I'm in my mid-30s, and I grew up no stranger to the common criticisms of American suburbia. To me and much of my generation, "sprawl" has always been a thing and has always been bad; even if you lived in a suburb or appreciated major aspects of what the suburbs offer (space, quiet, greenery) you couldn't avoid being exposed to (and probably nodding a little at) the idea that the inexorable march of McMansion subdivisions into the countryside throughout the 1990s and up to 2006 or so was horrifying at worst, discomfiting at best.

Here are just a few of the terms I’ve come to associate with the American suburb, and the thinkers that helped build those associations in my mind:

Soulless. Homogenous. Cookie-cutter. Nowhere. (James Howard Kunstler's seminal work The Geography of Nowhere, which is is almost 30 years old.)

Unhealthy. Destructive. Wasteful. Unsustainable. (Andres Duany and Jeff Speck's Suburban Nation, which sort of assembled into a neat package the many arguments against the suburban experiment and for the traditional development pattern; that book will soon turn 20.)

Financially unproductive. Insolvent. (I stumbled on this one in a little blog called—would you believe it—Strong Towns that started about 10 years ago, and added these terms to my lexicon.)

All this to say, the failings of America's grand experiment in car-centric suburbanization are many, and the arguments are familiar even to those who disagree: we have a litany of problems from unsupportable debt, to environmental destruction, to the poverty that entrenches itself in places built to decline to show for decades of this experiment.

And yet, the suburban experiment seems to still have legs. Housing construction is trending up (if nowhere near pre-Great Recession levels) including, very much, on the suburban fringe. This is driven by institutional and financial arrangements that favor a business-as-usual suburban model of development, and outsource many of the costs, such as the carbon emissions and the long-term maintenance of public infrastructure, to society at large.

The suburban experiment remains by far the predominant model of new development outside of urban cores: subdivisions built all at once, to a finished state, according to a template, by the kind of developer who refers to homes as "product" and is not at all invested in the long-term resilience of the place or the well-being of the people who will occupy it.

Thus, there remains intense interest in alternative models for places where the suburbs are still growing fast, and models that can actually scale. That can offer Americans a choice, not just of suburb versus city, but of a better kind of suburb: one that delivers community and a high quality of life but at costs—fiscal, environmental, public health and psychological—that we can afford to sustain in the long term.