The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town
I think suburbia might be a victim of its own success.As people moved out to more widely-dispersed communities, that caused commuting all the way downtown for work to be increasingly problematic. So of course that encouraged demand for business to also move out to the suburbs.Eventually things got so dispersed that people had to start driving everywhere. Roads got congested. It became increasingly common for people to spend 1/5 or more of their free time behind the wheel.  Attempts to relieve the congestion inevitably require frequent road construction projects, which only increases everyone's sense of frustration.I think it's pretty plain to see that nobody actually likes this state of affairs, and also that continuing the suburbanization trend would only continue to make it worse. Maybe there was a period back during the baby boom when the suburban lifestyle worked out really well (from a happiness perspective; let's forget about the economic and environmental cost for the sake of argument) for the first people to adopt it, but it's a lot harder to see the attraction now that the wide open spaces have become crowded with cars and parking lots.