Plenty of people (dare I say a majority?) commute to cities without living in them, and that often has nothing to do with the cost of housing and more personal preference.
I, for one, don't want to be forced to move every time I change jobs. I would much rather have the opportunity to take jobs in near by communities as well (assuming I didn't work from home of course).
It's possible this conversation about housing is not [yet] relevant to your area. By city I mean metro area, not the municipal boundaries. There's a predictable path:
1. city keeps adding dense office buildings
2. city and suburbs resist new housing
3. new housing is greenfield development outside the existing suburbs
I'll pause here to point out the resulting trend: average commutes get longer because the people in the new housing are driving more miles each day than existing residents. Traffic is a function of miles driven. So traffic is super linear on growth.
4. housing closest to offices become extremely expensive [rich people will pay to save time] and existing residents have longer commutes because of increased traffic
Commuting into a city is a thing everywhere. But the American "sprawl forever" model has broken down in the places that have grown the most in the last ~30 years. It screws the people with extremely long commutes, the homeless, the people spending the majority of their paycheck on housing, the people want to have kids but can't afford to, etcs
I, for one, don't want to be forced to move every time I change jobs. I would much rather have the opportunity to take jobs in near by communities as well (assuming I didn't work from home of course).