The Suburb of the Future, Almost Here

Suburbs aren’t necessarily low density, though they usually are. In places like New York, many “suburbs” are just small satellite cities well connected to the downtown core with rail.

StrongTowns has a great article on this, "The Growth Ponzi Scheme," describing the effect that debt-fuelled, suburban city growth can have on municipal finances: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/

That's true, but you still find higher rates of urban living in similarly rich countries with lower subsidies on sprawl.

This trend must be a price over preference issue. The desirable cities in the US are just so damn expensive to live in town. If you want to buy, it's either the 'burbs, or most of your income going to rent/buy in the city.

Of course, if you really do the math, even beyond being unsustainable from an economic and infrastructure/governance standpoint, on a personal level, owning and maintaining a house in the suburbs has many hidden costs.

> It's pretty telling that no evidence whatsoever is provided for this claim.

FWIW, I'm technically a Millennial (born in 1984, Millennials are born 1982-2004), and I'm a living counter-example to the article's claims.

I love living in the suburbs, and I have no problems whatsoever with "visial monotony and social conformity". Really, I'd love to just be an anonymous cog in the machine. I want lots of space and no noise, and I'm visually in love with with the look and feel of sprawl.

The only demand I make is that I strongly prefer living in southwestern and some midwestern suburbs that make use of an arterial grid (e.g. Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Columbus), and I despise the loosey-goosey layout of northeastern suburbs (I have family in NY... the suburbs there feel rural, and I just don't like that). Cities that use an arterial grid tend to place shopping centers at every intersection of arterials, and I like living close enough to one of those intersections that I can walk to the supermarket if I need to. That is the only kind of "walkability" I care about.

Interestingly enough, a recent local tragedy actually brought to light just how much of my age group in my area prefers suburban living. Last weekend, there was a mass shooting at a football watch party in a suburban home in Plano, TX. The shooter and the victims were all fairly close in age to me, leaning younger (the shooter was my age exactly, one other victim was a year older than me, four were 1-5 years younger than me, and three were 7-10 years younger than me). All of them are Millennial suburbanites living in a pretty conservative, sprawling suburb. Furthermore, as I found out after the shooting I have multiple friends who live in that neighborhood, all of whom are within two years of my age. Whatever this alleged trend in suburbs is, it didn't seem to affect Millennials who attended UTD in the mid-to-late '00s.

(As an aside, this has been pretty devastating--the suburbs of Dallas are tight-knit enough that everyone knows each other, I have mutual friends with almost every single person involved, we all went to the same university, and I'd met one of the victims before. Part of the reason I'm writing about this at all is to help me process what happened. And my friends who live there are seriously freaked because their neighbors just got murdered and there are cops and tourists all over their neighborhood now.)