Urbanists hate them because they are designed for cars instead of people, and are actively hostile to simply existing in the outside natural world.
Try this experiment: go to your local big box plaza or McDonald’s. Get out of your car and stand on the sidewalk on the four+ lane stroad. How does it sound? How does it feel to be there? What’s it like to cross the street at the crosswalk? Do you feel comfortable and safe?
But really, it feels terrible, doesn’t it? Like being inside a noisy wind tunnel. But there are these designed places where city planners are telling you that you should technically be able to walk there (sidewalks and crosswalks and signals), even though you know that nobody in their right mind would want to spend a spare moment there. You can’t actually be a happy person in that place unless you stay inside your car, completely removed from the real world, and these spaces take up the majority of the American suburb.
But that specific experience isn’t universal to all suburbs, it just happens to be common in North America. Urbanists hate the suburbs that disconnect the pedestrian environment even in cases where on a Birds Eye view you can see that some of the shopping and schools are so close to the residents. There are endless cases of easy 1/4 mile walks turned into a twisted loop of 1.5 mile long excursions just to follow the car infrastructure to the nearest safe crossings and access roads.
The automobile is America’s largest wealth destroyer that takes car payments averaging something like $500-700 a month and sends them to rapidly depreciating assets that fund a handful of corporations in the automotive industry. Meanwhile, these cars are fueled by oil we have scientifically proven to already use too much of.
There are numerous videos from urbanism channels like Not Just Bikes proving that car-light or car-free suburban living or even rural living is possible and exists successfully in places outside of North America. There are farming towns in places like the Netherlands and Japan where getting around via bicycle, train, and bus is completely viable.
Considering the electrification of bicycles and other similar light vehicles, getting around via non-automobile should be better than ever. No more excuses about being sweaty before work, the only barrier now is that there’s no bicycle infrastructure, no safe place to actually ride your e-bike between destinations.
Cars have only existed for a tiny fraction of human history. Far-flung villages and cities have existed for millennia. The bicycle can move a human faster, more reliably, and cheaper than a horse ever could. Trains are far more energy efficient, pleasant, accessible to people with disabilities, and safe than automobiles, and North America had loads of them before they ever had automobiles. The majority of towns and small cities in the US had something to do with the railroads or canals and waterways, nothing at all to do with personal vehicles or owning a 7,000 pound lifted truck.
The American suburb’s design is a purposeful choice, not a development model that is an inevitability nor does it have to be a model that we stick with forever. We don’t have to build a single new development this way if we choose not to.
Here’s a delightful fun fact: if the global car death count occurred in aviation, it would be equivalent of 20 commercial planes crashing and killing all occupants every single day.