[ars]

You've apparently never actually been in a suburb. They typically have random unkempt forests behind each row of houses, and not just a little bit. Like you need a serious walk between houses on different roads, and all of that is a long unbroken piece of nature.

The front of the house near the road has the lawn, but there's a LOT more to suburbs than that.

2 minute walk from where I lived in a suburb was a "forest" as I called it as a child, so large you could get lost. In the suburbs where my relatives live there's more forest with bears, and a there's a creek behind their house.

Yet from the front it's a road with lawns. There's a lot more to suburbs than that road.

Not to mention kids love playing in that road since there's barely any cars. All those car-free threads, about how cars ruin things? Suburban kids already have that: They have barely any cars to contend with.

[vitus]

You have a very narrow definition of a suburb.

Indeed, some suburbs have a lot of nature. I've encountered suburbs where individual houses are in the middle of the woods, off the main road, and yet not 10 miles away are developments where all the houses all look identical because they were built by the same developer and have a lawn in front, a backyard, and no wilderness whatsoever; right outside that development are busy streets on all sides.

I've lived in suburbs that are incorporated cities with population above a hundred thousand, and are eminently as pedestrian-friendly as some larger cities, but are tiny in comparison to the city that they're suburbs of (with more than a million people within that city's limits). And there are suburbs where you cannot get to the nearest grocery store without getting in a car and driving on the highway for 5 minutes.

You can't paint all suburbs as having lots of nature and being devoid of cars, just as you can't say all cities are identical.

[kdmccormick]

Yeah, I grew up in a town like that in CT. It's nice, for sure. I would call it semirural rather than suburban, though.

The issue with lovely semirural living is that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that. It's a privilage to live in house surrounded by woods with grocery store a 15 minutes drive away. Many people (not you, congrats) need to live very close to one another, and the best, happiest, most sustainable way for them to do that is in a dense city with good transit, good sidewalks, and limited auto traffic.

That is all not to mention the economics of suburban and semirural living. Those nice roads with little traffic? They are crushingly expensive. Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.

[ars]

It's not semirural - there are no farms or fields anywhere, and there are plenty of houses. It's just they are spread far enough apart for people to have space.

> that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that.

That's really not true. Half of the US lives in cities, half don't. You really think the US is so completely full there's no room for those city dwellers to have more space?

According to my quick math there enough room for 40 times the population of the US to each person (not each family - each person) to have a huge suburban lot.

> They are crushingly expensive.

No, they are not. That's an urban (ha!) myth. Roads are really not that expensive once you move out of dense cities. Rural roads cost around half or less of urban ones, and they last around 4 times as long since traffic is much lower (5-10 years vs 25-40 years). So a rural road costs like 1/10 an urban one.

And since according to http://demographia.com/db-intlsub.htm suburbs have around 1/3 the population density, suburban roads are actually 3 times cheaper per person!

Hardly "crushingly expensive".

> Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.

And cities would not exist if not for all the goods made in non-urban areas. Cities have tons of high-revenue, high-tax services, but they don't actually make anything. That's all done outside the city.

If everyone moved to the city everyone would die - there would be no food or anything else.

There's a balance in the world between cities and rural and suburban area, and you mess with that balance at your peril! You can end up with terrible imbalances and very expensive food and other goods.

And don't forget you need all those rural roads, or nobody could get any goods to cities. So be doubly cautious about suggesting fewer rural areas because of "road costs".

[ajoseps]

man I’m curious what state or country this suburb is in? The suburb I grew up in was nothing like that. If anything you’re describing something more on the rural side of things.

[ars]

Due to my privacy I'd rather not say the city name, but I will say it was the second largest city in a strongly Democratic coastal state.

The largest city in that state was one of those large city hell-holes with too many people crowded in too small a space. But the second largest city was quite nice once you were not too near the downtown.

[ajoseps]

It’s interesting how much variation there are for suburbs. I’m mostly used to the types that exist in CA which are very different from what you describe and I am personally trying to avoid settling on. Also as someone who lives in a “large city hell-hole”, I personally greatly prefer it to the suburbs I grew up in. Fwiw a lot of the urbanism movement I’m familiar with prefer rural areas and cities over suburbs. You’re right that cities can’t exist without rural areas and the idea is to make more areas rural, not decrease it. The main issue that is brought up is suburban sprawl, which I think is different from what you’re describing. I think the main idea is to avoid cities like LA and prefer more density like Chicago or NYC.