Maybe the suburbs aren’t that bad

The suburbs get a bad rap. We blame them for sprawl. We point to them when we talk about how homeowners don’t even know their next-door neighbors. We snicker when we hear that our friends are moving to some bland, boring far-off suburb. And we shudder at the commutes our suburban neighbors endure to get to their jobs.

But the suburbs mustn’t be all bad. Planners from foreign countries are coming to the United States to study just how we set up our suburbs. It’s true. You can read about it here in a USA Today story written by Haya El Nasser.

The story highlights a recent trip made by Beijing government officials to a suburban development in the Arizona town of Buckeye. The officials studied the homes and amenities of Sun City Festival, a 3,000-acre planned community for residents over the age of 55. They then took this information back to Beijing, in the hopes of duplicating a typical U.S. suburban community.

The story states that this is far from a rare occurence. Delegations from a host of countries travel each year to the United States to study examples of suburban living. Maybe we in the United States take our suburbs for granted. Sure, many of them may seem like little more than cookie-cutter houses broken up by strip malls with exotic names, but they are safe, they are good places to raise children and they do provide an escape from the noise of the city, for those looking for some peace and quiet.

Maybe it’s time we all updated our ideas about the suburbs. And that includes me.