As a Dutchman, I'll never understand the American idea that "suburban feel" has to mean "fully detached houses". I mean, I live in a country where nearly all suburbs and small towns consist of mostly connected houses - duplexes, triplexes, hexadecaplexes (pardon if my Latin fails me here), and so on.

The big downside to such housing (I live in the middle of a chain of 20-odd connected houses) is that gardens are small-ish and close to the neighbours'. If they barbecue, you're sitting in the smoke. But hey, this isn't Texas, people only grill every so often. At the same time, the benefits are enormous: because suburban density is higher, everything is biking distance, even in bigger cities. You need a car for less, which means that there's less cars, so streets are safer.

The local suburban shopping areas are well equipped and nearby (biking distance and often walking distance). In my suburb, there's a few "shopping areas", i.e. street corners with a supermarket and a bunch of other shops (drugstore, kebab parlor, clothes maybe, etc). These shopping areas are not even a kilometer apart from one another. If you live halfway two then you can walk 500m either direction and have sufficient facilities for your daily needs. These shops can stay in business because the suburb is relatively densely populated. If we had detached housing everywhere, the shops would need to be bigger (to make it worth driving to), and thus further away (cheaper rent), and thus need big tarmac parking lots, making it harder in turn to visit multiple shops in a row, etc. It's just a nasty downward spiral.

I'm really glad the Dutch housing culture developed this way. I mean even small towns in cheap areas are built this way, even if the ground prices would mean detached houses are affordable for most. People just want to live close to facilities. Connected housing is the best backyard-included way to accomplish that.