Exactly this. Many of us live in mixed-use suburbs and love it. Wouldn't move to the urban core for anything, totally unwilling to give up this community and lifestyle. But on HN a lot of the anti-suburb folks seem to think it's all just miles of tract housing.
I think when people think of the ideal urban environment, they're thinking 3-6 story mixed use buildings close to the street with tree lined streets. People have an idea of miles of single use suburbs because that's the prevailing model. I'd say almost all urbanists don't want everything to be like downtown.
It is definitely a major problem that the US has so much strictly residential zoning in most suburbs. This zoning may allow schools, and possibly churches, but often nothing else.
Allowing for small amounts of light commercial (cafés, small grocery stores, etc) to be sprinkled in would actually immensely improve things. Having a store within a few suburban blocks (perhaps 5-10 minutes walk, less with a bike) would obviously be helpful. But in many suburbs that is pretty rare. You may get the occasional small cluster of commercial zoning near main access roads, but often not placed to be sensible reachable by anything but car for nearby residences.
This is even technically achievable with strictly single use zoning if planned as part of a development, specifically zoning small areas for such businesses, strategically placed so as to be easily reachable from the residences without needing cars. But we often just don't do that. Even when there are rules requiring new developments to include some percentage of commercial space, developers tend to clump that near the entrance roads, potentially quite far from many residences.
Admittedly it is understandable that people are wary of having commercial spaces in the middle of residential clusters, unless the roads are carefully laid out such that they won't cause significant traffic on the residential streets. This generally means they are along specialized through streets (which have limited access to the residential areas, to make routes that cut though residential streets unappealing to through traffic), but that very same limited access also means most residences cannot easily reach those areas without cars. This can be avoided with smart layout, pedestrian/bike only paths to these areas, etc., but I just don't see that nearly as often as it should happen.
This is exactly what I was referring to. The sad part is that once an area is zoned solely residential and built up, even if the zoning is changed, it is very hard to bring in the light commercial establishments because they just don't fit.
