> This is endemic in American society now. Everywhere I lived in the suburbs/exurbs I'd describe the vast majority of my neighbors to act exactly like that. Utter sheer fear of things that simply don't exist. And they vote on those fears.

Did you poll them all?

> I don't think American society survives the suburbs, personally. The social fabric it ripped apart, and the "bubble" it put so many citizens in I believe is the most harmful thing to happen to the US at least in the modern era.

No. The suburbs are fine, it's social media that will get us. It greatly amplifies the the voices of people who use it compulsively, and those people are often unhinged and driven by unreasonable paranoia, fear, anger, etc.

> No. The suburbs are fine, it's social media that will get us.

Strong disagree. The decline of US civic life/institutions has been growing far before social media came on the scene. 13 year old me understood this fact just watching the Greatest Generation interact vs. the Boomers.

The fear-based culture of the suburbs existed since I was born, with local talk radio functioning as the NextDoor of the ye olde days giving every crank who saw someone suspicions a platform to rant on.

Social media certainly amped things up and accelerated this specific bit of our social decay. But it certainly didn't start it and the social fabric is breaking down in a manner far broader and earlier than what social media would explain.

Without talking about uninteresting outliers - we effectively McInfrastructured ourself into inhuman layouts designed to minimize unwanted social interaction. Fracturing communities and people the way we did with our construction patterns will end in tears. Humans are not built to only interact with those exactly like them on their own terms.

Those forced uncomfortable social interactions are absolutely key to humanity and personal growth and they have been nothing but reduced my entire life.

> The fear-based culture of the suburbs existed since I was born

Well my anecdote is the opposite. I once lived in a high-rise, and in that environment never met or knew anyone. Everyone fast-walks from the elevator to their door and go in. There are no common spaces so there's zero opportunity to meet anyone. Also, because the conditions are so tight everyone is hypersensitive about any sound through the walls etc so they're constantly complaining about everyone else.

Here in the suburbs, everyone spends time outside so I know all my neighbors, it's much more social and connected.

> Strong disagree. The decline of US civic life/institutions has been growing far before social media came on the scene. 13 year old me understood this fact just watching the Greatest Generation interact vs. the Boomers.

I suppose it could pre-date social media, but I don't think the reason for it is suburban living itself or the antidote is something explicitly anti-suburban, like bulldozing suburbs and piling people into high-density housing or something like that.

> Humans are not built to only interact with those exactly like them on their own terms.

I'm not so sure about that. I'd imagine that through the vast bulk of human history, most did only interact with people from their own small, insular communities who were very much like themselves.

This is so contrary to my experiences living in suburbs/exurbs most of my life that I'm honestly not exactly sure how we came to such polar opposite beliefs.

The most alienating, dehumanizing, isolated environments I've ever lived in are large and medium cities and apartments, while the most welcoming, strong communities I've been a part of have been suburbs, exurbs and rural areas.

I live in the suburbs and I have a similar view. Kids play in the street unsupervised, well-behaved dogs are free to roam, bikes are left in driveways without chains, and cars are left unlocked. I can't stand being in big cities for more than a few hours, it feels inhuman.

I get why some people like cities. Especially kids who don't want to be tied down, who want to be able to explore who they are, who want to see and be part of something bigger than their hometown. There's plenty of things to love about cities, from the convenience of the nightlife/food culture, to the "pulse" of the city, the feeling that something is always happening at any time of day, the compassionate social compromises residents adopt to accommodate the diversity of backgrounds of people, etc.

But there's a reason the plurality of Americans choose and prefer to live in suburbs. It's deeper than just "outdated 20th century city planning". It's something specific about American culture, community, etc. that resists specific generalizations.

I'm not making a case for dense urban living. I understand many do not prefer that form of living, in fact I'd say most do not. Something in between dense living and what we are currently building in the US seems most prudent to me, but I'm simply an observer.

My experiences in the suburbs were not remotely near yours, and I spent nearly all my life in them throughout the US - including raising a kid. In my experience, those sorts of vibrant communities only seemed to exist in a few select "older" suburbs (aka suburbs with downtowns) from where I was from. I agree those look great.

It also certainly depends on personality. In my experience, unless you enjoy a very structured social life you simply will not have one. I have seen many folks end up slowly just spending most of their time indoors in front of the TV/computer cut off from the world. This is at least a bit harder to do in an environment not basically built to optimize that condition. I enjoy going out with a friend on a random Wednesday night, but I don't enjoy planning on that activity a week in advance.

It's an interesting topic to me. I think of my Grandfather's house in what could only be called a prototypical suburbs of the 1950's and I can absolutely see that life being amazing. The same life in a 2000's era suburb just seems like an utterly different living experience to me - almost alien in nature when I lived there.

That and the whole financial sustainability of the endless expansionist sprawl is highly suspect to me.

I'm assuming the types of older w/ downtown suburbs you're talking about are more like this, right?:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2054168,-71.5416077,3a,75y,0...

For the record I grew up between two types of places. One was a pretty, forested, newish, wealthy, totally-isolated-from-anything-that's-not-a-home-or-school development very similar to this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7471229,-122.073413,3a,60y,0...

The other was a more remote, rural, mixed-income area a lot like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.4281764,-78.0252446,3a,75y,1...

I found both of those great in their own ways. The former was extremely pleasant and peaceful. Kids would play around outside, neighbors would walk their dogs together, people would frequently have house parties and barbecues and such. Weirdly, it's completely isolated from any commercial development. It's a 10 minute drive to the nearest place you can buy anything. Nobody had much of a problem having a social life as far as I could tell.

The latter was great too, but in a more independent kind of way. Everybody kept to themselves more at home, but they would congregate at church or at the local restaurants all the time. People would shoot guns, drive 4x4s, just do whatever the heck they wanted and nobody gave them shit for it. There was a bigger mix of poorer folks and richer folks, oftentimes along traditional racial boundaries, but they coexisted better than any community I've seen. Rich farmers would shoot an extra deer each year for the poorer families so they could eat meat for dinner even when it was expensive. There was a bit of a "downtown" but it was still like, 20 minutes drive away on a country road so not really accessible without a car obviously. School and sports was a huge center of life there: people all over town would come to the local high school football games.

I'm still not exactly sure which kinds of suburbs, or aspects of suburbs, you find alien.

It's this onslaught in the media of violent crime, stranger danger, drugs and gangs and immigrants everywhere. This isn't a new idea, it started decades ago.

I will mention that due to the rise of the internet and Certain Entities having an interest in making people afraid, people are exposed a lot more to things they should be afraid of. Would people have heard about e.g. a child disappearing in the next state over say 50 years ago?

> Not to mention the financial sustainability of the past 50 years of construction

? you think we are overbuilding?

I'm going to hazard a guess that the OP agress here but I'll at least chime in with my own take on that which is our building habits of desertification of the planet (grass and a few trees is a biological desert) based on a mistaken belief of cheap, infinite oil to power cars happily down roads unimpeded by traffic, building cheap houses that won't last at out of plastic, composite materials which are needed because of poor architecture and a negative heating feedback loop were a bit unsustainable.

We're both under-building (in terms of volume, and quality) and over-building in terms of spreading things out too much.

This does not mean pack everyone into skyscrapers like Hong Kong. It means building medium density neighborhoods like we used to (ya know all of the most expensive places in America? Wonder why they're so expensive...) where most of your daily activity would involve walking or biking somewhere, you have some yard in the back of your home and you probably own a single car but can certainly own more than one if needed. But transit isn't 99% (literally) car-based infrastructure.

EVs won't solve these problems. The root problem is car-based infrastructure so more efficient cars just puts more people on the road and uses more resources. The only solution is changing architecture and neighborhood design.