[jacobolus]

The environmental impact of suburban lifestyle is not limited to personal transportation carbon emissions. It also involves huge amounts of expensive (in land and resources) infrastructure, and individual suburbanites have a much larger resource footprint than other people.

[dragonwriter]

> individual suburbanites have a much larger resource footprint.

Suburbs have higher median personal income than urban cores; so that individual suburbanites consume more resources isn't surprising.

These people would also consume more resources if they lived in urban cores.

[jacobolus]

The same people would consume dramatically fewer resources (each, individually) and cause dramatically less environmental destruction if they lived in a smaller personal space with far less bulky/expensive per-person infrastructure and used shared rather than individual services (e.g. transportation).

[eweise]

The problem is solved in my suburbia since the county has resisted any sort of building for the past 50 years. Also, the new suburbia housing I see being built, is much more concentrated. Seems people like houses but don't care as much about big yards.

[brewdad]

My suburbia is trending the same way. Almost all new construction is on a lot of 5000 sq ft max. Most is closer to 3000 or multi-family. The trouble is that the old way of zoning still prevails and all of this semi-dense housing sits multiple miles away from the retail and job centers in the town. Everyone still needs one car per working adult, so really nothing of substance has changed.