I'm sorry that this issue leads you to attack
me personnally, twice now.
Also nowhere have I said that I wanted to force anything on anyone. I pointed out effects that this choice for sprawled suburbs (so in a city setting, and not rural, which is a different deal) has real consequences. And that maybe it's not frowned upon because those people are seen as NIMBY's or speculators, but simply that those choices are unconsiderate to our future challenges as a species (ie global warming, social fissure, ...).
So maybe if one doesn't care at all about environment and sustainability, and only about his own individual life, sprawled cities and suburbs can seem like a good idea. But roads and infrastructure are polluting, sometimes to the detriment of arable land. Such suburbs exists on dependance of the personal vehicle so far (shared ones will help matters a bit, sure but this still faces the issue) so more GHG pollution and so on.
Ecology is the most worrying aspect of it to me, but sadly socially it's also desastrous. I have read urbanist books that focused more that matter but in my native tongue so probably no point in making references but still : http://www.lechappee.org/collections/pour-en-finir-avec/le-c...
The problen is that if most people own vehicles, there's no need for PT, which consequently does not develop, and so a whole fringe of population that can't afford a car is isolated. Density brings populations together, if you live in a sprawled neighborhood you never meet other people, narrowing your perspective on your society.
Also note that this was not always the case. Cities used to have active centers, people lived around and did most errands by foot, streets were narrower... Now we go to malls, often peripherial, and single, private owned businesses are eaten up.
As for why people are attracted to suburbs (also largely sourced in books interested in the social phenomenon). More living space (so more volume to heat, see ecological concerns), which largely exceeds the actual comfortable need we have for it (and enables the stashing of shit, shit we don't need and that pollutes, consuming as much as one can, see ecological and social concerns). The garden, which is seemingly essential to some idyllistic upbringing of children, but probably nothing more (at least I don't feel people who grew up with gardens are significantly more attracted and careful towards nature but YMMV).
So yeah, sometimes specific hobbies (car collection, woodworking, gardening, whatever) can make sense of such choices. But that doesn't make it's inconvenients less real. And tbqh, most often people don't even think much of them in the first place.
Enough posts in the thread described European cities that I don't need to do so. But there's a need for density in the US, and the suburbian nightmare (which is also prevalent here) has to be taken control of.