The suburbs kinda suck, and you should stop moving there when you have kids. Kids being able to go places is actually really good for their development and there are no shops or 3rd places in the Suburbs. Just think, if you had a kid would you rather live in a cool canopied historic streetcar suburb with a corner store down the street and an ice cream place a few blocks away or would you want to live on a hot miserable suburb where you can't walk anywhere but other people's houses
It'd funny honestly, people complain that children stay inside but like, they have no where to go, if a kid wants to get ice cream they need to be driven halfway across town, if they want a soda and you don't have one in your fridge, you need to go to the massive super store instead of a local corner store. Suburbanisation is a major factor in the growing isolation in young people as the sprawl of cities have pushed people further and further away from any sort of mixed use environment.
This also goes into how suburbs have destroyed local communities instead of building them up like promised in the 50s and 60s by removing cornerstones of communities like local grocery stores, locally owned restaurants and other local businesses and replacing them with big business as there is no way run something like a small grocery store in the suburbs because of how zoning and the design of suburbs works. In the past people would know their neighbors and the people who they bought from because of how they all were one community but as people became more isolated in the suburbs to afford the suburban lifestyle and not having access to the amenities of a lively city or town they started to live more and more separate lives. This is yet another factor in how car dependence and Suburbanisation have lead to the current isolation in the modern world
Not this is not to say that because of how the American Suburban development has destroyed both community structures and the early development of children we should lose hope and lose ourselves in an idealised past or a nonexistent version of europe. No this is to make you angry, because if you want better cities, you need to be willing to fight for them, and the first step is forming a relationship with the people around you because that is what allows you to demand improvement and change in your community, actually both being in and having a community. And it should give you hope because if we have places that still have community and healthy places to grow up then we still can make those places a reality else where. It just takes effort and time
I didn't grow up in America, and the country I grew up in, despite being considered "worse", had all these things. As a kid I would go get ice cream and hang out at a local coffee shop for example. No parents involved. And I lived in an area very similar to American suburbs, except we had stores and businesses and a community all right there. You would never need to drive anywhere. It was an option. But not a necessity.
I don't think this is idealizing the past or an idea that's impossible in our current time, because these kinds of communities actively exist all over the world. America just has bullshit laws that prevent mixed-use buildings and that hamper small businesses. If anyone could open a small business in the front room of their house, or on the bottom floor of a town house, we'd see a lot of these communities come back.
Yeah I do agree with you here, we can and should change course, almost all of the problems with the suburbs are easily fixable of we change the laws, we just need to fight to fix them
