[kkfx]

Why? What's wrong in a supermarket, a 500m² (~5400ft²) shed one km (0.6 miles) from your home? It's not open 24/7, it does not smell or smoke, generate special noise, heat and so on. In between a pine wood, a small lake, a bit of grass. My nearest neighbor "pollute" much more with:

- noisy party in summer till early morning

- smelly fertilizer for his garden

- noisy DIY hobby in early morning and late evening

of course the supermarket receive a truck to resupply and many cars of buyers but hey, it's one km away in nature. Similarly the blacksmith shed it's not at a spit of some homes, it's around 1km away. The local elementary school is at few km from most homes. It's still a spread area but you do not need to run 40+40km just to buy a bottle of milk. There are also some polluting factories, but of course they are planted at a sufficient distance from any home.

[db48x]

Nothing, to you. But commercial places are commercial. The idea behind a suburb is that the only thing near you are your neighbors, and a few amenities such as churches and parks and elementary schools. The sound of a party or of children playing is not noise. Even the drone of a lawn mower is not noise. If you can smell your neighbor’s fertilizer, then you don’t live in a suburb (or he used way too much and killed all his plants).

[kkfx]

Well, and why this specific idea should persist? Or more precisely why the alternatives should be dense cities, suburbs or isolated countrysides instead of a mixture of them?

> The sound of a party or of children playing is not noise. Even the drone of a lawn mower is not noise.

If you casually came here for a vacations or something similar I can show you what I'm talking about... Yes theoretically children playing around a school should not make much noise, except when they do make many, with some of their parents helps picking them with a Harley, or a rusty old 4x4 with a holed muffler, often honking to attract their child attention, similarly a small electric lawn mower does not makes much noise, but a diesel small tractor at high rpm due to an old alternative mowing bar picking not only grass but also rocks and roots because the owner is not much good at regulating it's height from the seat and the ground is not a flat curated grass only surface but a mix of grass, pines wood, some brambles explicitly put due to same old litigation with another neighbor and his dogs freely moving around... Well... Ah, the fertilizer is manure discharged once per year by another neighbor from a farm trailer aside the border, than left here maybe few days because the neighbor who fertilize have something else to do... That's all part of the natural package. Here it's not like USA homes with a bit of short grass and white low fences, it's more vary, of course not at all terrible as described above but still have such aspects sometimes in the year.

[db48x]

You’re still missing the point. Regardless of how much you like your neighborhood, 50% of Americans would prefer to live in a suburb. Even if there were no constraints such as money or family obligations, they would choose a suburb consisting entirely of houses over your neighborhood which mixes residential and commercial uses. Your neighborhood might be great, but it isn’t what most Americans would choose. In fact, only about 20% would choose it; the rest want to live far out in the countryside with as few neighbors as possible.

That’s the key fact that folks like you miss: you’re the minority. And when you denigrate the suburbs, you are hurting your cause. You are insulting the people who see the suburbs as the ideal place for them to live.

Instead of going on about how the suburb they live in is not the dense urban city that they prefer, the folks who wrote this article should move to an existing city and then advocate to make it nicer. Don't try to turn a suburb into a city, turn a city into a better city.

[kkfx]

Actually I'm not against the suburbs, I simply agree with the article (just a bit) that the classic suburb model have issues because you can't buy anything nearby and so you need long trips just to buy some milk, that's is. I'm definitively against the city model, because IMVHO there is no way to turn a city into a "better city"m a city is just "a tool" you can use and than dispose and rebuild another, witch is practically next to impossible and so costly that we can't do on scale.

BTW if peoples living in the suburbs like them there is no issues at all, I do not denigrate anyone of them. IF some would like to live still in single family homes BUT also with some shops around without being in the city than the solution it's easy in nature or adapting a suburb, that's because suburbs and empty space could be changed a small step at a time, while cities can't.

That's is. I'm definitively not pro-urban as the article author.