The American Suburbs Are Better Than You Think

Author: Noah Smith URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-american-suburbs-are-better-than One-line: A committed urbanist argues his fellow YIMBYs overrate the case against suburbia — Americans have some of the shortest commutes in the developed world, suburban living isn’t more lonely than urban living in the research, and the ongoing suburbanization trend (led by Millennials) is driven as much by people wanting more space to raise kids as by being priced out of cities.

Key claims

• Suburban commutes are not actually longer. Despite greater sprawl, Americans have some of the shortest commutes in the developed world (OECD data) — because both homes and workplaces are dispersed (polycentric metro areas), and cars are consistently faster point-to-point than public transit even in transit-friendly cities like Stockholm and Amsterdam (Liao et al. 2020: transit takes 1.4–2.6x longer than driving).
• The “suburbs are lonely and isolating” claim doesn’t hold up in the research. Multiple studies (Abshire et al. 2022, Hammond et al. 2021, Morris and Pfeiffer 2016) find suburban residents are not lonelier than urban residents, and a 2022 review of 57 studies (Bower et al.) found no systematic association between loneliness and any measurable feature of the built environment. Higher population density/overcrowding is actually associated with more loneliness in one study.
• Suburbs make it easier to host the people you already know — big houses support dinner parties and game nights that are harder to pull off in a small city apartment, and short local drive times make casual visits easy; what reduces loneliness is repeated interaction with people you care about, not just passing more strangers on the street.
• Suburbanization is accelerating, led by Millennials, and it’s not purely people being priced out of cities — Albouy and Faberman (2025) find high-skill workers value urban amenities most in their twenties, then move to lower-amenity, lower-cost areas in their thirties and forties, especially after having their first child.
• Suburbs do have real, unignored downsides: low-density sprawl is expensive to maintain, associated with less walking/worse health, and reduces the variety of restaurants and retail that depend on a walkable density of nearby customers.
• The framing should not be “cities vs. suburbs” — both are good for different people and different life stages; Smith argues for building more dense, walkable urban cores and better (“gentle density”) suburbs, rather than treating suburbia as something to be shamed out of existence.

Notable quotes

“The suburbs are not the isolating, lonely hell that they’re often made out to be.”

“Car ownership is a form of wealth.”

“What really gets rid of loneliness is repeated interaction with people you know and care about… Remember that Japan has the world’s best cities, but struggles with widespread loneliness.”

“It’s simply a mistake to frame the question of urban form as ‘Which is better, cities or suburbs?’ The answer is that they’re good for different things, and they appeal to different sets of people.”

Embedded tweets

The main reasons the US doesn’t feel as rich is cars. The tradeoff for the big suburban house is spending $10-20k/year on transportation.

↳ quoting: I’m not a GDP truther but I still feel like a high percentage of people would prefer a middle-class Parisian lifestyle to living in a Dallas suburb?

— Alex Z (@AZinCLE) · Jul 10, 2026 · View on X

@Noahpinion The suburbs are less desirable pretty much by definition! Land is cheap so people can afford a larger house. They don’t love the 45 minute commute, just the big house.

— Alex Z (@AZinCLE) · Jul 11, 2026 · View on X

Transit takes about twice as long as driving in both Canada and the US

I’m actual a fan of public transportation but it’s cope to say having to drive to work is a tax on your time.

— Smirkley (@Smirkley) · Jul 12, 2026 · View on X

How it connects

• Noah Smith — author; a self-described urbanist making the contrarian, evidence-based case for suburbia’s real advantages.
• suburban sprawl — this piece is a direct rebuttal to the wiki’s existing sprawl-skeptic material (from The New Urban Crisis and A Walk in the Woods), arguing the loneliness/commute critiques of sprawl are empirically overstated.
• New Urbanism — the “gentle density” compromise Smith proposes (rowhouses, duplexes, bike lanes, commuter rail added to existing suburbs) sits adjacent to the New Urbanism movement without going full Manhattanization.
• NIMBY — background context for why city housing supply is constrained, pushing some residents to the suburbs involuntarily even as others choose it.