People with kids who move from the city to the suburbs/exurbs are doing their kids a disservice (all else equal; obviously there are some compensating advantages in moving from say a 1-bedroom apartment to a 3-bedroom house on a large lot). The kids generally end up dependent, immobile, and isolated.
Land is certainly much cheaper though, and a lot of the material waste involved is subsidized by the federal government or borrowed from future local taxpayers, and there is no price put on a wide range of negative externalities. Sustainably and accurately pricing the full range of costs and harms from suburbia would render it unaffordable for most.
Unfortunately national, state, and local policy in the USA is substantially organized around entrenching and extending car dependency. The places where people can easily live without cars tend to have high housing prices and generally higher cost of living. In other parts of the world, there is not such a steep price premium for housing density and walkable neighborhoods.
LOL. My kid was incredibly isolated when we lived in DC because there were no other families.
Just because you were living in a neighborhood full of 20-something yuppies or retirees or whoever, that doesn’t mean there are no kids in the city.
Or maybe you just felt culturally alienated from the families with kids in DC, most of whom are less wealthy than yourself?
If living in a transit-dependent city with kids and elderly people was so convenient, the immigration pipeline wouldn’t involve people moving to Texas as soon as they can. But that’s exactly what happens. New York City has a huge internal out migration—it would be shrinking without international immigration.
As an aside, most suburbs aren’t full of “wealthy white people.” In the DC area, the places where you’re most likely to encounter multigenerational households is the Virginia suburbs where there are lots of Hispanics and Muslims. DC itself has some of the lowest fertility rates in the country, for both white people and Black people.