People actually live like this? This appears to be a pretty standard looking neighborhood in the Phoenix area. Neighborhoods with nothing but sand and pavement.

Modern American suburbs are hell, but IMO they don't necessarily have to be this way. There's a balance between living in the middle of a busy city (which I get isn't for everyone), and living in the hellhole of a modern Texas car dependent suburb.

I live in Media, PA, and IMO it's how suburbs *should* be. We have a downtown that's anchored with a streetcar. That downtown has a nice main street with restaurants, grocery stores, etc. Surrounding that is a grid of mixed density houses (some single family, some apartments, some rowhomes), that are close enough to town that you can easily walk for your basic needs and get a trolley to the city. Outside of that it becomes larger (but still sensibly sized) single family homes on streets with trees, shade, and low traffic. And you can still own a car (most people do), you can still drive, but it's a way to do it that you also have a community and know your neighbors (which, isn't that what the right claim they want?).

Where else is doing it right?

I feel like its a sham to give a set the property price compared to "market value" for similar comp, creating arbitrary increases in certain neighborhoods so some people never seek not attain a safe homestead but instead have to grovel for their placement in their current apartment complex.

Then you add utilities, pest control, amenity fees, internet, renters insurance. Other add ons like parking, storage, arbitrary pet rent! My pets don't contribute and food, vet and leisure for them is expensive, but by all means, require my pet pays rent but kids don't! I mean a refundable security deposit should be in order if were fair to each party.
All the application fees and random add on fees. Applications constantly reflecting hundred of dollars for what work? For running credit and background checks? They need to pay someone for rentals with only a few move-ins each month. $300 office admin fees...Security deposits, first and last months rent.

I mean wtf why do we care so little for each other? because your existence feels tiny so you're ego makes you lash out at people searching for housing? I just want all walks of life respected at all stages, none of this retaliation crap. The problem is sinners retaliate, and most people really want to be able to sin. Hell even I like "fun".

I don't hunt or anything (I'm not that macho of a man), but reading about these hunters' herculean efforts to find places to hunt in a sprawling metro area (literally in the title of the article) showed me that it would be in hunters' best hunting interests to be fans of smart growth.

If you allow cities to be cities and more city-esque, you can also let the countryside be more country and more country-esque, which is obviously better for hunting.

Sprawl is edging out hunting in Twin Cities suburbs

I’m a huge fan of historic urban design and I’m looking for U.S. neighborhoods that have that perfectly preserved, satisfying street atmosphere. I’m strictly looking for spots that combine a few things at the same time: beautiful historic residential architecture, massive trees forming a green tunnel over the streets, and super neat layouts.I already know Charleston,Savannah and New Orleans neighborhoods but is there any other unknown or hidden gems?

Honestly, I saw it coming. I live in an older 1970’s early-suburban-experimental neighborhood to where it’s next to a stroad & there was this opening/shortcut behind a house on a cul-de-sac at the end of my street (the house sits half-abandoned most of the time fyi. The owner comes by once in a blue moon.) & it leads to another cul-de sac with businesses connecting to a stroad. I’ve used this shortcut a lot in my high school years, especially with my friends & if I wanted to walk to Walmart to buy myself something really quick. Felt illegal (which it is—literally going to another person’s backyard), but i became comfortable with it. Now it’s been blocked off, so now if I want to go to Walmart quickly without a car, I have to take my bike which takes 7 minutes. It was a 5-minute walk before, but now it’s 20 minutes. Devastated. it’s crazy how suburbs can be so hostile to walkers & make something be so far but yet so close and vice versa. Wish to live in a downtown area.

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

Edit: more photos in comments

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.

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.