I will absolutely trade my ridiculously sized house in the burbs (within walking distance of a bank, grocery, bike store, gym, Tae Kwon Do school, movie theater, two salons, 3 doctors and 3 dentists and a psychiatrist, a mix of about a dozen local and chain eating options, an optometrist, high-end toy store, dry cleaners, wine store, 2 ice cream parlors, and a 5 minute drive to more local ethnic food than you can shake a stick at soon to get a local library, and dozens of miles of bike and hiking trails and three large swimming pools) for an equivalent sized domicile of my choice in my choice of neighborhoods in Manhattan tomorrow if he wants to make that trade.
After which, I'll probably sell that place in Manhattan for the $30-40 million I can get, buy another house back in my old suburb and a vacation house in Southern Spain and retire/angel fund my choice of startups till I die.
If you are in reasonable walking distance of all those things, and it pleasant to walk to them, I would say almost by definition you don't live in a suburb, or rather, that is not the kind of place that people are complaining about. You must be just as horrified as anyone else at the prospect of living in a subdivision where you are miles away from anything apart from houses, or where you literally cannot walk to town, or from one shop to another across the road, because of a lack of pedestrian access.
Let's just say modern suburbs are quite different than they used to be. There's been lots of lessons learned and as a buyer, I won't buy in an area that's not at least of this style.
Is it as convenient as a dense city? No, but my standard of living makes the affordable parts of most cities look like tenement housing in comparison.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy cities as much as the next person. But economics is a major problem that cities have to overcome. Equivalent housing in a city is one or two orders of magnitude more expensive. Cities are great for lots of things but I don't use most of those things more than ever once in a while even while living in a city. May as well live someplace nicer the other 90% of the time and take the the easy access public transport in when I really want to see a museum or go to a concert or whatever.
5-10 minutes. It's an easy walk. Maybe...2 or 3 long blocks in NYC.
I realize of course that I got "lucky" and live in a really especially great suburb. However, I've noticed most of the developments in my area tend to be similar. A central "town center/shopping mall" surrounded by condos and apartments, surrounded by townhouses, surrounded by single family homes.
And that's nice and maybe I'd actually like to live there, but here's another question: How are these 'burbs linked to the outside world? As an example, your description sounds a lot like Issaquah Highlands east of Seattle. Shopping, light commercial, and so on surrounded by individual houses. The problem is, how do those people get to and from work? Massive freeways? Issaquah Highlands is asking to be included on the far end of a big light rail project and it will cost a few hundred million bucks to include them. It's still sprawl, just slightly-more-dense sprawl.
Work from Home (very common here since all homes have had fiber since pre-FiOS days) Car, Commuter Bus (the stop is in the neighborhood). We'll have light rail within 2 miles in a few years and have shuttles to the same rail service (but going in closer to the city). But yeah, most people drive.
Nearby towns (major nearby employment centers) are 10-30 minutes away by car and have ample free parking. Two of the bigger towns are also on the same rail line. The big city is about an hour by car outside of rush hour and you have to pay to park, rail and bus are faster and cheaper. However, all of the major tech employment in the area happens in a belt that stretches from my neighborhood into the city, there's negligible tech work actually in the city.
There's 17-23 million square feet of commercial and office space getting zoned right now that will set up a major employment center about 5 minutes away (with a world trade center and all that jazz). And I can almost but not quite see from one of the two coffee shops I'm working at today, the largest collection of new data center construction on the East Coast. Major tech employers range from aerospace to internet companies to government. So it's all fairly future proof.
So yeah, it's sprawl I guess. But it's not the mile after mile of unending prefab houses that defined suburbia from the 40s to the 90s either (though there is some of that out here as well, just not in my immediate area). From my front window I can see homes designed and built by 3 different developers and I think 8 or 9 participated in total. This isn't custom architecture, but if you get bored you can walk a block and see something that looks different at least.
Today for lunch my major conundrum was should I eat Greek, Thai, American style Chinese, Italian, Burgers, Subs or Tex-Mex within walking distance, or head out in my car for a quick 5-minute spin to get Vietnamese, Indian, Taiwanese or Korean. I decided to walk to my local pizza place, get a couple slices of pizza and then walk to one of my two local coffee shops and hang out for the rest of the day.
A slightly longer drive and I can add in Ethiopian, Bolivian, Salvadorian, Mexican, even more Korean, even more Vietnamese...and of course every kind of chain food you can imagine from Taco Bell to TGIF.
After which, I'll probably sell that place in Manhattan for the $30-40 million I can get, buy another house back in my old suburb and a vacation house in Southern Spain and retire/angel fund my choice of startups till I die.