@sun The places where I spent most of my formative years are considered suburbs of Los Angeles. It was great: people there had access to anything worth doing or seeing in Los Angeles, without being everyone being crowded into little apartments with no yards. We weren't in some far out place like Mecca or Thermal (both near the Salton Sea, hours of drive time away) or even as far out as San Bernardino and Riverside, but we avoided many of the bad things about cities.

I'd guess that most of the things people blame on "suburbs" are in places so far away from associated urban areas that they would have been called "exburbs". Because there's nothing about any urban area that would make me want to live inside the city rather than in an adjacent suburb. But if the suburb is an exburb that requires hours of commute time each day, I'd rather move closer.