place people avoided at night. Now it is greatly revived with movie theaters, restaurants, art galleries, etc.. The upper floors of old office buildings, which had long gone empty or used for storage, are being converted to housing. Downtown living is not a bad lifestyle and has a relatively small environmental footprint.
My wife and I live in a high density suburb with a backyard big enough for three large dogs. We're about two miles from downtown, a mile from the grocery store and two miles, in the opposite direction, to the nearest Target. Our children walked to school but now they are grown and living in big cities. I think our neighborhood would be greatly improved if it was more like pre-automobile cities, with a few little grocery stores, hair salons, and pubs scattered about within easy walking distance. Our children and some of our nieces and nephews live in places like that.
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