If we go by your parent's photos, my main beef with these neighborhoods is there's no commercial development. There should be (light) commercial development.
I am a big fan of the Asian shophouse. You can open a restaurant or a convenience store or a small clinic or whatever class of local service business isn't going to be too disruptive on the bottom floor of your residential property. You need to own and operate it, it can't be someone from outside the community. People eat, shop and live together and spend more locally. Small businesses get easier to create. Everyone has neighbors again. People walk two blocks down instead of driving 30 minutes to Walmart. Yes I'm stacking multiple social agendas here.
You probably do have to go towards medium density for this to be viable but maybe if you don't you still end up with people taking a lot of 10 minute car rides instead of 30-40 minute ones and then it's still a win in my book.
You described pretty well my almost-suburban New England spot. I walk everywhere, because there's stuff everywhere. There's a guy down the street who built an add-on to his house and his wife runs a convenience store out of it. It's great. The problem is that there are (particularly American? I don't know) pathologies around ejecting from the idea of a community that you see in even those relatively tight-packed suburbs, and what you describe, while great, flies against that.
My parents (who are themselves not really the sort of folks you'd expect in an urban core, ha) didn't last in Iowa very long. They moved back to New England and while they live on like three acres now, they're friendly with all their neighbors in a way even I'm not in my relatively approachable community.
There is. (both example pictures above have a commercial development less than 10 minutes walk away).
The problem is that there isn't enough commercial need for every single development to have it's own commercial block -- we already have a large overabundance of commercial space in the US as it is, adding even more of it inside each residential development doesn't magically spring forth a business to fill it.
(this is true even at city-level densities -- as lots of urban 5-over-1 developments are struggling to keep their ground-level commercial/retail units sustainably filled)
And since we do need more housing, pressure builds to just convert the commercial back into residential anyway...
I am a big fan of the Asian shophouse. You can open a restaurant or a convenience store or a small clinic or whatever class of local service business isn't going to be too disruptive on the bottom floor of your residential property. You need to own and operate it, it can't be someone from outside the community. People eat, shop and live together and spend more locally. Small businesses get easier to create. Everyone has neighbors again. People walk two blocks down instead of driving 30 minutes to Walmart. Yes I'm stacking multiple social agendas here.
You probably do have to go towards medium density for this to be viable but maybe if you don't you still end up with people taking a lot of 10 minute car rides instead of 30-40 minute ones and then it's still a win in my book.