[harpersealtako]

I get why some people like cities. Especially kids who don't want to be tied down, who want to be able to explore who they are, who want to see and be part of something bigger than their hometown. There's plenty of things to love about cities, from the convenience of the nightlife/food culture, to the "pulse" of the city, the feeling that something is always happening at any time of day, the compassionate social compromises residents adopt to accommodate the diversity of backgrounds of people, etc.

But there's a reason the plurality of Americans choose and prefer to live in suburbs. It's deeper than just "outdated 20th century city planning". It's something specific about American culture, community, etc. that resists specific generalizations.

[phil21]

I'm not making a case for dense urban living. I understand many do not prefer that form of living, in fact I'd say most do not. Something in between dense living and what we are currently building in the US seems most prudent to me, but I'm simply an observer.

My experiences in the suburbs were not remotely near yours, and I spent nearly all my life in them throughout the US - including raising a kid. In my experience, those sorts of vibrant communities only seemed to exist in a few select "older" suburbs (aka suburbs with downtowns) from where I was from. I agree those look great.

It also certainly depends on personality. In my experience, unless you enjoy a very structured social life you simply will not have one. I have seen many folks end up slowly just spending most of their time indoors in front of the TV/computer cut off from the world. This is at least a bit harder to do in an environment not basically built to optimize that condition. I enjoy going out with a friend on a random Wednesday night, but I don't enjoy planning on that activity a week in advance.

It's an interesting topic to me. I think of my Grandfather's house in what could only be called a prototypical suburbs of the 1950's and I can absolutely see that life being amazing. The same life in a 2000's era suburb just seems like an utterly different living experience to me - almost alien in nature when I lived there.

That and the whole financial sustainability of the endless expansionist sprawl is highly suspect to me.

[harpersealtako]

I'm assuming the types of older w/ downtown suburbs you're talking about are more like this, right?:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2054168,-71.5416077,3a,75y,0...

For the record I grew up between two types of places. One was a pretty, forested, newish, wealthy, totally-isolated-from-anything-that's-not-a-home-or-school development very similar to this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7471229,-122.073413,3a,60y,0...

The other was a more remote, rural, mixed-income area a lot like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.4281764,-78.0252446,3a,75y,1...

I found both of those great in their own ways. The former was extremely pleasant and peaceful. Kids would play around outside, neighbors would walk their dogs together, people would frequently have house parties and barbecues and such. Weirdly, it's completely isolated from any commercial development. It's a 10 minute drive to the nearest place you can buy anything. Nobody had much of a problem having a social life as far as I could tell.

The latter was great too, but in a more independent kind of way. Everybody kept to themselves more at home, but they would congregate at church or at the local restaurants all the time. People would shoot guns, drive 4x4s, just do whatever the heck they wanted and nobody gave them shit for it. There was a bigger mix of poorer folks and richer folks, oftentimes along traditional racial boundaries, but they coexisted better than any community I've seen. Rich farmers would shoot an extra deer each year for the poorer families so they could eat meat for dinner even when it was expensive. There was a bit of a "downtown" but it was still like, 20 minutes drive away on a country road so not really accessible without a car obviously. School and sports was a huge center of life there: people all over town would come to the local high school football games.

I'm still not exactly sure which kinds of suburbs, or aspects of suburbs, you find alien.