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

500sqm is huge! My house feels large with an office, 4 bedrooms, 2 living areas and a big kitchen, for a family of 5, and it's 260sqm. What do you do with the space? Do you have a cleaner? With a robot vac and a battery vacuum ours is fine but I wouldn't want to clean more than that.

If we urbanistas weren’t subsidizing your lifestyle and you stayed exclusively in your suburb and never went into the city, then we wouldn’t complain.

But highways get built and my taxes get redirected to support your commutes instead of improving our inner core, so complaints will continue.

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.

I'm in the French Alps, so a spread area, NOT designed to sell cars, and well we have walkable areas without physical ads (shop windows) in nature and the simplest difference between the USA suburbs is just the fact that here homes and commerce are mixed, so you have a supermarket nearby a blacksmith, few other shops and so on, while some works at home in presence, like a barber with the shop in the basement.

Long story short it's EASY to correct USA suburbs defects, just allowing mixing residences and commerce. While it's next to impossible evolving cities without rebuilding them. You'll never see a green new deal done NY, and we haven't enough natural resources to rebuild cities, while we can rebuild spread areas without making heat island of thermal mass, subsidence, health issues, big pollution and so on, the sole looser are the finance capitalists who need large cities to own en mass and rent en mass, selling services that are useless and unfeasible in a spread area.

The Strong Town model is definitively possible in a mixed suburbs like here in the Alps, while it's impossible in a modern city.

The term "wanted peace" includes the millions of people who built homes in the suburbs due to anxiety over desegregation in the cities, and preferred the peace of living in an area with an almost all white population, of similar economic status, and where the laws inhibited change in the status quo.