It's obviously fine if that's your preference. But many jobs are in the suburbs and you can access many city amenities pretty conveniently without living in the wilds.

I guess it depends on your idea of the suburbs. I can walk to a major grocery store, coffee shops, restaurants, and breweries, but have a quarter acre with fruit trees and gardens.

Im happy to trade that for having to spend an hour in car/train a few times a year to see a show or museum.

I would take a pay cut to work closer to home.

Like many in the suburbs have convinced themselves they're rural as a result of oil company propaganda (rural identity sells big mall crawler trucks), it sounds to me like you live in a central, quite urban area that's otherwise sparse on local options and have convinced yourself it's your extra special private enclave in the hills, completely separated from the economic center, despite it literally being your economic center.

Ditch the suburbanite identity politics and start advocating for the development of shows and museums in your local area that you could walk to, instead of taking your money away from your economic center at the benefit of oil companies (bc let's be real, suburban identity sells car dependence and even if you take the train, all the cultural momentum from the propaganda shaped your life decisions to move there and what's that train run on?).

Nah what living outside the city really buys me is more of my preferences of freedom. I have no government maintained roads, basically no police, I can build what I want without an inspector telling me what to do rather than some narrowly constrained window of options set by a city planning board. If I want to keep cows to feed my family fresh meat I can do so. There is no sound ordnance, no regulation on gunfire, you can ride dirtbikes all around, your kids can explore without encountering hordes of junkies or karen callin CPS for childhood independence. My taxes are near zero. I depend on myself and my neighbors not through violence of law and taxation but through mutual voluntary cooperation.

It's not for everybody but it's not an oil scam either.

Your situation is literally the opposite of what I was responding to and your situation is not included in what I was discussing.

Your situation is a completely irrelevant red hearing for the discussion we are having. You are actually rural, and are describing an actually rural life—not a suburban rural identity & not an urban suburban identity.

If you don’t even have state or county roads, like no paved roads going anywhere near where you are and there’s nothing around and there’s no police around and everything else you described then that’s not at all what I am responding to. Because what you describe sounds to me like you don’t have anything within walkable distance, and I was directly responding to somebody who says that they have shit they can walk to.

You are living an actual rural life because you are outside the range of services provided, relying on yourself instead and in terms of my own personal Urbanist Theory that’s exactly how it should be.

It really depends on how you draw the lines between urban and suburban.

For this conversation, we're talking about the cores of tier 1 cities where the high paying jobs are most abundant. I considers a location suburban if they are predominantly single-family homes and if many of them commute into the Metro for work.

I'm going to ignore all that identity politics stuff because frankly I don't understand what you were trying to say there

Age of the suburbs has a significant impact on their character. A New Jersey burb established in 1880 can be far more pleasant and walkable than a Florida McMansion neighborhood built in 1980.

I am not shocked that your ego shut your brain off the second that your suburban identity felt attacked.

I do implore you to attempt to reengage your brain, despite the the mental anguish it will require to actually comprehend what somebody was saying to you when it conflicts with an identity you don’t know that you hold.

I find it amusing that so many activists in US believe that the sole reason why people like the suburbs over the cities is some kind of "propaganda". I'm from a country where suburbs are far less common and I grew up in a city of 300k and then lived in a megapolis for several years. And yes, we did have public transportation etc.

When I moved to US, I chose to live pretty much as far as I can from the nearest large city that wouldn't be considered straight up "rural" (although we do have a bunch of farms around here). And the reason is because I don't want to live in what is, in effect, a giant human anthill.

The sprawling car based American suburbs are actually a result of propaganda and master planning by white supremacists. I find it amusing. That so many people are so sure that so many things are innate without having ever done an ounce of research or investigation into the source of why things are the way they are.

It’s OK to admit that you don’t actually know or maybe that you even have learned something today, but I did actually do a research paper with how and why we came to live in suburbs as a core point of research, and guess what? It was a result of master planned communities by white supremacists and their oil and motor industry buddies.

Most of the best old suburbs in America were built organically through bit by bit demand around street cars, not car cars. Then the motor industry executives and oil industry executives got together and lobby the government to create the crime of jaywalking, to buy up all the street cars and remove them from American cities, to build out the highway system, and to change zoning laws, to encourage if not outright force the building of car dependent American suburbia.

Do not get me wrong streetcar, suburb, designed suburbs are fantastic, walkable compact, wonderful wonderfully tight communities. But today in today’s world this year of our Lord 2025? Today those street car suburbs are urban compared to the car dependent suburban sprawl that we have now.

Haha, cities are where everything is if you want everything and experiences delivered up to you in a one stop mall like package and don't have personality enough to organically find things.

Personally I find city people the most boring and socially/culturally stunted because they think a cultivated/curated 'mall like setting of stuff' = culture. They also tend to think buying access to art/culture because they have money = having artist style/culture. The music scenes/art scenes are overly (often self) curated pap.

Lots of cities 'diverse' districts are just... suburbs... that the cities absorbed.

Even for things like 'exotic' foods I routinely find bombed out suburban strip mall restaurants to be superior and less 'catered' to American Paletes than places in cities that have to be more generic because they serve such a large population.

I also have personally found when I have been lonely in life, being lonely in the city is the worst kind of loneliness.

Jeez, you'd hate it here then :-)

Looking out my window, I can't even see another house. If I twist my neck, I can see a neighbor's barn about half a mile away, though.

That sounds quite rural - not suburban at all - and I am sure it is a lovely place to spend time!

It is sprawling, car-dependent, low-density development I can't abide, the kind of cul-de-sac-ridden suburbs the US has been building around its urban fringes for the last 80-odd years. It feels suffocating to be surrounded by mile after mile of other people's stuff, with nowhere to go but strip malls and nothing to do but drive from one parking lot to another. People talk about wanting a house with a yard, but when that yard is the only place you can be without justifying your presence there by participating in some transaction, it can feel like a very confining space indeed.