Like anyplace, suburbs can be great or suck. My last home (detached house) was a in very suburban mega development (about 20k people), but was walking distance

Like anyplace, suburbs can be great or suck. My last home (detached house) was a in very suburban mega development (about 20k people), but was walking distance to public transit (commuter bus), movies, gym, library, doctors, grocery, dentists, something like 15 different restaurants from fast food to high-end, coffee shop, and so on. It has something like 20 miles of trials, lots of green space, pools and so on. It wasn't a "downtown" but a designed commercial space in the middle of the development that made it pretty nice to live there. Anywhere outside of the development was decidedly not walkable, but not a terrible drive. While sections have very similar looking houses, there's lot of mixed sections with entirely different architecture making it not too boring. I moved a couple years ago to a new place further in towards a major city, but in another, but much older, mega development (about 60k people). It's higher/mixed density. There's a city bus a 2-3 minute walk from my detached house which connects to the subway, I can walk to work (it's about 3 miles away) and a bit of shopping and dining within a couple easy 2 mile walks. There's several shopping areas scattered around, pools, and so on, and a reasonably large and growing urban core maybe 4 miles away, I usually drive to it, but I could probably take the bus. It was also designed with intense tree cover in mind and most of the area is absolutely bursting in mature trees and nature (including wildlife!). There's also an extensive trail system that provides relatively easy transit around all this stuff for walkers, hikers, bikers, and so on. Homes were built in an impossible number of styles in a wide mix of densities. My point is, suburbs can be great places to live. Just like there are terrible suburbs, there's terrible urban areas as well -- not everywhere is Manhattan or San Francisco. But it doesn't mean they all suck. There's definitely a movement to make these areas more livable and to learn lessons from the past.