The East Coast is a great place to appreciate this dynamic. There are a lot of old suburbs and towns and they tend to be great places to live. The homes are beautiful and well maintained, the trees are mature, and they are generally expensive places to live.

Contrast them with adjacent towns that were built up post WW2 and the homes are ugly and isolated from restaurants and shops and they probably don't have a train station. And the property values are generally much lower.

Every non-rural home should be walkable to a real park, public transit into the anchoring city, and a town area with shops. So many post-WW2 suburbs are just wastelands where every home is an isolated island. But they aren't rural. It's weird.