i think that reactionary suburb brain is almost a kind of stockholm syndrome. literally, for all of history the overwhelming majority of people have always congregated in walkable units.

suburbs were created as a corporate racist policy a vast number of people simply had the most access to, not because there was a fair and weighed decision on everyone’s part. and following that it’s sunk cost & aversion to change. like literally all the nascent suburbanites came from apartments, tenements, and public projects, there wasn’t some groundswell of people demanding, against every civilizational instinct to spread themselves out in isolation that corporate demands “met”, it’s that the availability of newly-built properties the tenant would eventually own shifted almost entirely to suburban development—and lets not forget that early suburbs were much, much better served before neoliberalism began cannibalizing it, you couldn’t very well get all the whites out of the city & into food deserts, they provided all the amenities and created all these suburban municipalities so suburbanites could pretend they still lived in cities, simply with more privacy, segregation, and automobiles.

tldr, if corporate greed hadn’t created suburban sprawl as a product, we wouldn’t even have people defending it, but they also created a constituency of people whose only capital is tied up in the suburban ponzi scheme who are now vociferous defenders of it