Gone are the days when a typical growing American suburb didn’t have a single building over two stories. While the classic images of suburbia remain the single-family home with a spacious lawn and the strip mall on a stroad, a slow but steady change has occurred over the past couple decades. We’ve witnessed the normalization of “suburban retrofit” projects: private developments that attempt to introduce a more urban form to the suburbs, with compact layouts, higher densities, taller buildings, more variety in land use (residential, retail, etc.) and more emphasis on walkability.

Mid-rise apartments tend to sprout up in little pockets of open land along major roads that were left undeveloped, like holes in Swiss cheese, as development filled in around them. In fast-growing places, the “Swiss cheese” effect is a common phenomenon, as landowners may sit on undeveloped land for a long time to speculate on its rising value, wait for the right market timing to develop it, or navigate a slow and complex approval process.

The popular image of America’s suburbs as a realm of swing voters, moderates, and independents is wrong, a recent poll suggests. In fact, suburban voters are much less likely to be political independents than either urban or rural voters. Only 15 percent of the poll’s suburban respondents were independents, lower than the rate among rural or urban residents.

What makes the suburbs politically distinct in America may not be moderation, but rather a more even split between Democrats and Republicans than exists in left-leaning cities or right-leaning rural areas.

My perception is that suburbanites are generally more educated, and the more formal education a person has, the more likely they are to have a solid conception of how the world works, and the better that they are finding facts that support their own opinion.