I'm not sure if you're in a California city mindset, but it's easy if you move to a suburb of a city like Atlanta. You can have over an acre of wooded land and be less than an hour's commute to the city. It's super affordable too. 300k gets you 3000sqft and sometimes more.
If you're willing to pay double, you can have the same within thirty minutes of the city. And there are still spacious priorities within the city limits.
38 minutes from downtown. 3 acre wooded lot. 1900 sq ft house (currently refinishing full basement). $135 when I bought, probably $200 now. In the process of selling a much more expensive intown house, because there's no point.
The biggest things suburbs need to do these days is revolutionize malls. Tear up all the parking and retrofit empty store space into community-centric things people actually want.
Big box -> co-working space, as new anchor tenant.
As context for others, Avalon is a mixed-use development, with restaurants and shops on the first floor (of ~3). Definitely still anchor-tenant focused (movie theater, larger clothing retailers) & restaurant weighted.
IMHO, the type of place you visit to do things, then leave. Not the type of place you live.
But then, my opinion is that Atlantic Station should be nuked from orbit for the sin of isolating itself from the transit grid, so I'm probably on the get-off-my-lawn side of the planner/developer split.
But then people pay very high rents to live. $1600 or so for a studio.