Your response makes me think you are not as familiar with Strong Towns' advocacy as you may wish to indicate. Their focus is not on density vs sprawl, and they are very careful to qualify that dichotomy against other dichotomies along which one may proceed with analysis. Their focus is rather on walkability and the accessibility of all kinds of services -- open public spaces a la parks, grocery and shopping stores, healthcare, schools, cultural offerings and nightlife, etc. To pretend that anything to which is attached the label "suburb", unqualified, is the target of their ire, is lazy.

I quit reading several years ago. Thier focus on walkabilty is good, but they also talk about how suburbs are not sustainable (or did then, and others seem to imply still do), and that position does not add up.

Same. I binge watched and binge read piles of related content on the topic several years ago and the overall message resonated quite a bit (in the “hell yeah, why don’t we do that?!” way).

Then I took that overall very positive lens and started to apply it to what I saw and the financial arguments didn’t hold up to what I could plainly see in the low-density, car-dominated towns and suburbs around me.