Out in the suburbs or is exurbs? or ex ex exurbs?

I'm here in Barrie, Ontario. It is actually interesting to me, to see how foreign such a place is. I am coming to realize why people move into and live in the suburbs, but i still can't get over the fact that it seems so generic.

Half the houses are identical, there are no trees because they won't mature for like 15 years, not a whole lot of sidewalks, and then they have these large empty parks that 100 houses back onto.

This is what it looks like in southern ontario, but i've never lived in a place like it. I don't find it that inspiring. Then again maybe this will change when I have kids and want a nice backyard. The main driver is of course also economic, people can actually afford to live in the suburbs, though they lose any supposed benefit if you consider the amount of time they waste in their cars, even if they don't have to drive miles to work.

I'll always remember in my first year of university being asked whether i lived in "the city" or not. I didn't even understand the question at first. Where I come from, you either live in Regina or you don't. There is nothing in between. It's a city of 200,000 people but there aren't really any suburbs. You can drive anywhere in the city in 15 minutes or less. I'm still not sire exactly what the person who asked it meant but I was very perplexed by it at the time. I suppose in an area like this one here, or the fact that pretty much everyone in southern Ontario relates their location to a distance from Toronto, it makes more sense.

I'm reading an interesting book, Whats the Matter with Kansas aside from taken shots at Ann Coulter every few pages, he looks into how Kansas became a Republican hotbed. Interesting read, i don't think there are a whole lot of parallels with the Canadian prairies though, so that's a bit disappointing.