Yeah, I grew up in a town like that in CT. It's nice, for sure. I would call it semirural rather than suburban, though.
The issue with lovely semirural living is that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that. It's a privilage to live in house surrounded by woods with grocery store a 15 minutes drive away. Many people (not you, congrats) need to live very close to one another, and the best, happiest, most sustainable way for them to do that is in a dense city with good transit, good sidewalks, and limited auto traffic.
That is all not to mention the economics of suburban and semirural living. Those nice roads with little traffic? They are crushingly expensive. Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.
It's not semirural - there are no farms or fields anywhere, and there are plenty of houses. It's just they are spread far enough apart for people to have space.
> that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that.
That's really not true. Half of the US lives in cities, half don't. You really think the US is so completely full there's no room for those city dwellers to have more space?
According to my quick math there enough room for 40 times the population of the US to each person (not each family - each person) to have a huge suburban lot.
> They are crushingly expensive.
No, they are not. That's an urban (ha!) myth. Roads are really not that expensive once you move out of dense cities. Rural roads cost around half or less of urban ones, and they last around 4 times as long since traffic is much lower (5-10 years vs 25-40 years). So a rural road costs like 1/10 an urban one.
And since according to http://demographia.com/db-intlsub.htm suburbs have around 1/3 the population density, suburban roads are actually 3 times cheaper per person!
Hardly "crushingly expensive".
> Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.
And cities would not exist if not for all the goods made in non-urban areas. Cities have tons of high-revenue, high-tax services, but they don't actually make anything. That's all done outside the city.
If everyone moved to the city everyone would die - there would be no food or anything else.
There's a balance in the world between cities and rural and suburban area, and you mess with that balance at your peril! You can end up with terrible imbalances and very expensive food and other goods.
And don't forget you need all those rural roads, or nobody could get any goods to cities. So be doubly cautious about suggesting fewer rural areas because of "road costs".
The issue with lovely semirural living is that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that. It's a privilage to live in house surrounded by woods with grocery store a 15 minutes drive away. Many people (not you, congrats) need to live very close to one another, and the best, happiest, most sustainable way for them to do that is in a dense city with good transit, good sidewalks, and limited auto traffic.
That is all not to mention the economics of suburban and semirural living. Those nice roads with little traffic? They are crushingly expensive. Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.