Which is funny, because after 2008 it felt like a lot of the bedroom communities / strip malls struggled and went down hill (lack of demand I guess) - and it felt like a whole wave of young people were only wanting to live in the city.

Living in the city is great for young people who have no kids - lots of entertainment options a short walk away. It's noisier/busier/dirtier (EVs will help A LOT with noise and pollution).

Living further out is much nicer when you have kids - more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore.

Don't forget older people who have no kids.

I'm part of a DINK couple and could not imagine leaving an urban area. There's so much more to do, so much easier to get around, etc.

Sorry. Didn't mean to.

I suspect we'll be in that space in about 10 years or so, when being next to a good hospital with excellent geriatric services will be more important than having trees to climb.

And nowhere for them to go by themselves? Living in the suburbs as a tween/teenager is death.

See:

> more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore

Or „nowhere“ as in doing commercialized trendy stuff? Of course, when pop culture is pushing that lifestyle and people are glued to the screens, it ends up as a sad state of affairs.

Teens live online now. Your youth experience is not the same as that of the youth today. It's generational snobbery to impose a previous generation's preferences on modern youth.

This isn't a response: "living online" is a cultural metaphor for increased use of technology, not a preference w/r/t suburban vs. other living situations.

Last time I checked, teenagers still eat food and socialize in the physical world. It's not a huge reach to understand how suburbs stifle and constrain that (nor has that changed particularly in the last 20 years).

No food in suburbia?

Honestly, incredibly untrue. Everyone adapts. I grew up in a suburb-y suburb (northern virginia) 4-5 years ago. You bike to the local community center with your friends, you drive once you're 15 back from school, to the movies, to the basketball court. The real benefit is in actually being in proper nature. My backyard had trees, and miles of walking trails, and ponds to fish in just a 5 minute walk from my front door. You can't find that in the middle of NYC. Living in a 'real' suburb is far, far better than living in a city as a tween/teenager.

I grew up in a British suburb. One may not drive in the UK until 17, and the cost of insurance makes that basically impossible for all but the very wealthy. Even with that said they seem better than the suburbs where I live now in the US.

It was frankly so miserable I have resolved never to live in anything even remotely approaching a suburb again - in the UK I’d countenance the idea of living in a village with at least two pubs, but actually live in a city where I can walk to dozens of different events, bars etc every night if I want to and never see a situation where I would accept anything less.

The NYC suburbs are vastly different to suburbs in TX or CA, of course, and many are much more livable simply due to having a train to NYC.

Tween, maybe. It's pretty normalized for families to add [a] car[s] as kids age into driving so in practice affluent 16-year-olds lead pretty independent social lives. And this was the case for my own adolescence back in the early-mid aughts so I imagine now there's both more stuff in the suburbs and more widespread car access for teens.

As an urban father of a three-year-old I'm actually anxious about how much stuff seems to be 21+ or expensive in my city (Baltimore). In principle we're a short electric scooter ride from trendy eateries, coffee shops, theaters, music venues, etc. But my wife is super-scared of crime and traffic so I don't know if this will actually translate into him being more independent than a typical suburban teenager.