I enjoy the malls, the big box stores, and the clones. Why? I know that pretty much anywhere I go I can get a consistent experience. I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available, which at some level is fascinating. What's more, as cliche as all these places ares, there is a bit of a shared experience for almost everyone.

I enjoy driving on the giant roads, or strolling through the quiet suburbs with headphones on without fear of some incident. I like not hearing people and cars all the time.

I like the city for other reasons; I enjoy the history, the character, the feeling of life, but the suburbs have their place, there is a reason they exist. They aren't perfect and they are the harbingers of some negative social trends, but they aren't as horrible as HN likes to act.

I don't understand this. That is not because you're not lucidly explaining it. It simply does not fit into my head how this is desirable. :) But that's ok. I think Different places should look and feel and act different. I think that making a consistent experience absolutely destroys the unique culture and history of places, replaced by "the style from headquarters", and "the history of Walgreenmartsafewayco". It really repels me.

For really getting away from people/cars, I believe that the forests are appropriate. Ideally, no paths, no trails, just.... away.

Anyway. My anti-suburb rant over for the day. :)

It seems that much of the suburb vs. city debate comes down to culture and personal preference.

To be fair, the unique culture of the place used to be "industrial farming corn field" is most cases. It's not like anyone is tearing down 100 year old neighborhoods to build big boxes to serve suburbs (actually, the suburbs are far more likely to save those places than destroy them).

Ha, yes. But - thought experiment. What if, instead of another 'burb with winding streets, it started out by defining a downtown core kind of setup: 4-6 story buildings with retail storefronts and apartments above. Put the 'extra' space into a commons area, plus maybe a mini-park possibly with original area flora and fauna. So your 1/4 mile x 1/4 mile place gets a lot more dense and has a lot more to offer within an easy 10-minute walk. Bonus points if you figure out how to build a "tool shed" local workshop to replace the ubiquitous garages. :)

It makes me want to throw up. Every time the council pushes for a Historic Overlay, it turns into a revolt with Tea Party style propaganda.

One of the reasons for the economic dominance of big box stores over quaint mom and pop shops is simple economics. Small store usually don't offer the best prices or selection. It's only at the weird long end of the tail can they exist, selling stuff that's not of a big enough general interest for the big stores.

The point of the article is that suburbs are fundamentally flawed in that the tax base cannot keep up with the costs of the infrastructure once that patch of suburbia has gone past the growth phase. There simply isn't the density of tax payers to pay the bills. Raising taxes is not an option as people are mobile and will move to a more sensible city arrangement if the dream of suburbia is out of their price bracket. The developers will move to the city too.

Not mentioned in the article is the eventual problem of serious resource depletion, i.e. when every bit of America has been fracked, every Arctic wildlife refuge plundered for oil and the Red Sea pumped into the Saudi desert to get the last gasp of light, sweet crude. We no longer talk about 'Peak Oil' any more (wasn't that just grey propaganda put out by the oil companies to make their product worthy of a high price or am I being over cynical there?), however, there is no denying that suburbia can only exist so long as there is cheap and affordable motoring. When motoring starts to get much more expensive that is going to dent those wallets that pay the taxes to maintain suburbia so a lot of America is going to face the same problems of diminishing tax base that Detroit is famous for. I would not be one to bet that everyone will be driving a Tesla in between their teleconferences on the i-glasses by the time we get to that stage of the game.

Anyway, enjoy the suburbs by all means, along with millions of others including myself, but do appreciate that they are not entirely economically viable as the situation stands and, if there is a serious problem with ye-olde-petroleum-reserves, then suburbs will be very different to how they are now.

I regularly want things I can't find at a suburban mall.

That probably sums up the whole suburban experience to me. Comfortable, safe, predictable, beige. As someone who craves adventure (fwiw, I'm edging closer to 40) I just crave the authenticity a city or even a great small town provides. Suburbs really are just a bad compromise between those two things, the worst of all possible worlds.

Or maybe the places I'm thinking of are "great small towns"? What would you call Pleasanton? (I think it's pretty clearly a suburb, and not terribly much more, though certainly it didn't start out that way...).

People tend to think of "urban" as "City of San Francisco (Manhattan, Chicago, etc...)" To me urban is much of a characteristic. Many suburbs have a relatively urban component at their core. If you live on an actual city grid (no windy streets) with strong mixed uses (that you can walk to) throughout your neighborhood then you're living an urban existence in my book. Or at least non-suburban.

I can definitely identify with people living in central Pleasanton, but you don't have to get far outside the center city before it falls off the rails.

I do like "Ferris Beuler's Day Off" style suburbs.

I do not like "Edward Scissorhands" style suburbs.

I grew up in the former, and given the opportunity, I'd like my future kids to do the same.

Bueller's suburb is decades older, much closer to the "urban" it's a "sub" of, Chicago, which grew over time. Much bigger houses, all two-story, with bigger plots of land and plenty of trees providing shade and privacy. The houses are more varied because they were built over a longer span of time by different people.

Both had sidewalks but there are ones like the Scissorhands suburb that don't.

Neither has much economic or ethnic diversity. Because it developed over time, Bueller's suburb may have more integrated retail and services while Scissorhands' is strictly a bedroom community.

Edit: I guess my point was that from my experience visiting New York that's a city where public transit is so good that a car really seems unnecessary. Someone from NYC might be surprised to learn (or be reminded) that it's the exception, and that in most other places in the country it's a hassle not to own a car -- that's not a problem just in LA.

I'm in Seattle myself (Capitol Hill) and while I could get by day-to-day without a car, it would make my commute to the east side almost twice as long depending on traffic and bus timing, which isn't worth it for me. And while Uber / Lyft are a good alternative, a car is still the most convenient way to visit other parts of the city.

I even did so myself in Tucson for a year, though I'll grant that that was pretty annoying.

Because those are all significantly (hours more) to take mass transit than to drive.

It's very doable to not do cars in Seattle, however. Particularly if you have a car2go or zipcar account!

There are a few decent neighborhoods where one could make due without an automobile but they're pretty expensive (by Pittsburgh standards) to live in. Shadyside and Oakland are two such places. There are a few Hipster enclaves where a fair number of people do it but they're not very common. Outside of neighborhoods like these and especially outside of The City proper, it's a nightmare to try getting around without a car.

Instacart does my groceries and it's only about an hour or so going from the North side to the West side on the "L". Pretty great.

Also, we don't have great public transit through high-traffic areas from where people are to where they want to go, because we've got this weird kind of medium density continuous sprawl. There just aren't that many of the good high-density locations at which to place Metro stops, although that seems to be changing more because people go "Hey, let's get a stop here, and then we'll /become/ a destination location."

Also, I don't know of any city I've been in where the "Buses suck, subway rocks" relationship isn't true. I don't think it's just a "buses for poor people" thing, but I don't know what's going on to cause this anecdotally widely observed phenomenon.

Taking the Bus + Train from SF to LA area takes longer than driving, and has more stress. Can I stop to use the bathroom, or will I miss the bus? Not an issue if I am the driver. I realize that's not the same as city driving issues, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Line_(Los_Angeles_Metro)

They run on dedicated right-of-way. Not just their own lane, but their own road. Not as nice as a subway, but approaching it.

If you're into NYC comparatives, its isolation and ethos compares to Staten Island. Lots of cops and firefighters.

- Complete dependence on car ownership to get anywhere interesting or useful.

- So much time wasted in cars. I'd happily commute for twice as long on a train if I got to read. (Yes, self-driving cars could change this in a few decades, but living in the city could change it now.)

- The more you drive, the more you are contributing to distasteful regimes in the Middle East and the distasteful US foreign policy intended to secure our oil interests. If you drive an electric vehicle (and aren't covered by nuclear power), you've simply replaced oil with coal.

- Children can't get anywhere other than maybe some friends' houses without you driving them. This is maybe a feature for a 5-year-old, but a soul-crushing bug when a 15-year-old still can't go anywhere without you. The "chauffeur" aspect of parenthood is something that you choose by living in sprawl.

- Teenagers can't realistically hold jobs without having their own cars, either, and at minimum wage, owning a car that starts and might not kill you in a collision will wipe out a good portion of your earnings. (Exception would be if one parent doesn't work or telecommutes but still has a car. I was fortunate enough to be in this situation, but it could have evaporated any day.)

- There is just very little to do as a kid/teenager other than consume media and/or drugs (although I guess that doesn't matter for the hacker types, since all you need is a laptop anyway). If going downtown wasn't a special event, you could have access to a wealth of libraries, bookstores, restaurants, museums, theater, symphony, opera, etc. which often give extremely sweet discounts to K12 students as well as college kids. You're going to experience these things less often if getting to them is onerous (and requires parking at $10+/hour). Instead, social life revolves around the mall and finished basements.

- DUI seems to be more of an issue, not less, since everyone is by default driving everywhere.

- I just get this visceral feeling of isolation. It's like living in a snowglobe. I've seen everything there is to see. I've met everyone (in my age group) there is to meet. I've been through every inch of every building I have access to. There is nothing left to explore. It's horrifying, and not what I want my kids to be experiencing at 15-16-17. In a decent-sized city, there's always more. There's always something you haven't seen or been to or been to in a while. There's something incredibly comforting about knowing you can never exhaust all your options. High school was fine, my parents were fine, but I just couldn't wait to get out of suburbia and never come back. (It seems lots of kids feel this way... the word for it is "ungrateful.")

The big-box stores, cookie-cutter houses, etc. are a matter of aesthetics, and people have different tastes. I personally can't sleep in silence. But the environmental impact and the suffocation of non-drivers is real.

I like cars. I'd love to own a 3-series or a Tesla or something and go drive it fast out in the country, but owning and driving a car shouldn't be a prerequisite for being a functioning member of society.

There might come a time when I want to own rather than rent, but it will be within walking distance of an electric train.

http://cohousing.org is the movement of people looking for exactly what you are looking for.