That's quite a strawman there.

Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too.

I'm seeing a ton of strawman arguments, totally inaccurate descriptions of suburbs, unsourced hyperbole about "subsidies" and "externalities", and conflation of "suburb" and "rural" in this thread which certainly does not apply to any suburbs I've ever lived in.

People with more resources and more power have taken larger living spaces for centuries, the idea of wanting more space isn't some creation of post-WWII America.

Nowdays we talk about trains in the US as a "let's get away from suburban development" but the train itself was a driver of suburbanization from London, historically - people opted for more space and a train commute when they got the option.

Do they really?

My country is a textbook case of the opposite, where the general population suddenly decided they don't really want to live in apartment blocks in the city - especially the type which was built in the communist second half of the XXth century.

What happened next was intense proliferation of sprawl. It actually was seen as a status symbol back then to be able to afford a detached house.

So much so that the urbanization rate actually slightly fell in the past 20 years.

People gravitate towards comfort and apparently needing to drive everywhere but having enormous living space is preferable to living in a relatively small apartment and walking/cycling.

Houston has space to expand so it can easily keep building outwards without bulldozing shit (which requires people wanting to sell their land, etc, etc). Development is easy if there's nothing to displace. NY? LA? SF? Not so much. No coincidence that Chicago is much cheaper than those geography-bound places too.

Compare Houston to other cities in Texas *that have plenty of zoning of the sort that would be immediately recognizable in the Bay Area) and it no longer looks like any YIMBY miracle of affordability. Just... basically the same...