Libs love suburbs too. Maybe they aren’t quite as violently attached to lawns and detached housing, but they certainly love suburbs.

It’s a lot of factors. Culture indoctrination is a big one. The cliche 1950/60s post-WWII “everyone is making it” type ideal (of course “everyone” excludes non-whites for the most part) is a mainstay for decades now.

On the more abstract level there’s remnants of the American frontier and obsession by modern Americans (and not just today, but going back to like the 1940s and shit) of planting their flag on something and signing some documents to make it legally theirs forever. Anything goes in your little “castle” and you get to kill anyone who steps on your precious lawn… or so goes the mythology. They’re LARPing, in essence, the idealized mythology of their forefathers.

Houses and more broadly speaking owning land (a few acres or whatever) was and still is for many people the ultimate goal. After the (now) Western US was conquered and brought into the US properly, there was no more land to conquer on the continent.

The entire mission of the US “manifest destiny” had been accomplished. The land was seized, the indigenous people killed or forcefully removed, and all the newly open land was divided up to the conquering people. Over time (actually similar to feudal Europe as Western Rome fell apart) the massive pieces of land got divided up as inheritance or sold off otherwise. If you ever look at how much land a single person or family once owned in like the 1700s or 1800s up into the 1900s it’s almost laughable. Like one family owning modern San Francisco (real thing).

Anyway, all the absolutely ridiculous sums of land ended up basically into how it is today with all these 1 acre or whatever detached single family homes in the suburbs. It’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller. It’s kinda doing a multi layered thing if you’re one to buy into the thought that owning land and having your little fiefdom is important. You still want it, but it’s not as “easy” as it once was where you just joined the US army while they killed some indigenous people and then afterward you got a bunch of land. Or being the children, grandchildren or great grandchildren of those people. Now there’s finite amounts of land, it’s not “free” for people to claim, and that little dream of having your own little god-like palace is fading.

So, if you value that fantasy because you’ve lived 40, 50, 90 years or whatever of your life being told there is no other way, then it’s scary to think it’s ending. You have to covet what you might have even more. “Everything might be shit, but look at my beautiful two story suburban home on 2 acres that I painstakingly trim the grass on every 5-10 days- depending on the weather.” It’s always been there. It must always be there. And if you question it being there you are questioning existence itself in a very real way to them.

There’s definitely some enculturation there; they’ve been taught these things are desirable. I think a lot of them don’t really have any aesthetic sense of their own, per se, but just think mcmansions are beautiful and desirable bc that’s what the culture around them says to them at all times. Many of them don’t have any experience of community, or when they did live in a community they were very brainworms about it. A lot of them are totally uncritical of cars and capitalism

I think there’s just a profound amount of “what no theory does to a mf” going on at some level.

Because they love redlining. No minorities in the burbs, the police harass any that dare come out there

Only poors and liberals live in the “inner city” with them “urban” folks

I guess if you’re white and super-racist but also poor, you live in a trailer park.

There’s a reason it’s called Castle Doctrine. The law itself is fine, but just name of it reinforces the notion that these people see their homes as one of the last layer of defense behind the savages outside. The sprawl let’s them experience a piece of rural living which they likely romanticize.

They see it as the ultimate American dream. Your own piece of property, nice freshly cut lawn, big house that can shelter a nuclear family, and the best part is that you get away from those dirty urbans. You can never be a poc and walk around a suburb with a hoodie on because people will immediately suspect you’re going to rob them. I’ve had people stare at me uncomfortably when I walk through neighborhoods with my hood on during the fall.

Immigrant chuds are the same way. They grew up watching Hollywood films that feature those types of neighborhoods and being able to live in one signals to them that they’ve achieved the American dream.

Because it’s like a loophole that allows racial segregation without implicit, legal segregation. It also keeps poor people restricted to certain areas due to lack of public transportation or meaningful ways to get around except for cars. It generally keeps everyone away unless they have a reason to be there, since the sprawl type of suburbs are endless repeated houses full of paranoid white people who are possibly armed.

Chuds like when white people are kept in little sealed bubbles apart from the world, yet destroying it with their unsustainable sprawl lifestyles with grass lawns in Arizona.

Also suburbs like that are like little battlegrounds where people like to pretend they’re little capitalists who’ve made property investments. So their home, rather than being a practical place where they live, is more of a long term business strategy to make money later. So your neighbors are both competitors and allies in this scheme. If they don’t keep up appearances, your property values drop, so you get to be a little annoying hall monitor by calling an HOA and complaining your neighbors grass is too tall.

I don’t care about the suburbs, but regrettably, I’m also house-pilled. I can’t help but one a detached home with a little room. I’ve been living in apartments on my own for two decades and I’ve been exposed to so many slumlords and bad neighbors that I just want to be free from it all. I can’t even open my windows to enjoy the weather right now because my neighbor beneath me smokes like a chimney on his balcony and it all flows up into my apartment and makes the entire place smell like cigarettes for days. My current next door neighbor is the 3am-party-on-a-weeknight type. Also, I want room for my hobbies.

It’s a wealth signifier

First of all suburban sprawl is unsustainable and irresponsible but one must recognise that it has real and understandable material appeal to people. If you manage to live there you get space, you get a garden to relax in and for your kids to play in. You don’t have to put up with landlord bullshit and the money you pay each month goes towards an asset you own, instead of lining the pocket of a parasite landlord.

But in addition to this I suspect the reason chuds loves suburban sprawl is that it represents their reward for being good Aryan boys and girls. They get to live there, or at least they feel entitled to living there while the people they feel superior to, the poor and the marginalised, are excluded. The poor are also excluded from mansions and super yachts but so are the chuds so these object of extreme wealth becomes unsuitable to act as a visible divider between master race and subhumans. Suburban sprawl on the other hand is perceived to be within the reach of most “normal” people.

This perception doesn’t always align with reality though and that is where you get the chud genre of complaint that “I a hardworking (as opposed to the lazy others) white man can’t afford a house!” that diffuses anger over economic exploitation into anger at those who are worse off than you are yourself.

it’s incredible how every single thread like this completely vindicates dialectical materialism

There is a romanticized vision of the suburbs where you get to know your neighbors and have cookouts and trade favors like borrowing tools or baby sitting services.

Usually all the houses in a 'burb were built at the same time or within a few years so it’s less likely that there will be houses nearby that are literally falling to pieces potentially lowering the “sale value”.

Its typically assumed that home ownership is a way to build some small measure of wealth over time. So you’ve got the option of selling the house to help fund your retirement or passing it down as an inheritance to family. And all you have to do is just spend a fuckton of money up front, a shitton of money for the next 30 years, and a small crapload of money to keep the house “looking” like its in decent shape to help it hold its market value.

As was mentioned in another comment, there probably a bit of nostalgia for the post WW2 period where a chunk of returning veterans opted to use their GIBill to get a house instead of going to college, and starting their families. Lots of these people moved near to each other, into those suburbs and all went to work at a local factories or larger businesses and had a similar enough life schedule that they could actually know their neighbors. People at that time probably weren’t moving in and out every few years so you could probably do things like have block parties, expect the neighborhood kids to play with each other, invite neighbors over regularly for weekend cookouts, or ask if somebody could watch the kids while the parents went out on a date.

Driving to the grocery store wasn’t that big of a deal as one of the parents was doing the domestic work. Shit, driving to several grocery stores to shop for the best prices or clipping coupons and spending the whole ass day driving around to use those coupons was not seen as a waste of time and prices were low enough with wages high enough that it was also still economical to do.

For the most part, it’s what they’re used to. The familiar is comforting.

homogeneity

First to clarify, I do not like cookie cutter garbage homes and chain restaurants, and desperately wish streetcars were available in my area to remove most of the need to drive. I also happily live in a diverse neighborhood.

From my perspective, I grew up in a rural community and am neurodivergent. I find urban areas profoundly uncomfortable - too noisy, too many people (leads my brain to go into hyper-vigilance mode), too closed in, too much light pollution (can’t see stars at night), and not enough green. But, I also enjoy the convenient accessibility of amenities and cultural activities like museums. This put me in a bit of a conundrum as urban living would have both significant psychological advantages and disadvantages - for example, it’s easier to meet people in densly populated areas.

Ultimately, this decision was made for me because I was priced out of ownership and even rentership in all nearby urban areas, despite having a more-than-decent salary. So, I ended up in a semi-dense suburban area of a small city on the border of a major metropolitan area.

Additionally, I suspect that those with past trauma, such as myself, also feel a strong preference towards having some land, even if it is well less than an acre, in order to have capacity to increase self-sufficiency (vegetable gardening, fabrication, etc). Especially, if thinking of the long-term as I refuse to accept the concept of being forced to work for a company to survive when/if I get to my twilight years.