The US tried the suburban office park model. It's horrible.
It's 'horrible' from the '3rd space' perspective, in that it doesn't make for quaint high street shopping ... but it works really well for teams that want to get together every day and do stuff without the fuss of complicated little villages and twisty roads, no space for parking.
Kind of like major highways, they're good at what they were designed to do. They just have externalizations. Bad one's depending on how you measure.
Sure, sounds lame if I'm 23. What if -- crazy idea -- we have a variety of both options?
Certain sectors clustering together in a geographic region has nice advantages even for non-23yo non-single folk. One can hop jobs without uprooting the rest of the family.
It really isn't that bad mate. After living around the world (central Europe, SE Asia), Los Angeles, the mid west, I can say that people who complain about smells and the homeless are incredibly sheltered. I find they tell on themselves when they complain about seeing homeless people when the crime rate is down across the board from the last 20 years.
If you are so offended by seeing someone in distress, who is probably more dead on the inside trying to survive in a world whose upward mobility is strongly diminishing, then perhaps you shouldn't be going into that community to begin with.
It's perfectly fair to complain whilst having empathy for people. The lack of solutions or even enforcement is a problem, and I voted with my feet to live away from it.