[CliffFletcher]

At 30, my friends and I all lived in the inner city. Worked in the inner city. Loved the nightlife. Did the cafe culture thing on weekends. Walked or rode bikes everywhere (I didn’t own a car until I was 36). We were never going to live in the suburbs like our lame parents.

At 40 we all lived in the suburbs like our lame parents - some of us in the same neighbourhoods we had grown up in.

People’s wants and priorities change dramatically when they have kids. They want schools and soccer fields and neighbourhoods kids can ride bikes in. They want a yard big enough for a trampoline and a garage big enough for two cars. They want leisure centres and hockey rinks and tobogganing hills. They may not love malls and big box shopping complexes, but they find them convenient because getting all your weekly shopping done in a 50 minute trip in the Dodge Grand Caravan beats pushing a stroller up and down curbs and onto buses.

And terrible as it sounds, parents aren’t as sanguine about encountering homeless people and drug addicts outside their door as they were in their 20s. Most couples want to raise their kids in neighbourhoods like the ones they grew up in.

They aren’t all that bothered that you need a car for all that stuff because if you’re middle-class and have kids, then you have a car. Probably two of them, and one is a minivan or SUV.

Suburbs are popular because they meet the needs of families and most people genuinely like them.