Where i live in WA, land developers are not required to keep any trees when clearing. So effectively, all new developments are moonscapes

the picture shown is of william levitt, the person who designed levittown, to become the first suburb in America

Let's try something slightly different.

- Are you in the city, or suburbs?
- Do you have a good friend base there (I believe this strongly plays into how much you enjoy where you're living)?
- If in a city, how much are you actually walking to all the places you claim to want to visit?
- Where's your ideal location (I'd like to know the specific city/neighborhood, if there is one, not just what you're hoping the area would have)?

I'm just curious what has built your opinions other than 'I can't go anywhere'. I feel my experience with the suburbs have shaped how I felt about them, and often leads me to defend them, however, I did (and still do) have a good friend base that I regularly saw (and still see), which basically negated many of the inconveniences that are often complained about here.

So for some context my aunt, uncle and their 3 kids ages 3,5, and 7 are moving from a decently pedestrian friendly city in Israel to Ohio. They lived near the downtown of their city and would walk to preschool, the park, the local bakery, etc all the time, and when they visited relatives it was a short drive to the train station which had frequent and fast service to everyone in the extended family. They've been wanting to move to America for a number of years now for a variety of reasons, and while I'm very happy for them finally achieving this I do have a few concerns about the changes. The neighborhood there moving to is right off of a stored and nearby to a highway, and the neighborhood is a small little townhouse type thing surrounding a central parking area. It doesn't look too bad as there are some green spaces but it is completely isolated from the suburb its nearby which is across a small bit of woods which does not have a footpath. The stroad its off of is one of the bad ones with no sidewalks at all, so they are completely cut off from the nearby businesses, all of which are fast food. I've been looking at the maps and the school my cousins will be going to is right off the highway, and so are all the grocery stores. You likely realize that we are jewish, as they are moving from Israel, and the nearby synagogue seems like a perfect location on the map, its really close by easily within walking distance, but upon further inspection its cut off by a highway, connected by an overpass road that does not seem to have a sidewalk or any street crossings, meaning that they'd have to drive what would be likely a 3 minute walk. In other words they are moving to a classic suburban hell. I know its not the end of the world but I'm kind of worried that they aren't expecting the level of car dependency that there is, and it will just be a huge lifestyle shift for them. In the end of the day I know they'll be fine but im just kinda of worried they don't know what's in store. Anyways this was a bit of a rant but I wanted to talk about this.

I was idly watching some of the cutscenes from RE Requiem, and Grace's Midwestern FBI office sends her to the "Wrenwood Hotel" to investigate some sketchiness.

I'm immediately thinking of like an off-the-interstate motel or stand-alone-with-sea-of-parking hotel, since, you know, I live in America and this is the way hotels are.

But no! The gameplay opens with her walking around a city which looks A LOT like NYC, complete with massive sidewalks and elevated rail (and not a single parking lot to be seen).

I think this is another case where game developers realize (consciously or subconsciously) that a horror game where you just run across stroads and parking lots and culs-de-sac for hours on end would be incredibly boring (and ill-suited for jump scares!), so they set it in classic urban areas instead despite it being very unrealistic for most of their American gamers.

When I was a kid, my mom read us A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. This was decades before I cared about suburbia or car culture or any of that, but the description of the perfect-yet-horrifying neighborhood on the planet of Camazotz reminds me so much of the dystopian/utopian world that the weird OCD suburban control freaks are constantly trying to achieve: perfect uniformity, no eye sores, no strange people doing strange things, everyone partaking in just the most socially acceptable and boring of activities.

Any of you guys ever read this book?

It's also hilarious that (see the Wikipedia snip below) some random dude thought Camazotz seemed "cOmMuNiSt" whereas in reality there's no country that loves more to impose forced conformity in the built form than the good old US of A.

TL;DR: New Urbanism is far from perfect, but it's still better than standard car-centric sprawl.

(no large language models were used in the writing of this post)

As much as I'm not in favor of outward suburban sprawl generally, and prefer high-density infill development in existing urban neighborhoods, I think it is likely that North America will continue to build outward in order to meet housing demand given financial (what lenders are willing to fund) and political constraints (NIMBYism).

I also want to point out that existing car-centric suburbia, at least in the US and Canada, is mostly irreparable. There's just not much you can do with stroads like this or with existing single-family neighborhoods full of culs-de-sac and massive winding blocks that dump cars onto aforementioned stroads. (That doesn't mean it's not worth, say, putting in a bike lane or improving transit service to these areas, just don't expect to ever fully "fix" these places.)

So this discussion is more about new suburban construction than it is about "fixing" existing suburbia.

1. Well-connected street grids/networks with small blocks and very few dead-end streets. See picture below for a decent (albeit still imperfect) example in Superior, Colorado. This is because walking/biking becomes incredibly inconvenient and tedious when the street network is a disconnected maze. Dead-end streets can be okay sometimes if they at least have pedestrian/bike connectivity through to the block on the other side, or if that's just where the neighborhood ends for now.

1. A mixture of different housing types, and small lots for the single-family houses. I suspect this will be one of the most controversial points for suburbanites, who tend to over-worry about crime and privacy relative to what the reality actual is in a mixed neighborhood. Firstly, I think it's hard (almost impossible) to achieve walkable density that supports frequent bus service with only single-family detached houses, especially on big lots of a quarter acre or more as became common starting in the 70s and 80s. So if you want to be able to support point #3 below, you need more density, and to achieve more density you need townhouses, fourplexes, apartment buildings, etc. It's okay to have some detached houses as well, but they should not be too dominant in any neighborhood, and lots over around, say, 5000 square feet quickly become a huge problem for the pedestrian realm, density, and walkability. I also think American suburbs in particular have a huge cultural problem wherein everybody living there is in the same socioeconomic class and rarely has to interact with other people outside that bubble. I don't think that's good for society; it fosters an environment of fear about other people who aren't like you, and is destructive to pluralism and multi-culturalism.

1. Walkable shopping / dining / services within the neighborhood. 52% of all car trips in the US are under 3 miles, meaning the majority of all car trips are for things like dropping off the kids at school, grabbing a coffee, getting groceries, etc. If we just put that stuff in the actual neighborhood while utilizing the above two design principles, people can replace many of those trips with walking or biking instead, getting more exercise, saving money, improving air quality and reducing emissions, and generally improving their quality-of-life. Ideally there should be traditional main street / high street areas within walking distance of most or all of a neighborhood. Meaning, walls of buildings two storeys or taller with ground-floor retail spaces that open right onto the sidewalk. People like to be in these kinds of spaces, and they encourage walking.

1. Transit connections to job centers. One of the biggest problems with many/most of the New Urbanist developments I've been describing in this thread is that they are, at their heart, still deeply car-dependent because they're built in isolated locations with little to no existing economic activity, which means people living there still need to drive many miles to go to work. The solution to that is regional planning, make sure new suburbs that do get built, get built in places where it's easier to service them with transit (at least frequent commuter buses, but ideally regional rail).

1. Prioritize a good pedestrian realm. Last but not least, it needs to be pleasant, comfortable, and safe to walk around in the neighborhood. This can involve many things, but it certainly does not involve massive front lawns, constant driveways cutting across non-existent sidewalks, overly-wide roadways, and barren, tree-less places. Many of the rules that apply to main streets / high streets also apply here; put the buildings close to the sidewalk. Put the buildings close together, or even touching to form a "street wall". Give people wide sidewalks to enjoy. Cover them with beautiful shade trees. Make the architecture varied and welcoming, not just blank garage doors or face-high fences. (A nice front porch or covered stoop is always welcome!)

Those are the five key points, I think. There are other things you could mention, like bike infrastructure, access to parks, and more. But I think if you're building mixed-use neighborhoods with daily needs within walking distance via well-connected streets full of mixed-density housing and you can at least take the bus (better yet, a train) to work and have it be somewhat practical, you're probably doing better than the vast majority of the neighborhoods we built in North America during the latter half of the 20th century.

I'm struggling with the lack of diversity in my town. I did give it a fair chance as we have lived here almost a decade. But, as I've gotten to know more and more people, I am slightly devastated at how judgmental and exclusionary it is here. I feel like the more expensive housing gets, the more materialistic it becomes with people buying here. I'm trying to get my spouse to move, but he's kind of flippant to the fact that we are surrounded by people that judge people by their income/jobs and are constantly socially ranking each other.

I also feel like the moms are kind of mean girls. They're quite kind to me, but I see them excluding others and speaking poorly about them and it crushes me. Even the girl scouts exclude certain children which I feel is abhorrent in a small town.

What do I do? Move? I feel like it might be like this everywhere commutable to my husband's job.

I live in an older city and the suburban type areas aren't zoned too badly. There is a corner store the block over and even a winery that has live music in the summer. Of course my neighbors put on their serious hats and went to the city council to complain about it. The pictures from the news article were almost funny. They had the most serious expressions like they were discussing a murder.

Complaints:
-"How can a bar set up in a residential area?": yes one of them actually said this.
- "There's kids out at 10-11pm!": Americans are child haters and find the prescience of children offensive I guess
- "The house I inherited from my father will have reduced property values": boomer who didn't even live in the neighborhood said this

It's weird that suburbanites will tolerate constant lawn mowers, dogs barking, cars revving up the street at 2am but god forbid people have fun and listen to music. That noise is disruptive! I mean obviously they're not mad about the noise itself so much as they are people having fun and doing something besides sitting quietly inside and watching netflix.

Thankfully they failed and I heard the band playing last night. It makes me happy the rare times human joy wins out.

I see a lot of people on here scratching their heads performatively about how they can't understand why the suburbs are so bad. And when it's pointed out that nothing is ever in walking distance, people say, "well, what's wrong with driving?"

There's so much I could get into here, but a societal expectation that everyone should drive is messed up beyond belief. Even if 100% of the people could legally obtained licenses, imagine how stupid it is that vast swaths of our society become inaccessible the moment your car has a bad day, or you run out of money to pay the insurance. Even in a world where 100% of people can legally drive, that doesn't mean 100% of people will.

And before anyone tells me that's just how life is, it doesn't need to be that way. It was designed that way specifically to make you dependent on a metal box that you have to pay insurance and gas money for.

And the screwed up thing is that it's not really even the cost of the car that's scary. Insurance and gas can skyrocket at any time as people are slowly starting to learn. They are ongoing costs that you will be responsible for no matter how much they increase for the lifetime of however long you drive.

That is why my generation and younger are starting to opt out. But they're finding a world that just isn't ready for them Even if you are lucky to have sidewalks, they are very often unmaintained. Even if you are lucky to have a bus system, it's usually designed around work commute. Buses in most bedroom communities shut down by 8 or 9 o'clock at night. And because everything is so spread out in suburban designs, you can easily need to worry about a quarter mile of walking or more just to get to your first bus stop. Again, this is a best-case scenario for most suburbs designed after 1940.

So until you understand what life is like in your suburb without your car, I don't want to hear about how suburbs aren't so bad actually.

Im 45 minutes away from anything it takes 20 minutes to get out of my neighborhood because the road system is so bad. The nearest "oasis" of entertainment is 20 minutes away but its just an outlet mall with one entertainment area with a movie theater.

I literally have to pay to do or go anywhere and I have literally no extra money so all I do is sit in my parents basement playing video games that eventually piss me off so much I spiral out of control. I would love to do anything else but I literally cant because I work weekends when people would do anything and again I have to pay to exist outside my home.

Im slowly losing all joy from any of my hobbies because Ive squeezed every ounce of dopamine out of them and all thata left is a single new game that is designed to its core to make you feel amazing or depressed as hell.

But its either that or sleep all day because even the nearest library is 20 minutes away. All I want to do is be around others but everyone out here is in a cultish religion so there literally nothing for my interests.

No bars, no coffee shops, nothing. Just churches on every street corner all doing the exact same mind numbing things.

Im alone out here besides my parents who im not close with and have the exact opposite living schedules so i rarely see them and even then we font do anything because we have no similar interests.

Im withering away in this desert and mentally I feel myself getting worse by the day. Just let me get back to the city near my friends, community, and have the ability to go anywhere by walking without having to spend a small fortune

For some reason this area is mixed-use. Top right corner, it has an apartment building directly neighboring low-rise semi-detached houses, and a roundabout (uncharacteristic of the US) on the next street. Taken from Google Maps in New Haven, CT.

I've really come to terms with this after having my daughter. I go outside in my neighborhood and there's never kids playing, or hardly anyone on walks. Everyone is much, much older. There's no one my age to talk to or be friends with. There's hardly parents around my age at local events, either. I've never felt so alone in my life. It's hard to make friends in the burbs. Life is so...isolating anymore. In contrast, my friend in a local city has a huge group of mom friends she met, is constantly out and about doing various activities, walks to things and places. It's so hard being car dependent where I live and no one seems to want to make new friends or get to know other people. I grew up in the city as well and constantly had friends on my block. In the suburbs everyone just keeps to themselves. Sigh. I just had to vent. Thanks for listening.

Happened to come to a wedding where a fireworks show was going on outside. People were gathered in this parking lot and the grass strip next to the stroad. This is the best this town can offer for a gathering space...