My thoughts on suburbia before I research further into the phenomenon are that it allows people to isolate them from issues, it’s not a sustainable way of living, and that it is a main part of the “American Dream”. 

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/postwarera/postwar-era/a/the-dark-side-of-suburbia 

Points that this article covers out american suburbia: 

• • History of suburbia: Levitt and Sons went on to build two more highly-successful suburbs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey (both of which they also named Levittown), and other developers quickly adopted their formula for suburban housing. Between 1948 and 1958, 85% of the new homes built in the United States were located in suburbs. Suburban construction across the country also meant that regional differences of architecture and urban planning began to erode in favor of identical housing across the United States. This suburban trend has endured: today, four out of five Americans live in suburbs.

• The need for cars in suburbia: Living in suburbia meant that residents had to own cars in order to go to work or purchase groceries. By 1955 American automobile companies were producing eight million cars per year, more than three times as many as in 1945. Likewise, the system of roads had to expand in order to meet the demand of an increasingly car-oriented society: states and the federal government invested heavily in an interstate highway system in the late 1940s and 1950s. Suburbia helped to promote a "car culture" in the United States that made it easier to drive than to take public transportation.

• How suburbia pushed the idea of the ideal housewife: But this conformity also had a dark side. For white women, the charms of suburban life began to wear thin after a few years. Although it should not be forgotten that more than 30% of women did work outside the home in some capacity during the 1950s, popular culture was replete with messages counseling women that their greatest satisfaction in life would come from raising children, tending to their husbands' needs, and owning all of the labor-saving household appliances that money could buy. But many began to identify a creeping sense that there ought to be more to life than childcare and housework. Minority women did not experience the ennui of suburban life because, by and large, they were barred from suburbia altogether

• Suburbia and racism: William Levitt was an unapologetic segregationist, declaring openly that his subdivisions were for whites only. In 1960, not a single resident of Levittown, New York was black. Suburbs throughout the nation enacted restrictive covenants that prevented homeowners from selling their houses to African Americans or Asian Americans, upon the pretense that their presence would lower property values. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that such covenants were unenforceable, de facto segregation continued and was frequently enforced by violence and intimidation. Banks also refused to loan money for new homes or improvements in the inner city neighborhoods where minorities lived in a practice known as redlining (a term derived from mortgage security maps that shaded minority neighborhoods in red, signifying they were 'risky' investments). Thus, government subsidies for suburban home building and prejudice against lending to minorities combined to increase the distance--both physically and economically--between whites and African Americans.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suburbs-are-bad-2016-9?r=US&IR=T

Points this article covers in suburban America: 

• Isolation and difficulty of socializing in suburbia: The feeling you're often left with in these towns is one of general malaise, a vague sense of unnaturalness that's hard to chalk up to any one factor. Research from evolutionary psychology suggests there is a reason for this feeling, and it lies in humans' natural preference for socialization and well-defined spaces — both traits suburbia often lacks.

• The trouble with the suburbs is that big houses with big yards, set behind wide streets and long driveways, make socializing much harder. And since everyone is driving from A to B, unlike in large cities were residents walk or take public transportation everywhere, people who live in the suburbs have to make a much more active effort to socialize.
• While the suburbs have wide-open roads to ferry people from their homes to shops and restaurants, cities stack apartments on top of those shops and restaurants. Trees flanking the streets create both a natural tunnel and a border between the sidewalk and pavement. In some suburbs you have to cross a highway to buy some milk; in cities you walk downstairs. Not all suburbs are guilty of lacking cohesion. The best suburbs tend to borrow elements from their nearby metropolitan region, such as public transportation or highly walkable downtowns, to create public spaces that don't require lots of driving or space. But in some sense, the order and organization of a city is more natural. Urban planners, for instance, rely on the notion of "organic order," which says people naturally want to live in places that have well-defined paths, edges, districts, and landmarks.

https://www.bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/bl/global/social-welfare/pdfs/non-secure/h/o/u/housing-and-growth-in-suburbia.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/09/suburbs-architecture-stagnation

This article talks about how the suburbs in the UK are declining in favor of people moving to inner cities. 

• Once sociologists and planners used to worry about “doughnut cities”, where prosperous residents would move out to the suburbs and leave the centre – to use another dated term – to suffer “inner-city decay”. Now the process has reversed.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/05/the-new-suburban-crisis/521709/

Points this article talks about suburban america: 

• How the suburbs are declining: Indeed, with their enormous physical footprints, shoddy construction, hastily installed infrastructure, many suburbs are visibly crumbling. Across the nation, hundreds of suburban shopping malls are dead or dying; countless suburban factories, like their urban counterparts a couple of generations ago, have fallen silent.

• How alot of poor people now live in suburbs: Across the United States, more than one in four suburbanites are poor or nearly poor. In fact, the suburbs of America’s largest metropolitan areas have more poor people living in them than their inner cities do, and poverty is also growing at a much faster rate in the suburbs. Between 2000 and 2013, the number of people living below the poverty line in American cities increased by 29 percent. During that same period, the ranks of the suburban poor grew by 66 percent. Seventeen million suburbanites lived below the poverty line in 2013, compared to 13.5 million urbanites. Concentrated poverty also resides in the suburbs—the numbers of the suburban poor who lived in neighborhoods where at least 40 percent of residents were below the poverty line grew by 139 percent between 2000 and 2012. That’s triple the growth rate for concentrated poverty populations in the cities.

• Crime rates have gone up: Once sold as havens of safety and serenity, many suburbs are now struggling with rising crime as their economies falter and populations shift. The TV series “Breaking Bad” made suburban meth dens as iconic as the urban corners where drug dealers plied their trade in “The Wire.” The current opioid epidemic has deep roots in the suburbs. Furthermore, the violent crime rate—which has been declining across the United States—fell three times faster in America’s primary cities than it did in their suburbs between 1990 and 2008. Murders actually rose by 16.9 percent in the suburbs between 2001 and 2010, while falling by 16.7 percent in cities. Many, if not most, of America’s mass shootings occur in suburbs, from Columbine to Sandy Hook.

• Houses in the suburbs are cheaper but their distance actually makes them pricier in the long run: A suburban home was once a cornerstone of the American Dream; now, sprawl has become a factor holding back Americans’ ability to move up the economic ladder. The old saying “drive ’til you qualify” reflects the reality that real estate becomes more affordable in the farthest-out suburbs, but distance levies additional high costs. The rule of thumb is that people should spend roughly 30 percent of their income for housing, but up to 45 percent including transportation. Having multiple cars and keeping them insured, repaired, and fueled up on gas can be an expensive proposition. Living closer to where one works or being able to take public transit can slash those costs considerably. For this reason, a pricier condo or apartment in the urban core or along transit lines can end up being considerably more affordable than a cheaper house in a car-dependent suburb.

• Suburbs are costly to the economy: Suburban sprawl is extremely costly to the economy broadly. Infrastructure and vital services such as water and energy can be 2.5 times more expensive to deliver in the suburbs than in compact urban centers. In total, sprawl costs the U.S. economy roughly $600 billion a year in direct costs related to inefficient land usage and car dependency, and another $400 billion in indirect costs from traffic congestion, pollution, and the like, according to a 2015 study from the London School of Economics. The total bill: a whopping $1 trillion a year.

• Some of the priciest zip codes are in the suburbs and they help to further inequality and class divisions: All but one of the ten priciest ZIP codes in America are in the suburbs— the exception being New York’s Tribeca/SoHo. Eight of the ten are in California, including the elite Silicon Valley suburbs of Atherton, Los Altos, and Palo Alto, as well as Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego, and Santa Barbara’s Montecito. The exclusive enclave of Fisher Island, accessible only by boat or ferry, lies in Biscayne Bay just off of Miami Beach. The suburbs are the sites of growing inequality and are increasingly beset with deep class divisions of their own. ( I know from first hand experience of this because I live next to one of these zip codes. Montecito). 

My thoughts after doing some research: I was aware of the poverty in the suburbs because I have witnessed it where I live but I didn’t connect that in my mind of the “american dream” suburbs that I was thinking about, that the ones that my uncle lives in in atlanta that look like mini castles are part of the same urban planning as the ones that are declining and perpetuating poverty in the city where I live in California. Most of the issues that I read about were ones that I was aware of but didn't connect them to suburbia such as the dependency on cars. So it was interesting to realize that the propaganda of the american dream still exists today even though the reality is right under my nose.