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That yell at you from their hot tub to get off of their lawns.

Actually my town (Geneva) is borderline suburb - I think when we moved there most of the residents would have been insulted if you said it was a suburb of Chicago, they thought of it as it's own town which was probably true 15 years ago. But sadly suburban sprawl has spread it's tentacles our way, strip malls and shopping malls that pretend not to be shopping malls and more traffic than I care to deal with. I guess it depends on what part of town you are in - toward the downtown area it feels like it's own town but on the outskirts it's just another blah suburb.

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"Boy, that was exciting. I always say it ain't over til it's over, but that one should've been over a while ago." ~ Yogi Berra

Oh, you don't like populated suburbs.

No, I don't like towns that lack any sense of self identity. Towns whose sole purpose is to serve as a satellite for a bigger city tend to lack a character. If the main attraction of a downtown is the Metra stop to shuttle people back and forth between the big city, blah. On the other hand towns that have shopping, restaurants, bars, parks, etc... better. They feel independent. My town has both, the downtown area is thriving with small shops of all kinds, there are tons of bars and restaurants - enough to where you really don't ever need to leave the town to get options. More Mexican joints than I can count, a couple of chinese joints, Thai, a Swedish pub, American joints with burgers and what not, and yes even several up scale restaurants if that's your sort of thing.

But out on the edge of town - Chili's and Chipolte and McDonalds and Best Buy and .... you get the idea. It's not bad it's just generic with lots of traffic. On the edge of town you can't tell the difference between Geneva and Elgin and Schaumburg and St. Peters and Kirkwood and Chesterfield and Florrisant and ... Downtown there is no mistaking where you are.

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"Boy, that was exciting. I always say it ain't over til it's over, but that one should've been over a while ago." ~ Yogi Berra

agree with jim: a city/twon with a sense of self identity and character make a great place to live. and i usually find those not in the suburbs. or at least not in suburbs built in the last 30 years.

They do have those downtown areas, but they can only sustain you up to a certain point. Elgin, Arlington Heights, Palatine, they all have areas with local restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, etc. You could live downtown there and pretty much not need a car if you wanted to. But there's over 100 thousand people that live in Elgin, 70k for Arlington Heights and Palatine, they can't all be served by that downtown district like Geneva and their 25k. The fact that they do have that downtown area is good enough for me since there's certainly plenty of suburbs in many states(Including Illinois, I'm looking at you Hoffman Estates and Schaumburg) that don't.