The Ice Storm and American Beauty were the 1990s big-screen versions. John Updike’s Rabbit novels and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road were among the 1960s-inflected novels on these themes.

The message: Suburban life is impossibly stultifying and repressive. Nobody is actually happy living in a brick single-family home with a yard and a white picket fence.

Suburbia-hating of this sort fit perfectly into some strains of feminism, such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique: Marriage is a golden cage, and the suburban housewife is either on quaaludes or about to run away with her French lover.

The Left’s favorite bogeymen have all been deployed against the burbs: They are all white (both racist and uncool), sprawl causing global warming, lawns are useless, and destroying the planet.

The subversive, edgy anti-suburban take became a cliched by the end of the 20^th Century. In the first 10 or 15 years of the new century, America’s cities enjoyed a renaissance, while the suburbs, according to the tastemakers, were knocking on death’s door.

“Manhattan is thriving. Crime is at record lows, and ‘inner cities’ in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston are vital,” wrote Harvard social scientist Robert J. Sampson, author of Great American City. “Meanwhile, many a suburb is hemorrhaging. Vacant homes dot the suburban landscape of the subprime mortgage crisis, and poverty is growing. Suburbs are increasingly seen as culturally stale and boring, especially for those who will define the future—the young.”

Sampson was reviewing The Great Inversion, an acclaimed 2012 book by Alan Ehrenhalt.

“The late 20th century,” Ehrenhalt wrote, “was the age of poor inner cities and wealthy suburbs; the 21st century is emerging as an age of affluent inner neighborhoods and immigrants settling on the outside.”

These counter-cultural, counter-intuitive stories are told so often with so little pushback that they are no longer counter-anything. They are the official dogma. They’re also largely at odds with how Americans live and want to live.

What the people want

And yet, Americans want the suburbs. In particular, American parents want what the suburbs are offering: A home, good schools, low crime, and a tiny patch of earth to call your own.

“After leading a back-to-the-city movement, many Millennials moved to the suburbs,” explained Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in 2024.

“While there is extensive research and discussion about millennial preferences for walkable urban areas,” the Harvard researchers explained, “we found that the places with the largest increases of early millennials were both suburban and on the periphery of metropolitan areas.”

They explained this in negative terms: “this suburbanization may have been motivated by the lack of affordable and right-sized housing in urban areas….”

Alternatively, people moved to the suburbs because they wanted bigger houses for less money.

Again, Harvard housing scholars can put this negatively, but in truth, a lot of people, especially parents, just want to live in a house with a yard with less traffic and less density than the cities.

Nearly 90% of American homebuyers told Redfin they “would prefer a single-family home with a backyard over a unit in a triplex with a shorter commute.”

A full 79% say their ideal residence is a single-family home, while only 59% live in one. Meanwhile, only 8% say their ideal residence is an apartment, while 24% of Americans live in one.

Sure, single-family homes exist in the city, but really, having your own home typically means living in the burbs.

While suburbs are less dense with amenities (coffee shops, parks, museums) than cities are, the suburbs are much safer, which is crucial, because safety is rated much more valuable than other goods, such as local restaurants or diversity.

That said, many suburbs are incredibly diverse. Within a quarter mile of my home in Fairfax County, Virginia, you can find shops where the primary language is Vietnamese and Spanish. The county is 10% black, 20% Asian, and 17% Hispanic. Nearly one in three residents of my suburban county was born overseas.

Contrary to the suburbs-are-racist-white-enclaves tale, a vast majority of black and Hispanic Americans live in suburban or exurban places, and only a small minority live in the urban core.

They are not all super-isolating, as liberal blogger Noah Smith pointed out. He cited studies finding “Mean unadjusted loneliness scores were lower in suburban compared to urban areas” and “Increased overcrowding and population density were associated with higher levels of loneliness.”

Yes, commuting from the suburbs can be horrible, but this charge against suburbia is also overstated. For one thing, suburbanites are much more able to afford a car (parking is much cheaper and easier, and insurance rates are lower), and driving to work is generally quicker than taking public transit. Also, plenty of suburbanites work in the suburbs, because the suburbs aren’t just residential, they also have commerce and office buildings.

This is also very much a discussion about the birthrate. The Baby Boom happened in the suburbs and because of the suburbs. Young adults — particularly veterans benefitting from the GI bill — could afford a 3-bedroom brick colonial with a yard, which made it easier for lovebirds in their early 20s to tie the knot and start making babies.

If you think a low and falling birthrate represents progress — and many do — then you see suburbia as a den of patriarchy or something. But if you think it’s better when people get married and have kids (and have more of them), then you have to embrace and care about suburbia.

The problems

Part of caring about suburbia is trying to fix its problems, which are real.

One core charge against it is true: Life there is too car-dependent. This was a policy choice. In the second half of the last century, many suburbs were built for cars rather than people, because walking was seen as passe, and driving as modern.

Yes, public transit can alleviate driving, but in most suburbs, it’s not feasible to build out light-rail or subway systems. Instead, suburbs should zone for more mixed-use, allowing residents to walk to coffee shops and office buildings more.

But realistically, Mom & Dad are going to drive to work and the supermarket most of the time, and so the most important thing on walkability is liberating kids from cars (and liberating parents from driving them everywhere).

That requires building more sidewalks and crosswalks, and rethinking wide high-speed arterial roads. In general, it requires slowing down traffic. Don’t let the dream of perfect walkability block the possibility of kid-walkability.

The biggest problem of the suburbs today is not anything that makes them undesirable, but that they are too desirable: Demand is exceeding supply in the walkable suburbs and the ones with good schools, and so prices are too high.  

There’s no easy solution to this problem, but there are plenty of potential tweaks that could improve things.

A SUBURBANITE CONTENDS WITH KUDZU

For instance, school choice could help make less desirable suburbs into more desirable suburbs. That is, married parents would move into lower-cost neighborhoods with worse public schools if they could still afford to send their kids to private school. (Over time, this improvement of the neighborhood would improve the local public schools.)

The ultimate way to fix the problem of high costs is to increase the supply. Expensive suburbs should become a little more dense by allowing a few row houses and reducing minimum lot sizes. States and counties should allow more sprawl, which is called “greenfield” development, where new suburbs are built — and ideally built to allow kids to run around more.