The suburbs are part of a set of tradeoffs people make and it seems like a strawman to frame it as some kind of inherent "mistake". The reality is if they were so undesirable, they wouldn't be growing.
> Now, I can hear some people saying, people like cars and houses and privacy. That’s all there is to it. Was air conditioning a “revolution”? Stop telling people how to live!
> But here’s the thing: when we permit people to do urbanism, even in America, they do it! The New Urbanists had to fight very hard with zoning boards and other skeptics to be permitted to build a few small housing developments that resembled pre-revolutionary places. Immigrants from countries with a stronger tradition of public space and small-scale commerce recreate that in America, even in deteriorating suburban landscapes. Our old towns and cities—remember that “historic district” is a euphemism for “not destroyed by urban renewal”—are some of the most desirable places to live in the country.
> All the evidence suggests that typical American car-dependent suburbia is not the affirmative preference of the majority of Americans. And yet we’re not allowed to fully test that claim, because we’re not allowed to build in a pre-revolutionary manner in most of the country. And even if we were, the decades during which traditional urbanism has been out of practice mean that the continuity of building and placemaking knowledge has also been broken.
> when we permit people to do urbanism, even in America, they do it!
> All the evidence suggests that typical American car-dependent suburbia is not the affirmative preference of the majority of Americans.
The latter is also compatible with my entire point. I don't doubt that if affordable large-living spaces were available with walkable cities with excellent public transit, that would be everyone's preference, but it's simple math, if you want a larger space that is "yours" then that is incompatible with density. It's a trade-off.