The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

> nobody actually likes this state of affairs

Car dealers.

17% is not a small vacancy rate. It's a fairly high vacancy rate.

> All of this works in cycles. There once was a time when people were flocking to the suburbs. Now, it is fashionable to live in the city.

American suburbs are something of an anomaly. They've existed for a relatively brief period of time, and they seem to be waning now after a few generations. I think you may be conflating "small town" and "suburb" to some degree, when I wouldn't consider those things to be exactly the same. Towns have more centralization and more personality. Suburbs are characterized by sprawl and you tend to end up with chains and nothing really unique or notable.

> Hey look, I live in the city. I don't have a car. I pay a company to clean my place. I pay a company to do my laundry. There is no parking available for friends visiting me. I can't host anything at my place because its so small. I have to do all of my get together events 'out'.

I don't have a car payment, or a car insurance payment, and I don't have to deal with maintenance (cost or time associated with sitting at the mechanic). I actually do clean my own place and do my own laundry, but I've considered paying for these things to free up more of my time. I don't see essentially buying more time as a bad thing. I frequently host things at my place, but then I prefer smaller gatherings anyway. We cook, we drink, we talk, we play games. There's plenty of room for that.

> The city generally provides the illusion that you are part of something that's bigger than you really are. Young people haven't formed a clear definition of this. So, they flock to the city which provides it in 'instant' form. This changes when a generation after realizes the cons of one thing and seeks out the pros in another. Or, when you get older and wiser.

This seems like maybe a weird over-generalization of personal experience. I don't think I know anyone that's moved to the city to "feel like part of something bigger". There are a ton of good jobs here. I rarely have to leave a 2 mile radius because my favorite restaurants, doctor's office, grocery store, parks, museums and stores are all right here. I live a pretty quiet, comfortable life where a lot of nice things are very convenient.

> I have a choice in the matter and live by the beat of my own drum. When you are young, you have no sense of this 'beat'.

I honestly don't even know what you're talking about here, maybe another generalization of personal experience. I didn't move to a city to "find the beat of my drum" or learn who I am as a person or any of those things. I've lived in rural, suburban, small urban and massive urban areas. Both urban areas were far and away more enjoyable than the suburbs or rural.

I visited a friend out in suburbia recently and found the identical office parks full of identical grey rectangular prisms and identical houses and Chipotle after Chipotle depressing. All there seemed to be to do was drink shitty beer at depressing "Irish" pubs. She complains that my city is too dirty and requires too much walking. To each their own, I guess. But I don't think your change in personal preference is indicative of any massive cyclical shifts. I'd also argue that it's not neccisarily indicative of being "older and wiser".

This

It's frankly pathetic that the so-called "biggest innovators" and people who "get the internet" feel the need to be constrained in an already crowded city.

Face to face communication is important, but there are tools to help with day to day communication

The Linux world knows much better how to deal with this then your average "Web 2.0" company

It's articles like these that make me wonder if the current paradigm of centralized production in general is a fluke. Before the industrial revolution there were a handful of cities that were big and mostly for political (cities where the sovereign reigned) or economic reasons (trading). But now, we seem to be overbuilding because that's what we're use to. The suburbs are just an extension of the same phenomenon where the ability to subsidize transportation costs via centralization of production has made this possible. Obviously, the steadily rising price of oil is slowing the growth, but in many ways if the societies before the industrial revolution could have kept the same inventions of production at the local level perhaps things wouldn't be as disjointed as they are. Imagine smaller towns and cities with the same tools of production, but not to the current scale as we experience. Only a handful of modern situations would warrant a big foot print (datacenters and certain factories come to mind), but those would exist in the regions and cities that make economic sense. Today, it just seems like everyone wants to go Stalinist/Soviet big with everything.