American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We're the Protagonists

Millions of people all across the country built homes in suburbs because they wanted peace. They’re not horrifying. Even if you personally find them dull, they are a nice way to live for many others. Even if yours is badly built, many are not. Parking garages are not creepy, they’re just utilitarian. They overstate their case by pointing to one place that they don’t like and generalizing that to all suburbs.

Another question is how are kids supposed to get around in that environment? Particularly crossing stroads to visit their friends.

>There were two reasons why. One was that there is no easy path to our grocery store (unless you’re in a car, of course):

Where I live, walking in suburbs is not an issue, neither is biking, no matter where.

But a relative had a 4 month summer job stint in the midwest and they put him up in a wealthy suburban home. So, I brought my bicycle to explore the area for a 2 week visit.

Riding in that area was damn scary, and I have ridden my bicycle many places, including NYC, Philadelphia, Montreal and Boston. I would never do that again where he lived. There were no shoulders or sidewalks on any of the regular roads. The drives seemed intent on killing me on purpose, during the rides I was being beeped at and sideswiped non stop.

Visiting other areas in the midwest since, I would drive around and seems those areas are designed for cars and nothing else.

So I would think in Texas, this would be true even to a greater extent.

All I can say to the person, is good luck.

I was living, now circa 8 years ago, in a big city, now I'm living in the french Alps and I have exactly ZERO intention to come back in a prisons named city.

USA suburbs for my little US experience have a simple issue: they are residential ONLY. Here we have sparse homes AND commerce of various kind, in few km/miles from my home there are a handful of other homes, but also a small supermarket, a blacksmith shed, a brico-like shop (semi-finished wood like panels, lumbers etc and metal products, paint, ...) a multi-service small center (from tobacco shop to parcel shipping and so on), as a result we move of course, but much less than in the USA.

In cities on contrary instead of living in nature, moving in nature, we commute between big buildings used for less than half a day, to seed physical ads (shop windows) in between them, wasting a gazillion of natural resources, being unable to evolve due to density, being in a thermal mass island to augment the effects of climate changes, having waterproofed so killed, a vast area of soil, created subsidence problems, disrupted the natural water cycle for a much bigger then the city radius, ... to the point nearby some coastal cities sharks get too much cocaine from humans.

Dear city-lovers: in the past cities was NEEDED, not a good place anyway but a needed one, because of scarce, slow and expensive logistics, paperwork who need offices, absence of modern TLCs etc, nowadays cities have grown big enough to being unmaintainable, ghettos for poor and desperate slaves of the finance capitalism who NEED CITIES to keep up, the sole, without any other purpose. Did you now the Green New Deal? Well, allow me, since I've built a new home, with p.v., a bit of energy storage, BEV etc to tell a thing: the Green New Deal work. But work ONLY in small buildings, single family homes, hens etc. NOT in cities. Oh, yes you can theoretically build new cities, the Saudis knows a bit with their failed Neom project, failed like the ancient Fordlandia or modern Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis, ... smart-lagers for citizens-inmates to be exploited by giants, so costly we can't even build a first generation of smart cities, while we can and we build and have already built countless new green new deal compliant homes. Cities are modern mainframe, needed by the cloud+mobile world witch is a fragile and distopic one.

To correct suburbs just buy and destroy some homes there if the density it's too much and insert some sheds with various shops, and you'll discover how is easy to live with them. Than you'll discover again the strong-town classic physical work from home with the barber shop in the basement and the barber's home on top because hey, we have hairs to be cut, teeth to treated and so on whenever we live, so instead of having X dentist in a dense area of a city we have the same number of dentists spread as we are spread. The sole who loose are the giants because in single family homes we own and we are naturally pushed to own instead of rent, there is room for LOCAL economy while giants struggle to be spread and so on. If you want a clean planet remember cities are polluted and incompatible with nature, humans are part of the nature and integrated in it live well.

There's a bit of contradiction in the article. The main objection is the author's feeling of uneasiness in open spaces. "liminal spaces" created by, for example, large parking lots. The author then complains that these wide open spaces are not "walkable". What? They are certainly walkable by their very design! What they are not, it seems is the real objection, are cozy spaces lined with tacqueiras and coffee shops.

Should be tagged with 2022, and the flagging makes sense.

This whole site appears to be an urbanist propaganda site. Suburbs are evil, suburbs are racist, suburbs are stealing our money, suburbs are... Here's how to "organize" a Community Action Committee to rail against suburbs

The thing about big cities is the government has way more control over your daily life if you're stuck in one place.