I understand the concrete in all directions comment, and that is definitely a problem. As I look at some of America's big cities I think you can see the time frames where we valued open green space and incorporated that into the landscape and where we stopped doing that and let development proceed unchecked. In the Capital Hill neighborhood of DC they did an exceptional job of incorporating green space. Other parts of the city or in places like Baltimore and the newer parts of Philadelphia they didn't do a good job of that and its depressing.

Contract that with the sprawl in most sections of the northeast. Houses extend for miles with little to no public green space, except for a handful of county run parks that you drive to. Newer developments will try to incorporate parks more frequently, but generally they will all have parking lots because the only way to get to them in by car.

Both of those environments are a stark contrast to small town America which has a very different operation then either. Small towns are driveable, lower density then even the suburbs, and generally more pleasant to live in so long as they have the economic driver required to sustain them. Small towns have had their own problems with the rise of big cities and their suburbs, and I think they are a model that _could_ work if we as a nation set them up to succeed, but today all our regulations favor the bigger cities and towns and we have been watching the small towns die out

Yeah, small town is really nice to live in, with commercial zones nearby to get stuff from or have malls. Miles of houses with no green space sounds nearly as bad as the concrete. I don't think I've ever seen such a thing in person, though. I was thinking of where the houses are generally separated by a certain amount of trees/woods. It was easy to take for granted how nice of a place the Hudson Valley was to live until I had to move away in order to be within driving distance of my job. "All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River" is a quote attributed to FDR, and I really get where he was coming from nowadays.