> The neighborhood grocery was about two miles away and we could walk or ride our bikes, and we had plenty of friends houses along the route should we need to s

> The neighborhood grocery was about two miles away and we could walk or ride our bikes, and we had plenty of friends houses along the route should we need to stop. This doesn't sound like the typical American suburban experience, and I think what you are describing is almost heading in the direction of the best existing solution for non-city living, which is the "village" style denser towns that you see in Europe. The idea basically being that you turn a fairly evenly distributed suburban population into one that clusters around small to medium sized town centers that are walkable and bikable, but contain and are surrounded by large areas of communal countryside and green space. It necessitates a sacrifice in lot size (and potentially house size), but in return you get a quiet, safe, traversable town with plentiful access to the countryside, and it also helps immensely with things like logistics, infrastructure (electricity/gas/internet in the suburbs is a nightmare), and, potentially most importantly, transportation, since a strong commuter rail system can actually service that sort of layout effectively. Many if not would still describe this as a suburb. There are definitely places (I'm aware of ones in the North East) that follow this model that are called suburbs. When people complain about suburbs, they are complaining about the model that dominates the US, not the concept of a less dense population area surrounding a metropolis.