Americans were just the first culture to make it practical for large numbers of people to actually do it.
The presence of all the other people ruins the dacha vibe.
Wow, what you describe as gross tasteless suburb is I imagine a dream come true for 90% of world population.
There are multiple generations of people who have willingly lived in suburbs.
I repeat: their tastes are not the same as yours.
People buy houses in those "gross, tasteless suburbs" by choice. No one is putting a gun to their head.
Their tastes are not yours.
I think the difference is that Americans are forced to do that dance, even the ones that actively don't want this.
Kids are crazy expensive to have and raise. Just child daycare alone starts at around $1,000/month and goes up from there. Housing costs are so high in every single city that if you want to give your kid a bedroom of any kind, you are effectively required to live in the suburbs, unless your extremely wealthy.
If you do have the money to stay, then comes the network. Housing in cities gets hard to find at all (no one wants to live near you, since you bring the screaming infant into the building). And American buildings are all built like shit, so everyone can hear everything. Childcare isn't just expensive -- it's difficult to find at all. (As one example, Seattle daycare waitlists are 2 years long in some cases - http://crosscut.com/2014/09/parents-seek-alternatives-tough-... )
And we haven't even started on the mess that is schooling.
Generally, American society treat parents and children like shit, and then forces families to live elsewhere. It's no surprise that those parents just up-and-leave to form their own little enclaves out in the suburbs, where they can at least try to remove some of that pain.
> That said, when I did live in the suburbs for a while, I found it to be depressing and miserable.
Well yeah. It can be depressing and miserable to be poor or working-class-poor. But at least suburbs are a safe and somewhat-affordable place to live. It's not like there is an alternative -- there are no functional cities willing to house people. And especially no cities willing to house families at all.
As an American-in-training I too would be terrified of having a kid in a place like San Francisco. Ain't nobody got money for that.
That said, when I did live in the suburbs for a while, I found it to be depressing and miserable. But I grew up in a small city, 10min walk from as downtown as it gets, so I'm biased.